This longitudinal study examined the relation between family instability and the problem behaviors of children from economically disadvantaged families. Family instability was assessed when the children were ages 5 and 7 and included number of residence changes, changes of intimate caregiver relationships, and recent negative life events. The results showed direct concurrent relations between family instability and preschool children's externalizing behavior in the context of other family process variables, relations between subsequent family instability and lst-grade children's internalizing behavior (i.e., with preschool behavior ratings controlled), and an effect for persistent instability across grade. Moderator effects were also found for child variables, including gender, temperamental adaptability, and prior externalizing Children raised in economically disadvantaged families are at risk for a variety of academic and social problems. As shown by a

This study explored the relations between additive and cumulative representations of contextual risk, caregiver emotionality, child adaptability, and teacher reports of the problem behaviors of 6- and 7-year-old children (N = 155) from economically disadvantaged families. The results showed relations between both risk representations and child problem scores and provided evidence that the relation for cumulative risk may be moderated by caregiver negative emotionality and caregiver positive emotionality and partially mediated by child adaptability. The results suggest the importance of exploring alternative representations of contextual risk and the conditions under which contextual risk influences child behavior.

Analysis of cumulative recall curves originally led to the conclusion that asymptotic recall is inversely related to the rate of approaching asymptote. This finding suggests that recall differences between conditions on a short test would continue to exist with longer tests. However, this assumption is not always correct. In Experiments 1 and 2, orienting tasks promoting relational processing produced an initial recall advantage over item-specific processing tasks, but the advantage diminished by the end of the recall period. In Experiment 3, item-specific tasks produced a recall advantage over the relational processing task, but this advantage was manifested only after several minutes of recall. Experiments 4 and 5 extended these results. It was suggested that the results of a single recall test can be misleading when conditions differ in the amount of relational and/or item-specific information encoded.

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This study examined the relations between alternative representations of poverty cofactors and promotion processes and teacher reports of the problem behaviors of 6-and 7-year-old children from economically disadvantaged families (N = 159). The results showed that single-index representations of risk and promotion variables predicted child aggressive behaviors but not child anxious/depressed behaviors. An additive model of individual risk indicators performed similarly. Smaller indexes representing clusters of parent adjustment variables and family instability variables, however, differentially predicted aggressive and anxious/depressed behaviors, respectively. The results suggest the importance of promotion processes and of representing environmental adversity at varying levels of specificity for children from economically disadvantaged families. Economic disadvantage is associated with a variety of cofactors that pose risks for children's normative development (Dodge,