Children's Sensitivity to Ulterior Motives When Evaluating Prosocial Behavior

Reasoning about ulterior motives was investigated among children ages 6–10 years (total N = 119). In each of two studies, participants were told about children who offered gifts to peers who needed help. Each giver chose to present a gift in either a public setting, which is consistent with having an ulterior motive to enhance one's reputation, or in a private setting, which is not consistent with having an ulterior motive. In each study, the 6‐ to 7‐year olds showed no evidence of understanding that the public givers might have ulterior motives, but the 8‐ to 10‐year olds rated the private givers more favorably. In 3. , the older children were more likely than the younger children to refer to impression management when explaining their judgments of the givers. The younger children who mentioned impression management did so to justify a preference for public givers (e.g., by explaining that public givers are nicer because more of their peers will know that they are nice). Results from 4. suggest that developmental change in children's reasoning about intentions and social outcomes contributes to their understanding of ulterior motives.     

The ontogeny of intent‐based normative judgments

When evaluating norm transgressions, children begin to show some sensitivity to the agent's intentionality around preschool age. However, the specific developmental trajectories of different forms of such intent‐based judgments and their cognitive underpinnings are still largely unclear. The current studies, therefore, systematically investigated the development of intent‐based normative judgments as a function of two crucial factors: (a) the type of the agent's mental state underlying a normative transgression, and (b) the type of norm transgressed (moral versus conventional). In Study 1, 5‐ and 7‐year‐old children as well as adults were presented with vignettes in which an agent transgressed either a moral or a conventional norm. Crucially, she did so either intentionally, accidentally (not intentionally at all) or unknowingly (intentionally, yet based on a false belief regarding the outcome). The results revealed two asymmetries in children's intent‐based judgments. First, all age groups showed greater sensitivity to mental state information for moral compared to conventional transgressions. Second, children's (but not adults') normative judgments were more sensitive to the agent's intention than to her belief. Two subsequent studies investigated this asymmetry in children more closely and found evidence that it is based on performance factors: children are able in principle to take into account an agent's false belief in much the same way as her intentions, yet do not make belief‐based judgments in many existing tasks (like that of Study 1) due to their inferential complexity. Taken together, these findings contribute to a more systematic understanding of the development of intent‐based normative judgment.     

The effects of source and type of feedback on child witnesses' metamemory accuracy

This study investigated the effect of feedback on the accuracy (realism) of 12‐year‐old children's metacognitive judgments of their answers to questions about a film clip. Two types of judgments were investigated: confidence judgments (on each question) and frequency judgments (i.e. estimates of overall accuracy). The source of feedback, whether it was presented as provided by a teacher or a peer child, did not influence metacognitive accuracy. Four types of feedback were given depending on whether the participant's answer was correct and depending on whether the feedback confirmed or disconfirmed the child's answer. The children showed large overconfidence when they received confirmatory feedback but much less so when they received disconfirmatory feedback. The children gave frequency judgments implying that they had more correct answers than they actually had. No main gender differences were found for any of the measures. The results indicate a high degree of malleability in children's metacognitive judgments. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Maternal beliefs concerning young children's private speech

The goal of this study was to understand maternal reports, beliefs, and attitudes about their young children's use of private speech. Mothers of 48 children between the ages of 3 and 5 participated in a semi‐structured interview in which they reported on the frequency and context of their child's use of private speech, maternal responses toward such speech use in children, and beliefs about the utility of such speech for children. Interviews were transcribed and responses coded. Mothers also completed surveys on children's self control and parenting style. Results indicated that practically all parents reported that their child engaged in private speech and that such speech was more likely to appear during fantasy play than during problem‐solving activities. Parents varied in their personal responses to children's self talk and, as a group, do not appear to actively discourage or encourage its use. Ignoring/allowing child private speech use was common and this response was positively associated with authoritative parenting. Parental reports of the frequency with which their child talks to himself were negatively associated with parental reports of children's self‐control. Crib speech, or bedtime monologue, was reported to be very common and was negatively associated with children's self‐control and positively associated with children's private speech use. Parents were uniformly positive in their belief that private speech serves important functions and that it helps young children during task activities. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

An Analysis of the Relations Among Tests of Musical,Artistic, and Mechanical Abilitiesa

In a study of 80 fifth grade American boys and girls, an attempt was made to demonstrate a causal link between children's first names and judgments about the rightness or wrongness of those children's conflicted decisions. It was expected that children possessing liked names would be judged as right more frequently than children having disliked names. The expected effect was not found. Reasons for this negative finding were discussed.     

