The emergence and development of argumentation skills in interpersonal conflict situations are the focus of this study. The mental structures used to understand arguments are related to those used to understand social conflict and goal-directed action. The desire to maintain or dissolve a relationship, to persuade, and to understand a position operate throughout interpersonal arguments. Decisions made about whether a relationship should be maintained influence the reasoning and thinking during negotiation, the negotiation strategies, and the outcome of an argument. Because social goals are crucial to understanding argument, negotiations and memory for an argument may be affected as to bias and accuracy.The ability to understand an argument is claimed to emerge early in development. By 3 years of age, children understand and generate the principle components of an argument, either in face-to-face interaction or individual interviews. The ability to construct detailed, coherent rationales in defense of a favored position improves with age. This development, however, does not guarantee a deeper understanding of one's opponents. The conditions that prevent greater understanding of the opposition from developing are discussed. The ways in which biases and limited understanding can be overcome are also considered.In this article, we focus on the social origins and nature of argument. Our analysis describes how children and adults represent, evaluate, and resolve arguments. We have, in our research (

No abstract

No abstract

Autobiographical accounts of traumatic and stressful emotional events reveal how we understand and organize personally meaningful experiences. Our analysis of traumatic and emotional narratives focuses on the ways in which the person's event memory predicts the impact of trauma and emotional experiences on psychological well-being (e.g., depression or positive morale) of both children and adults. Four primary factors account for the relationship between memory and psychological well-being: 1) beliefs (evaluations) about the experience of trauma or stress; 2) specific emotions expressed in reaction to the events; 3) beliefs about one's competence at coping with and overcoming adversity; and 4) the generation of new goals formulated to replace those lost irrevocably. The organization and narration of emotional understanding, while diverse and complex in content, is highly constrained as to the number and kind of emotions expressed. The relationships among specific 1 An example of these personal "common man" narratives can be seen in Studs Terkel's writings, especially those where Terkel presents the oral histories of men who fought in the "good" war, the Second World War. He also uses oral autobiographical narratives in his explorations of Race, How Blacks and Whites Think and Feel about the American Obsession (1992). Tom Brokaw's two-volume account of men and women involved in WW II, the Holocaust Museum's oral recordings of survivors, their interviews with non-Jewish rescuers, and the narratives from Stephen Spielberg's ongoing "Shoah" project also fit into this genre.