Developing Moral Emotion Attributions in Happy Victimizer Task: Role of Victim Information

Previous happy victimizer (HV) studies have shown that preschool and early elementary school children attribute happy emotions to the violator of moral rules. This study examines the effects of information pertaining to the victim in HV stories on children's emotion attributions. In Study 1, 55 children (aged 5–6 and 7–8 years) participated. Participants heard three types of stories: (a) victim sadness resulting from a character's wrongdoing (normal HV story); (b) victim happiness resulting from a character's wrongdoing (non‐canonical HV story); and (c) victim sadness resulting from an accident (accident story). The children were required to infer the victimizer's feelings and to justify their attributions. Children demonstrated more positive emotion attributions for non‐canonical HV stories than the normal and accident versions. In Study 2, 57 children (aged 5–6 and 7–8 years) judged two types of HV tasks (a story featuring a younger child as victim and a normal HV story). Both groups demonstrated more negative emotion attributions for the young victim stories than the normal HV stories, indicating that children's judgment varied according to contexts and different information in determining emotion attributions.     

Development of beliefs about storybook reality

The goal of this research was to assess children's beliefs about the reality status of storybook characters and events. In Experiment 1, 156 preschool age children heard realistic, fantastical, or religious stories, and their understanding of the reality status of the characters and events in the stories was assessed. Results revealed that 3-year-olds were more likely to judge characters as real than were 4- and 5-year-olds, but most children judged all characters as not real for all story types. Children of all ages who heard realistic stories made more claims that the events in the stories could happen in real life than did children who heard fantastical stories. Five-year-olds made significantly more claims that events in religious stories could happen in real life than did younger children. In Experiment 2, 136 4- and 5-year-olds heard similar stories. Results replicated those from Experiment 1, and also indicated a growing awareness of the basic nature of realistic fiction.     

Intention and outcome: key components of causal structure facilitating mapping in children's analogical transfer.

The consequences of two key features of causal structure in source stories, intention and positive outcome, for analogical transfer were examined in kindergarten and second graders. In Experiment 1, children received either structure-complete, structure-incomplete, or irrelevant source stories. Structure-incomplete stories lacked either the intention to solve a problem (a goal-directed component), evidence of a successful consequence (an outcome-related component), or both as part of the solution activity described in source stories. Evidence for transfer was obtained for second graders when a goal-directed component, and to a lesser extent, an outcome-related component were connected to the solution action in source stories. Differences among conditions for kindergartners were less evident, although they revealed a pattern of performance similar to the second graders. A second experiment was conducted to determine whether memory and an orientation to use the source story information might account for these findings. Efforts to ensure memory for and hints to use information in the source stories, however, did not benefit solution transfer when intention and positive outcome were absent. These results suggest that a complete causal structure, including goal and outcome, in source stories augments transfer in young children by promoting mapping of the analogical relationship between source stories and the target problem.     

Judgments of damage to public versus private property in Chinese children at different historical times

This study examined children's judgments of damage to public versus private property in China at two historical times. Participants were two cohorts (1980 and 2012) of elementary school children at ages 7, 9, and 11 years. The children were administered paired stories that described a protagonist who damaged public or private property with a good or bad intention. The results showed that children in the 2012 cohort were less likely than their counterparts in the 1980 cohort to judge damage to public property as more culpable than damage to private property. The cohort differences were more evident in older children than in younger children. The results suggest that macro‐level contexts may play an important role in shaping children's judgments.     

Effects of language intervention on syntactic skill levels in preschoolers

Questions concerning the role of input in the growth of syntactic skills have generated substantial debate within psychology and linguistics. The authors address these questions by investigating the effects of experimentally manipulated input on children's skill with the passive voice. The study involved 72 four-year-olds who listened to stories containing either a high proportion of passive voice sentences or a high proportion of active voice sentences. Following 10 story sessions, children's production and comprehension of passives were assessed. Intervention type affected performance--children who heard stories with passive sentences produced more passive constructions (and with fewer mistakes) and showed higher comprehension scores than children who heard stories with active sentences. Theoretical implications of these results for the understanding of the nature of syntactic skills and practical implications for the development of preschool materials are discussed.     