The role of severity and intentionality in the intensity of Schadenfreude attribution: A developmental study of Danish children

Understanding envy and schadenfreude requires complex interpersonal social cognitive abilities, such as social comparison and evaluating the Self, but also understanding agency and intentionality. Previous studies of children's development of envy/schadenfreude addressed whether children understand and experience schadenfreude as opposed to compassion/sympathy or whether children's attribution of schadenfreude is a consequence of envy provoked by a disadvantageous social comparison. In this study, we take a step further and investigate the roles that agency and severity of the damage play in mediating children's attribution of schadenfreude. The participants were 144 Danish children aged 3–9 years divided into two age groups. Children were presented with eight stories supported by pictures showing intentional versus accidental and irreparable versus reparable damage to envied objects. The results show that the intensity of envy/schadenfreude, as well as the happy victimizer phenomenon, varies depending on the severity of damage, agency and intentionality. When damage is accidental, schadenfreude is expressed with less intensity compared to when damage is intentional (led by an agent). When damage is irreparable, children attribute less intense feelings of schadenfreude compared to when it is reparable. In addition, only the older children expressed reparable damage carrying more intense schadenfreude and only in the accidental condition. In general, children consider intentional and reparable damage more intense than accidental and irreparable damage, and this is mediated by age. The results are important for understanding the developmental trajectory of children's complex emotions and for educational programmes directed towards supporting this development.     

Japanese and British Children's Understanding of the Social Function of Pretend Crying

The purpose of this study was to investigate cross-cultural differences in children's understanding of pretend crying. Five- and 6-year-olds from Japan and the United Kingdom (N = 71) heard two hypothetical stories in which the protagonist of each story pretended to cry in front of another person. Children were asked about the appearance–reality distinction of pretend crying, the other character's thoughts and behavior, and the children's own moral judgment of pretend crying. Cultural differences were found in their understanding of the social function of pretend crying. Japanese children judged that pretend crying elicited another's concern and prosocial behavior more than British children. There were no significant differences in appearance–reality distinction or moral judgments between Japanese and British children. All participants successfully discriminated between pretend crying and real crying, and most participants judged pretend crying as “not good” behavior. These results suggested that Japanese children might be more expected to be sensitive to others’ feelings, and that such cultural differences in communication and socialization lead to different patterns in expectations of the social consequences of pretend crying.     

Detecting children's true and false denials of wrongdoing: Effects of question type and base rate knowledge

One common and unfortunately overlooked obstacle to the detection of sexual abuse is non-disclosure by children. Non-disclosure in forensic interviews may be expressed via concealment in response to recall questions or via active denials in response to recognition (e.g., yes/no) questions. In two studies, we evaluated whether adults' ability to discern true and false denials of wrongdoing by children varied as a function of the types of interview question the children were asked. Results suggest that adults are not good at detecting deceptive denials of wrongdoing by children, even when the adults view children narrate their experiences in response to recall questions rather than provide one word answers to recognition questions. In Study 1, adults exhibited a consistent “truth bias,” leading them toward believing children, regardless of whether the children's denials were true or false. In Study 2, adults were given base-rate information about the occurrence of true and false denials (50% of each). The information eliminated the adults' truth bias but did not improve their overall detection accuracy, which still hovered near chance. Adults did, however, perceive children's denials as slightly more credible when they emerged in response to recall rather than recognition questions, especially when children were honestly denying wrongdoing. Results suggest the need for caution when evaluating adults' judgments of children's veracity when the children fail to disclose abuse.     

Correlation of the Response Potentials of the Skin with “Exciting” and Non-“Exciting” Stimuli

The relationship between psychological test performance and adult judgments of children's intelligence was explored in Guatemala and the U. S. A. In Guatemala, 15 male and 15 female children, age eight, were studied in each of two rural villages. In one village, 48 adult community members ranked the children on intelligence; in the other, 29 adults did the rankings. Male and female children were ranked separately. In the U. S., nine male children in a small New Jersey town were ranked by 25 adults. In a second U. S. community. a small California town, eight male children were ranked by 14 adults. In general, adult judgments were found to be congruent with children's test performance. In Guatemala, a simple family socioeconomic index was also related to both adult judgment and children's test performance. The implications of the results and the utility of these types of judgment techniques in cross-cultural research are discussed.     

