Across cultures, narrative emerges early in communicative development and is a fundamental means of making sense of experience. Narrative and self are inseparable in that narrative is simultaneously born out of experience and gives shape to experience. Narrative activity provides tellers with an opportunity to impose order on otherwise disconnected events, and to create continuity between past, present, and imagined worlds. Narrative also interfaces self and society, constituting a crucial resource for socializing emotions, attitudes, and identities, developing interpersonal relationships, and constituting membership in a community. Through various genres and modes; through discourse, grammar, lexicon, and prosody; and through the dynamics of collaborative authorship, narratives bring multiple, partial selves to life. NARRATIVE HORIZONSNarrative is a fundamental genre in that it is universal and emerges early in the communicative development of children (4,19,152,157,164,182,209). This review focuses on narratives of personal experience, defined here as verbalized, visualized, and/or embodied framings of a sequence of actual or possible life events.Personal narratives comprise a range of genres from story (60, 135, 147, 175, 177, 207) to novel (11, 38, 39, 132, 188), diaries (239) and letters (21) to memoirs (100), gossip (20,28, 101,160) to legal testimony (10, 165), boast (207) to eulogy (29, 30), troubles talk (119) to medical history (49), joke (191) to satire (132, 183), bird song (65, 202) to opera (40), etching to palimpsest (150), and mime (5, 233) to dance (93,205). Counter to a prevalent ideology of disembodied objectivity (98), even scientific narratives can be personal in tone. Scientists, for example, routinely construct oral narratives of procedures Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 1996.25:19-43. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org by New Mexico State University (NMSU) on 09/17/13. For personal use only.

Drawing on E. Goffman's concepts of face and strategic interaction, the authors define a tease as a playful provocation in which one person comments on something relevant to the target. This approach encompasses the diverse behaviors labeled teasing, clarifies previous ambiguities, differentiates teasing from related practices, and suggests how teasing can lead to hostile or affiliative outcomes. The authors then integrate studies of the content of teasing. Studies indicate that norm violations and conflict prompt teasing. With development, children tease in playful ways, particularly around the ages of 11 and 12 years, and understand and enjoy teasing more. Finally, consistent with hypotheses concerning contextual variation in face concerns, teasing is more frequent and hostile when initiated by high-status and familiar others and men, although gender differences are smaller than assumed. The authors conclude by discussing how teasing varies according to individual differences and culture.

Non-retarded autistic children are compared to normal controls on measures of emotion expression and recognition. In general, autistic subjects recounted appropriate examples of simple and complex emotions, and accurately labeled relatively ambiguous affect expression in pictures. Autistic children manifested some difficulty talking about socially derived emotions, pride and embarrassment. They required more time and more prompts, their responses were more tentative and "scripted", and they displayed limited understanding of the salience of others in embarrassing situations. Results are discussed in relation to theory of mind impairment and compensation strategies in autism.

While it is widely recognized that autism undercuts conversational ability, there has been little systematic examination of the involvement of children with autism in informal conversational interaction. This study compares the behaviour of 15 children with autism and 15 children with developmental delays matched on language ability within the context of a semi-structured conversation. Children with autism more often failed to respond to questions and comments, less often offered new, relevant contributions, and produced fewer narratives of personal experience. In contrast to prior research findings, groups did not differ with respect to use of gesture: several children with autism enhanced their communication through dramatization and pointing. Discussion focuses on the nature of pragmatic impairment in autism; factors underlying the development of conversational ability, including theory of mind; and practices that may promote communicative competence.

Nineteen autistic children were examined in a modified version of Ainsworth's Strange Situation. The attachment security of 15 children could be classified. Each of these children displayed disorganized attachment patterns, but almost half (40%) of them were subclassified as securely attached. To assess the validity of the attachment classifications, children and their mothers were observed in a separate interaction. Mothers of children who were subclassified as securely attached displayed greater sensitivity than mothers of children who were subclassified as insecurely attached. Children who were subclassified as securely attached more frequently initiated social interaction with their mothers than did children who were subclassified as insecurely attached. Children with secure and insecure subclassifications were compared to investigate correlations between attachment organization and representational ability and social-emotional understanding. Although children with underlying secure attachments were no more likely to initiate joint attention, they were more responsive to bids for joint attention, made requests more frequently, and demonstrated greater receptive language ability than children subclassified as insecurely attached. Discussion focuses on dynamics that may contribute to individual differences in the attachment organization of autistic children and on the reciprocal relationship between advances in our understanding of normal and pathological development.Since the initial description of the syndrome (Kanner, 1943), attachment has been central to discussion of autism. Psychoanalytic accounts have conceptualized autism as a disorder of attachment. Mahler (1968) suggested that autistic children's development was arrested prior to forming an attachment relationship such that concepts of self and other fail to develop. Similarly, Rutter (1978, p. 9) described autistic children's "lack of attachment behavior and relative failure of bonding." More recently, Cohen, Paul, and Volkmar (1987, p. 29) have written that "autistic social impairment results in the child's failure to demonstrate differ-