When the happy victimizer says sorry: Children's understanding of apology and emotion

Previous research suggests that children gradually understand the mitigating effects of apology on damage to a transgressor's reputation. However, little is known about young children's insights into the central emotional implications of apology. In two studies, children ages 4–9 heard stories about moral transgressions in which the wrongdoers either did or did not apologize. In Study 1, children in the no‐apology condition showed the classic pattern of ‘happy victimizer’ attributions by expecting the wrongdoer to feel good about gains won via transgression. By contrast, in the apology condition, children attributed negative feelings to the transgressor and improved feelings to the victim. In Study 2, these effects were found even when the explicit emotion marker ‘sorry’ was removed from the apology exchange. Thus, young children understand some important emotional functions of apology.     

The role of intentional forgetting in reducing children's retroactive interference.

Preschool and kindergarten children's retention of stories was examined in the presence of interfering information and instructions to forget. Children learned 2 stories and, 24 hr later, were asked to recall the 1st or 2nd story learned. Some of the children were instructed, either following acquisition or just prior to the retention test, to forget the 2nd, or interfering, story. A model was used to isolate storage and retrieval effects, and the results showed that (a) retroactive interference affected both storage- and retrieval-based forgetting rates for the younger children but only storage-based forgetting rates for the older children, (b) intentional forgetting reduced retroactive interference primarily by attenuating storage-based forgetting regardless of age, (c) intentional forgetting instructions were effective only at acquisition for preschoolers but at both acquisition and retention for kindergarteners, and (d) all children recalled the to-be-forgotten story as well as they recalled the to-be-remembered story. These results are interpreted in terms of reorganization and distinctiveness effects in storage.     

Older, not younger, children learn more false facts from stories

Early school-aged children listened to stories that contained correct and incorrect facts. All ages answered more questions correctly after having heard the correct fact in the story. Only the older children, however, produced story errors on a later general knowledge test. Source errors did not drive the increased suggestibility in older children, as they were better at remembering source than were the younger children. Instead, different processes are involved in learning correct and incorrect facts from fictional sources. All ages benefited from hearing correct answers because they activated a pre-existing semantic network. Older children, however, were better able to form memories of the misinformation and thus showed greater suggestibility on the general knowledge test.     

The effects of books and gender constancy development on kindergarten children's sex-role attitudes

The effects of symbolic models and level of gender understanding on children's sex-role attitudes was investigated. Kindergarten boys and girls heard and discussed books whose characters depicted either traditional or nontraditional sex-role behaviors. Attitudes toward males and females were measured before and after the picture book treatment. When the study began, children were screened for gender understanding so that half were able to make other-gender constancy judgments, and half were not able to make other-gender constancy judgments. Prior to the treatment, boys and children who had attained gender constancy were slightly negative toward males and neutral toward females, whereas girls and children who had not attained gender constancy were very negative toward males and very positive toward females. Exposure to traditional books had the effect of enhancing attitudes toward males and decreasing attitudes toward females. Exposure to nontraditional books had the opposite effect of decreasing attitudes toward males and enhancing attitudes toward females. The effects of the picture book treatment on attitudes toward females were more pronounced for children who had attained other-gender constancy. Implications for social learning and cognitive-developmental theories of sex-role development are discussed.     

Effects of Presentation Format and List Length on Children's False Memories

The effect of list length on children's false memories was investigated using list and story versions of the Deese/Roediger-McDermott procedure. Short (7 items) and long (14 items) sequences of semantic associates were presented to children aged 6, 8, and 10 years old either in lists or embedded within a story that emphasized the list theme. Subsequent tests of recognition memory revealed different effects of length for lists and stories across development. Longer lists produced more false alarms to critical lures for 8- and 10-year-olds only, and longer stories produced more false alarms to critical lures for 6-year-olds only. These results demonstrate that increasing the number of items presented at study increases false recognition for younger as well as older children when the theme of the items is made salient.     