Children's linguistic intuitions about factive presuppositions

Third and sixth graders' understanding of factive presupposition was investigated via two tasks: One required an abstract truth value judgment of the verb complement; the other called for a more informal judgment of consistency (or contradiction) between the target sentence and the negation of its complement. When compared with corresponding adult data, the present results indicate that the development of factive presupposition continues through late childhood. A further task examined a nonlogical pragmatic variable related to factive meaning. The final task investigated whether children's judgments of overall certainty are governed by factive or pragmatic aspects of meaning. Comparisons across the four tasks indicate that factive presupposition only gradually emerges as a distinct logical component of verb meaning. It is argued that young children's initial discriminations between factive and nonfactive verbs reflect the subjective confidence conveyed by the verb rather than the logical property of factivity, but that later in acquisition, factivity acquires a status superseding that of other facets of meaning.     

The mental health of children of migrant workers in Beijing: The protective role of public school attendance

The present study aims to understand the mental health status of an understudied group of migrant children – children of migrant workers in China. A total of 1,466 children from Beijing participated in the study that compared migrant children (n = 1,019) to their local peers (n = 447) in public and private school settings. Results showed that overall, migrant children reported more internalizing and externalizing mental health problems and lower life satisfaction than local peers. However, public school attendance served as a protective factor for migrant children's mental health. The mental health status of migrant children attending public schools, including externalizing problems as well as friend and school satisfaction, was not different from local children. In addition, our data indicates that the protective effect of public school attendance for migrant children may be even more salient among girls than boys, and for younger children than older children.     

Popular and Rejected Children's Social Reasoning: Linking Social Status and Social Knowledge

The relationship between children's social status/sex and their moral judgments was examined. Sixty-four second- and third-grade children (33 boys, 31 girls) who were identified as popular or rejected by peer sociometric measures were shown pictures of children engaged in moral and second-order transgressions. The children were asked to rate each event on (a) the degree of seriousness for other and self, (b) the amount of punishment for other and self, and (c) rule alterability. The children were also asked for justification of the transgressions (why they thought the transgressions were wrong). The popular and rejected children differentiated between moral and second-order transgressions based upon criterion ratings and justifications. Differences emerged between the popular and the rejected children's ratings and justifications for moral transgressions, suggesting that children's moral judgments are related to social experiences associated with peer acceptance and rejection.     

Parents' Expressiveness and Young Children's Emotion Decoding With Parents and Unknown Adults

The authors investigated young children's ability to decode the emotions of happiness and anger expressed by their parent and an adult stranger. Parents and adult strangers (encoders) were videotaped while describing events that had elicited happiness or anger. Children viewed brief clips edited from these videotapes and indicated the emotion that their parent or the stranger was expressing. With male encoders, only children's age predicted accuracy. With female encoders, mothers' expressive style and children's age interacted to predict children's decoding accuracy. Compared with older children of less positively expressive mothers, older children of more positively expressive mothers were more accurate overall, because they were better at recognizing happiness. In general, children were no more or less accurate in decoding their parent's emotions than they were in decoding an unknown adult's emotions.     

Eye Gaze Provides a Window on Children's Understanding of Verbal Irony

We investigated how children solve the interpretive problem of verbal irony. Children 5 to 8 years of age and a group of adults were presented with ironic and literal remarks in the context of short puppet shows. The speaker puppet's personality was manipulated as a cue to intent; that is, speakers were described as funny or serious. We measured all participants' interpretations of the remarks and also children's eye gaze and response latencies as they made their interpretations. As expected, children were less accurate than adults in their judgments of speaker intent. Although children took longer to judge speaker intent for ironic remarks than literal remarks, eye gaze data showed no evidence that children had a literal-first bias in their processing of ironic language. Instead, children's eye gaze behavior suggested that they considered an ironic interpretation even in the earliest moments of processing. We argue that these results are most consistent with a parallel constraint satisfaction framework for irony comprehension.     

Racial Self-Identification: The Effects of Social History and Gender1

Dark and Clark's pioneering study in 1947 demonstrated that Black children were ambivalent about racial self-identification. Subsequent research indicates that during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, Black children were increasingly likely to demonstrate a commitment to identifying with a Black stimulus. The present study investigates the extent to which this trend persists in the 1980s and how gender of the child affects her/his racial identification. The results indicate that the 1980s may be a time in history when Black children are growing more ambivalent about racial self-identification, and that Black boys are significantly more likely than Black girls to identify with the white doll. The findings suggest that the current political climate which places Blacks at a significant social and economic disadvantage may reduce children's willingness to identify with a Black stimulus. The gender differences are explored in terms of Black boys' greater likelihood psychologically to try to identify away from Blackness.     

