This study examined 3- to 5-year-olds' (N = 128; 54% girls) ability to discriminate emotional fantasy and reality. Children viewed images depicting fantastic or real events that elicited several emotions, reported whether each event could occur, and rated their emotional reaction to the image. Children were also administered the Play Behavior Questionnaire and Pretend Action Tasks to assess play behaviors. Findings revealed age-related improvements in performance and biases in judgment based on the emotion depicted. Children reported that happy fantastic events could occur significantly more often than frightening and angry fantastic events and that happy real events could occur significantly more often than frightening and angry real events. Children's emotional reactions to the images but not play behaviors were significantly related to their fantasy-reality distinctions. Implications for the relation between emotions and children's fantasy-reality distinctions are discussed.

Two studies examined young children’s early understanding and evaluation of truth-telling and lying, and the role that factuality plays in their judgments. Study 1 (104 2- to 5-year-olds) found that even the youngest children reliably accepted true statements and rejected false statements, and that older children’s ability to label true and false statements as “truth” and “lie” emerged in tandem with their positive evaluation of true statements and “truth” and their negative evaluation of false statements and “lie.” The findings suggest that children’s early preference for factuality develops into a conception of “truth” and “lie” that is linked both to factuality and moral evaluation. Study 2 (128 3- to 5-year-olds) found that, whereas young children exhibited good understanding of the association of true and false statements with “truth,” “lie,” “mistake,” “right,” and “wrong,” they showed little awareness of assumptions about speaker knowledge underlying “lie” and “mistake.” The results further support the primacy of factuality in children’s early understanding and evaluation of truth and lies.

This study examined maltreated and non-maltreated children’s (N = 183) emerging understanding of “truth” and “lie,” terms about which they are quizzed to qualify as competent to testify. Four- to six-year-old children were asked to accept or reject true and false (T/F) statements, label T/F statements as the “truth” or “a lie,” label T/F statements as “good” or “bad,” and label “truth” and “lie” as “good” or “bad.” The youngest children were at ceiling in accepting/rejecting T/F statements. The labeling tasks revealed improvement with age and children performed similarly across the tasks. Most children were better able to evaluate “truth” than “lie.” Maltreated children exhibited somewhat different response patterns, suggesting greater sensitivity to the immorality of lying.

Although numerous studies have examined the relations between stress and memory in children, few studies have investigated physiological responses as predictors of children's memory for stressful events. In this study, 4-to 8-year-olds completed laboratory challenges and experienced a fire-alarm incident while their sympathetic and parasympathetic reactions were monitored. Shortly afterward, children's memory of the alarm incident was tested. As children's age and family income increased, memory performance improved. High sympathetic activation during the laboratory challenges was associated with enhanced memory. Also, a trend indicated that, among older children, greater general parasympathetic withdrawal was associated with poorer memory, but among younger children, parasympathetic withdrawal was unrelated to memory. Findings highlight the need to measure both sympathetic and parasympathetic responses when evaluating children's memory for mild stressors and to include a wide age range so that developmental changes in the relations between stress and memory in childhood can be identified.

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