The present study investigated mothers' joint attention strategies (follow/redirect), attention-directing behavior (point/show/demonstrate/give), and infant responses to mothers' redirect strategy. 20-month-old infants and their mothers were observed playing with toys. Mothers followed their infants' focus of attention more often than redirecting it, as a joint attention strategy. Mothers labeled and told their babies about the toys they were playing with, and often redirected the infants' attention with directive statements. "Showing" was more common as a redirect strategy and about half of mothers' redirect strategies were rejected or ignored by the infants. Among the attention-directing behavior in the redirect strategy, infant responded more to pointing and giving. Finally, joint attention continued longer if initiated by mothers rather than by infants.

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This study examined understanding of knowing among 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds. The Japanese term, "shiru" (to know), in this study was investigated in relation to 3 aspects of a "theory of knowledge" (Perner, 1991) : (1) truth, i.e., correct representation of facts, (2) access to relevant information, and (3) successful action. Children were given stories with 2 characters, in which one character had knowledge of an object according to conditions of the 3 preceding aspects of knowledge. Children chose which character knew the objects, and the findings were as follows. (1) Understanding of knowing developed with age. (2) Although children could draw upon the 3 informational aspects to make choices, children from age 4 reported use of the "access to relevant information "aspect more than the other aspects. (3) The relation between the understanding of knowing and the development of theory of mind was suggested by the data. (4) The amount of vocabularies of children understood was related to their understanding of knowing. The results suggested that it is important to examine understanding of various mental processes such as knowing.

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The present study examined the development of self-understanding in the preschool and grade school years, as revealed by children's self-descriptions and self-evaluations. Thirty-two 5 year olds, 37 second graders and 35 fourth graders were interviewed about their self-definition, self-evaluation and interests. Children's answers were classified according to the modified Damon & Hart (1988) category scheme and the main results were as follows. First, with age, self-descriptions about physical features became less common, whereas descriptions about activities and personality traits increased in frequency. Second, many children in all age groups gave some descriptions about harmonious relationships, and the varied use of specialty words for descriptions about ability, competence and diligence increased in number with age. Third, while many preschoolers described only positive and likable aspects of themselves, most school age children described both positive and negative aspects of self. In fact, many 4th graders described only their bad aspects.

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A questionnaire survey investigated attitudes toward the environment from a lifespan developmental perspective. Differences among age groups and the effects of several predictors were examined in an analysis of 4-point scale ratings of familiarity and potential for influence on 10 environmental issues. Participants were junior high school (n=221), high school (n=208), and university (n=195) students and their mothers (junior high school n=221, high school n=208, university n=89), for a total N of 1311. Additionally, data for 936 participants from another study (Wakamatsu & Watanabe, 1996) were included in the analysis. The main findings included that pro-environmental attitudes changed over the lifespan, changes in attitudes were dramatic between adolescence and adulthood, and environmental studies in school and society appeared to be more effective than housework experiences as learning chances. These results indicated the important role of lifespan integrated education to encourage pro-environmental attitudes.

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This study examined how preschool teachers become expert in comprehension of and solution to problems in the education of children. Teachers (N=33) from 12 preschools were classified into 3 groups according to their length of teaching experience. And teachers were interviewed individually at their place of work. Case histories about 3 children were presented to the teachers, who were asked about their reasons for the perceived level of difficulty of treating each cases, the goals they would set for each child, predictions of children's changes, and information they thought to be lacking in each case. Their answers revealed the following trends. First, knowledge of children and teaching was greater among the groups of medium-experience teachers and veterans, than among novices. Second, medium-experience and veteran groups did not differ in their amount of knowledge, but with greater experience the knowledge of the veterans tended to be more structured than that of the medium-experience teachers. And while there was no difference in the recognition of the response according to difficulty level, there was a difference according to level of experience in the reasons for recognition of difficulty level. The results suggest that preschool teachers acquire richly structured knowledge with expertise, and that they use cues and know-how connected with contexts to predict changes in children's individual characteristics and development.

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This paper compared the personal space of middle-aged and elderly individuals toward family members, from a developmental standpoint, and considered the influence of personal space on people living with their families. Personal space was measured as thedistance from another person when engaged in conversation. Middle-aged (n=285) and elderly (over age 65, n=219) participants took part in a simulation by imagining themselves in conversation before being asked to mark the closest point to various people at which they felt comfortable. Interpersonal distances from their children were closer for the middle-aged group than for the elderly group. For both the middle-aged and elderly groups, distances between mothers and daughters were closer than that between mothers and sons, fathers and daughters, or between fathers and sons. There was no difference between the middle-aged and elderly group in the comfortable distances between husbands and wives. Both groups reportedly maintained closer space proximity to their daughters and sons than to their daughters-or sons-in-law. Finally, middle-aged females who lived with their parents were relatively more remote from their spouses.

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