Children prefer to learn from mind‐readers

Kim and Harris ( 2014 , J. Cogn. Dev.) showed that children selectively learned from an informant who produced apparently magical outcomes as compared to another informant who produced only ordinary outcomes in the domain of everyday physics. In the present study, we tested children's ability to differentiate between and selectively learn from informants who displayed either an extraordinary or an ordinary ability in the domain of everyday psychology. Prior studies have shown that children come to appreciate what is ordinarily involved in knowing the private mental states of other people. Drawing on this research, we asked whether 3‐ to 4‐ and 5‐ to 6‐year‐old children preferentially learned from an informant who knew another person's mind via either an ordinary or an extraordinary form of communication. As compared to younger children, older children were more likely to learn from the extraordinary informant. Moreover, children's ability to differentiate between the two informants was a better predictor of their learning from the extraordinary informant than age. We discuss the findings in the light of prior work on selective learning, children's ideas about prayer and their understanding of impossibility.     

Making Sense of Divergent Interpretations of Conflict and Developing an Interpretive Understanding of Mind

Our goals in this study were to develop a measure of children's understanding of divergent interpretations of conflict and relate that measure to children's more general interpretive understanding of mind (Carpendale & Chandler, 1996). Eighty-nine children between 4 and 9 years of age heard 4 conflict stories in which fault was ambiguous. Children overwhelmingly suggested that antagonists would blame each other and adequately justified those judgments. However, children under 7 years did not believe that it made sense for antagonists to disagree, and children were better able to explain why mutual blame made sense as they grew older. Children's judgments of the legitimacy of and explanations for divergent conflict interpretations were correlated with similar measures assessing their understanding of the general interpretive quality of mind. Findings are discussed in terms of the role of everyday interaction for the gradual acquisition of interpretive understanding.     

Children's reasoning about responses to peer aggression: Victim's and witness's expected and prescribed behaviors

This research examined children's reasoning about expected (i.e., what a peer would do) and prescribed (i.e., what a peer should do) responses to unprovoked, intentional aggressive actions in two contexts: as a victim of such a transgression and as a witness to the incident. Physical harm and property damage items were used in a structured interview format. There were 90 subjects drawn from three elementary school grades (2nd, 4th, and 6th). Children differentiated between the expected and prescribed responses of peers and significant developmental differences in children's evaluations were found. Although the majority of the subjects in all grades denounced retaliation on the basis of concerns about others' welfare, older children stated that peers were likely to retaliate against the perpetrator nonetheless. Across different contexts, older children's responses appeared to reveal a greater independence from authority in negotiating peer interactions. In evaluating the witness's responses to aggressive acts, younger children's expected and prescribed responses were less disparate than that of the older children. The utility of including different vantage points of the child in examining children's social reasoning about aggression and the application of the present findings to social information-processing models are discussed. © 1996 Wiley-Liss, Inc.     

Favourable and unfavourable conditions for children's confidence judgments

Two studies are presented in which favourable and unfavourable conditions for children's meta‐cognitive monitoring processes are examined. Previously reported findings have shown that especially children's uncertainty monitoring (in contrast to certainty monitoring) poses specific problems for children in their elementary school years. When interviewing children about an observed event, answerable and unanswerable questions in two question formats (unbiased and misleading) were used, and 8‐ and 10‐year‐old children as well as adults were asked to rate their confidence on a three‐point scale concerning each response. Results of Study 1 show that accuracy instructions and the option to answer with ‘I don't know’ inflate children's level of confidence because uncertain answers are withheld. Results of Study 2 revealed that children's difficulty with uncertainty monitoring may lie in a cognitive overload during the interview because immediate confidence judgments were less precise and less adequate compared with delayed confidence judgments. Participants' rating of their uncertainty after having erroneously provided an answer to an unanswerable question proved that children aged 8 years and older are able to experience and report levels of uncertainty but, as was shown for answerable questions, these emerging competencies are dependent on favourable task conditions.     

“If it's in your mind,it's in your knowledge”: Children's developing anatomy of identity

Recent work has investigated children's developing understanding of the anatomical locus of identity. In two studies, we extend this work by exploring the role of the mind as opposed to the brain in children's conceptualization of identity. In Experiment 1, an analysis of natural language indicated that adults use the term mind more frequently than the term brain with reference to identity-related mental processes. Children's output displayed a similar bias. In Experiment 2, we compared the judgments of 5- and 7-year-old children to those displayed by adults. Participants heard stories in which a magical transformation resulted in either a creature with a mismatch between brain and body or a creature with a mismatch between mind and body. Children were more accurate in recognizing the enduring identity of this transformed creature when the transformation resulted in a mismatch between mind and body as compared to brain and body.