Strength of a Secondary Reinforcement as a Function of the Quality of Food Reward

Thirty-two children were presented 18 stories containing either a good, neutral, or negative act which was followed by either a reward or punishment. It was predicted that Ss' responses would be influenced by the sanctions. It was also predicted that the type of story (good, neutral, or bad) would influence the extent to which a child judged the act independent of the effects of the sanction (reward or punishment).

These predictions were supported. Ss made more positive responses to acts followed by reward than to those followed by punishment. However, an examination of a Content × Sanction interaction found the sanction of reward relatively ineffective for the stones with negative content.     

Promoting Honesty: The Influence of Stories on Children's Lie‐Telling Behaviours and Moral Understanding

Moral stories are a means of communicating the consequences of our actions and emphasizing virtuous behaviour, such as honesty. However, the effect of these stories on children's lie‐telling has yet to be thoroughly explored. The current study investigated the influence of moral stories on children's willingness to lie for another individual. Children were read one of three stories prior to being questioned about an accidental wrongdoing: (1) a positive story, which emphasized the benefits of being honest; (2) a negative story, which outlined the potential costs of lying; and (3) a neutral story, which was unrelated to truth‐telling or lie‐telling. Initially, most children withheld information about the event. Older children were better able to maintain their lies throughout the interview. However, when asked direct questions, children in the positive story condition were more likely to tell the truth than those in the negative and neutral conditions. No significant differences were found between the negative and neutral story conditions. The present study also investigated the relationship between children's conceptual understanding and behaviour. The findings revealed that children's knowledge of truths and lies increased with age. Children who lied had significantly higher conceptual scores than those who did not lie. Furthermore, the type of story children were read had a significant impact on their evaluations of true and false statements. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Preschoolers' comprehension of goal structure in narratives

Preschool children's understanding and use of goals were studied in two experiments. Children heard stories in the presence of pictures or props. The stories were varied by goal success occurring early or late in the story, with late goal success resulting in more causal connections in the narrative. The results showed that children recalled goals spontaneously and that their recall benefited from goal structure of the stories. Pictures benefited the children when the stories were short. Enactment of the props versus static displays of the props did not enhance recall in the second experiment. Preschool children thus demonstrated ability to infer and use goal and causal information in stories for both picture and object support.     

Preschoolers' comprehension of goal structure in narratives

Preschool children's understanding and use of goals were studied in two experiments. Children heard stories in the presence of pictures or props. The stories were varied by goal success occurring early or late in the story, with late goal success resulting in more causal connections in the narrative. The results showed that children recalled goals spontaneously and that their recall benefited from goal structure of the stories. Pictures benefited the children when the stories were short. Enactment of the props versus static displays of the props did not enhance recall in the second experiment. Preschool children thus demonstrated ability to infer and use goal and causal information in stories for both picture and object support.     

Young Children's Understanding of Intention

Three studies were done to determine when children begin to understand people's intentions as mental-representational states (Searle's prior intentions) and as instantiated in purposive, goal-directed behaviors (Searle's intentions-in-action) that are distinguishable both from the people's desires or preferences and from the outcomes of the actions their intentions engender. Three- and four-year-olds were presented with stories in which the story characters' intentions differed both from their desires or preferences and from the outcomes of their efforts to carry out their intentions. The 3-year-olds, especially the younger ones, showed little ability to distinguish intentions from desires and outcomes. In contrast, most of the 4-year-olds were able to make these distinctions consistently. These and other recent differential studies suggest that children begin to develop a differentiated conception of intention at around 3 1/2 or 4 years of age.     

