No abstract

Factors associated with the presence or absence of imaginary companions in 222 preschool children were investigated using a self-administered questionnaire completed by their parents. Section I of the Imaginary Companion Questionnaire was designed to elicit a variety of demographic data on the children and their families and was completed by all parents. Section II was devised to obtain data concerning the imaginary companion itself and was completed only by parents of those children (N -63) who currently or in the recent past had imaginary companions. Data on family structure, play activities, and personality characteristics of the children, as well as characteristics of their imaginary companions, were presented. Data from the present study indicate that reducing loneliness is one of the multiple functions served by imaginary companions.

The developmental progression of children's belief in three major figures oj early childhood was examined through structured interviews with children and questionnaires for parents. Belief in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy varied with the child's age and the level of parental encouragement of belief. However, belief in these figures was unrelated to other indices of the child's fantasy involvement.asual observation indicates that vari-C ous imaginary figures-Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, and others-play significant roles in the lives of many young children. Yet pertinent professional writings are surprisingly sparse. A review of the literature revealed some scattered references to Santa Claus. The history of Santa as an American folk custom was examined by Barnett,' and a small body of psychiatric papers described negative reactions in adults occasioned by Chri~tmas.~. * Ge sell and Doll pioneered in outlining the age sequence of children's belief in Santa Claus some years ago. While authorities in child development continue to offer conflicting advice to parents on the desirability of the Santa myth,2s child development research on Santa Claus appears limited to the study of expectancy effects6 Some recent popular literature has focused on issues in the selection of Santa's helpers for department stores,20

Two inbred strains of mice were opposed in measures of tube-dominanc e, food-dominanc e, and aggression, using matched pairs of individual opponents. There were stable strain differences on all three measures, and Ss within strains were highly similar to each other in performance. Results on the food-dominance and aggression measures were concordant, while performance on the tube-dominance test was negatively related to the other two measures.While uncontrolled observation of social dominance in infrahuman animals has long been reported, there has been relatively little experimental study. In large part this has been due to the absence of sensitive and efficient measuring techniques. The present study was concerned with an examination ofarelativelynewmeasure, "tube-dominance," in relation to two other tests of social behavior. Thus, three different behavioral measures were employed: (a) a test in which hungry Ss must push against each other in a narrow tube in order to reach food, (b) a test opposing hungry Ss in an arena containing a food aperture large enough for only one S at a time to eat, (c) a test of spontaneous fighting behavior. All three tests are standardized,easytoadminister, and employ objective behavioral measures. Each measure is believed on the basis of previous research to possess at least minimally adequate psychometric properties, and has been shown to possess sensitivity to behavioral differences between inbred strains of mice.The tube-dominance test was shown in a previous study (Lindzey, Winston, & Manosevitz, 1961) to be unusually reliable and to result in very stable transitive relationships both between individual Ss within groups and between different inbred strains of mice. One means of adding to our understanding of the psychological significance of the tube-dominance measure is to observe its relation to other measures of social behavior. More specifically, in the present study we were concerned with (1) the possibility that the three tests employed might be viewed as measures of the same general trait; (2) to observe the extent to which the genetically homogeneous Ss within inbred strains would perform in the same way on these measures; and (3) to determine for each measure the stability in performance over repeated trials between individual sets of opponents. Method Twenty-six male Ss were employed, organized into 13 matched pairs that remained the same for all three phases of testing. One member of each pair was from strain A, the other from strain DBA/8. Pairs were matched on the basis of age. Both strains have been inbred for more than 30 generations of brother-sister mating. All Ss were weaned and housed with same-sex littermates at 23 days of age, individually housed in metal cages at approximately 42 days, and were 75-100 days of age at the beginning of the experiment.The aggression test is a measure of spontaneous fighting betwe"n pairs of mice. The present apparatus and testing procedure is a Psychon. Sci., 1966, Vol. 5 (11) modification of that described by Fredericson (1...

The authors investigated (a) different components of sex typing in play interests, (b) a potential masculine bias in Brown's It Scale for Children, and (c) selected social learning concepts of sex-role development. Subjects were 32 white, 4-year-old, upper-class children and 56 of their parents. To measure sex-role orientation, preference, and adoption, respectively, the children were given an "imaginary It" and a "you" version of the It Scale for Children and were scored at home on play interests. On all three measures, boys and girls differed in direction, but not in degree, of sex typing. The Orientation and Preference scores were positively correlated, but subjects were more sex typed on Preference. Significant tendencies for subjects to label an "imaginary It" as their same sex, but the standard It figure as a boy, indicated a masculine bias in the latter. Parental responses on a modified It test and interview were scored for differential reinforcement and modeling of sex-typed interests. Correlations between parents' scores and their children's failed to support social learning concepts of sex typing. Parents discouraged cross-sexed interests in boys more than in girls. Parents of the same sex as their child reported more encouragement of sex typing than did opposite-sexed parents.Using the standard administration of Brown's (1956) It Scale for Children, it is typically reported (Kohlberg, 1966) that boys are more sex typed than girls, that is, more masculine than girls are feminine. Brown (1962), Thompson and McCandless (1970), and others have suggested that the It figure may actually appear more masculine than "neuter" and thus bias results.Several investigators eliminated this possible bias by administering the test with "It" concealed in an envelope (Endsley, 1967;Lansky & McKay, 1963; Sher & Lansky, 1968;Thompson & McCandless, 1970). Endsley found no significant difference between the mean scores on the concealed and the standard version for boys and girls combined. In the other three studies, a nonsignificant tendency was found for girls to be more feminine on the concealed test than on