Kindergarten, third-, and sixth-grade children were given vignettes describing experiences that were likely to produce emotional states, and their consensus about the probable affective reaction was determined. A sample of eight social and personal (private) experiences was utilized in the vignettes: success, failure, dishonesty (caught or not caught), experiencing nurturance or aggression, and experiencing justified or unjustified punishment. The potential affective reactions that children were asked to choose among included happiness, sadness, anger, fear, and neutral affect. There were no sex differences. Children of all ages agreed that relatively simple experiences such as success and nurturance would elicit a happy reaction. For other categories of experience, multiple consensuses appeared for more than one affective reaction. There were developmental differences in the affective reactions anticipated to five of the eight experience categories. Results are discussed in terms of cognitive and social learning determinants of knowledge about the experimental antecedents of emotion for oneself and others.

Little is known about the specific and potentially interactive impact of successive affect-inducing experiences. In the present study preschool children experienced two standard experimental affect inductions in succession and the effects were assessed on self-gratification, altruism, cognitive processing, and expressed affect. The states induced were happy, sad, or neutral, and the repeated inductions were either consistent (e.g., +/+) or inconsistent (e.g., +/-, -/+). The findings were as follows: (a) Only the first of the two affect inductions had an effect on selfgratification or altruism, with sad states increasing self-gratification and decreasing altruism. There was no indication that a second affect-inducing experience could remediate the behavioral consequences of a prior one. (b) Generative cognitive processing (producing a thought of an affective valence) was increased by both the ongoing affective state and the affective content of the material to be generated. Positive affect states or content increased the speed of processing, (c) Finally, children's memory for the thoughts they had produced was influenced also by affective state, with sad states increasing the latency for recall.

The present study examined age-related patterns in children’s anxiety-related interpretations and internal attributions of physical symptoms. A large sample of 388 children aged between 4 and 13 years completed a vignette paradigm during which they had to explain the emotional response of the main character who experienced anxiety-related physical symptoms in a variety of daily situations. In addition, children completed measures of cognitive development and anxiety sensitivity. Results demonstrated that age, cognitive development, and anxiety sensitivity were all positively related to children’s ability to perceive physical symptoms as a signal of anxiety and making internal attributions. Further, while a substantial proportion of the younger children (i.e., <7 years) were able to make a valid anxiety-related interpretation of a physical symptom, very few were capable of making an internal attribution, which means that children of this age lack the developmental prerequisites for applying physical symptoms-based theories of childhood anxiety.

Preschool, third-grade, and sixth-grade children and adults were presented with vignettes depicting eight types of experiences (e.g., success, failure, dishonesty that is discovered) and asked what would be their own (for children) or a preschool, third-grade, or sixth-grade child's (for adults) emotional reaction. Without exception, adults' expectancies agreed with those of third-and sixth-grade students. However, adults' expectancies about preschoolers' affect varied significantly from preschoolers' own accounts for vignettes presenting experiences of success, dishonesty that is discovered, dishonesty that is not discovered, being the target of aggression, and unjustified punishment. However, adults and preschoolers agreed in predicted affective responses to failure, nurturance, and justified punishment. Overall, adults did not differentiate their predictions as a function of the age of the child whose affective reactions they were asked to predict, indicating an absence of developmental considerations in their implicit theories of children's emotional responsiveness. Results are discussed within a framework of social cognition, focusing on the nature and development of implicit theories about affect and on questions regarding the accuracy of such theories.It is only recently that those interested in personality and social development have turned their attention to social cognition, "the child's intuitive or logical representation of others, that is, how he characterizes others and makes inferences about their covert, inner psychological experiences" (Shantz, 1975, p. 1). This area emerged from the traditional work in person perception by social psychologists such as Kelly (1955) andHeider(1958) and from the extension of research in cognitive development and logical problem solving to social phenomena. Almost without exception, person-perception research was originally concerned with adults' perceptions of other adults. The application of this model to children led to studies of children's understanding of and predictions about other children (e.g., Borke, 1971Borke, , 1973.However, little attention has been paid to adults" expectancies about children's behavior or feelings, or vice versa. One exception is a recent paper by Miller, White, and Delgado (1980) that examined the accuracy of parents' and nonparents' predictions of the ages at which various cognitive achievements and other aspects of cognitive development are exhibited by children. Both parents and nonparents predicted quite accurately the temporal sequence of acquisition of different abilities, but there was considerable inaccuracy in their beliefs about the ages at which object permanence is achieved and the appearances of some formal-

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