The Relation of Story Structure Properties to Recall of Television Stories in Young Children with Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and Nonreferred Peers

In this study, the authors examined memory for televised stories to gain insight into similarities and differences in story comprehension between young children with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and their typical peers. In particular, the authors investigated the extent to which 4- to 6-year-old children's free recall of story events is predicted by several structural properties of story events (number of causal connections, whether an event is on or off the story's causal chain, story-grammar category, and position in the story's hierarchical structure), whether differences exist between children with ADHD and nonreferred comparison children in their sensitivity to structural features of stories, and whether age differences in sensitivity to structural features are similar for both groups. For both groups, recall of story events was predicted by all four structural properties, but the effects of the two causal properties was stronger for comparison children than for children with ADHD. Further examination revealed that this difference was observed only when a competing activity was available during television viewing. These findings indicate that both groups of preschool children are able to benefit from causal structure when recalling television stories, but that children with ADHD lose this benefit when attention is divided. Consistent with previous findings for nonreferred children (P. W. van den Broek, E. P. Lorch, & R. Thurlow, 1996), in both diagnostic groups the effects of causal properties increased across age, and older children were more likely to include causally important protagonists' goals in their recalls than younger children.     

Walking the Walk While Thinking About the Talk: Embodied Interpretation of Metaphorical Narratives

Two sets of experiments examined people’s embodied understanding of metaphorical narratives. Participants heard one of two stories about a romantic relationship; either one that was successful or one that was not, that initially described it in metaphorical terms as “Your relationship was moving along in a good direction” or nonmetaphorical terms as “Your relationship was very important to you.” Participants were then blindfolded and attempted to accurately walk, or imagine walking, to a marker 40 feet away while they thought about the story they just heard. People who heard about the successful metaphorical story walked longer and further than those presented with the unsuccessful relationship story. But these walking and imagining differences disappeared when the critical metaphorical statement “moving along in a good direction” was replaced by a nonmetaphorical expression. These findings, and those from another set of experiments, suggest that people’s understanding of metaphorical narratives is partly based on their embodied simulations of the metaphorical actions referred to in these stories.     

How valence affects language processing: Negativity bias and mood congruence in narrative comprehension

The present research examined how positive and negative moods affect readers’ understanding of positive and negative story endings. It demonstrated how negativity bias and mood congruence emerge during narrative comprehension. Participants were induced to experience either a positive or a negative mood and then read stories that could have either a positive or a negative ending. In Experiment 1, participants took longer to integrate negative endings than positive endings, independent of their mood. In Experiment 2, participants judged as more surprising those endings that did not match their mood. The present results illustrate that ending valence has strong influence on moment-by-moment reading, but that readers’ moods influence expectations for story outcomes once readers reflect on a complete representation of the story.     

Discourse-based emotional consistency modulates early and middle components of event-related potentials

In this study, participants read stories describing emotional episodes with either a positive or negative valence (Experiment 1). Following each story, participants were exposed to short sentences referring to the protagonist, and the event-related potential (ERP) for each sentence's last word was recorded. Some sentences described the protagonist's emotion, either consistent or inconsistent with the story; others were neutral; and others involved a semantically anomalous word. Inconsistent emotions were found to elicit larger N100/P200 and N400 than consistent emotions. However, when participants were exposed to the same critical sentences in a control experiment (Experiment 2) in which the stories had been removed, emotional consistency effects disappeared in all ERP components, demonstrating that these effects were discourse-level phenomena. By contrast, the ordinary N400 effect for locally anomalous words in the sentence was obtained both with and without story context. In conclusion, reading stories describing events with emotional significance determines strong and very early anticipations of an emotional word.     

When to Cry Over Spilled Milk: Young Children's Use of Category Information to Guide Inferences About Ambiguous Behavior

Three studies (N = 171) examined preschool children's tendency to use category information to make inferences about ambiguous behavior. Children heard stories in which category information about story characters was manipulated and behavioral information was held constant. Participants were asked to evaluate, explain, and determine the significance of the behavior in question. Children tended to be harsher judges of the same ambiguous behaviors when performed by (a) humans as compared to animals, (b) boys compared to girls, and (c) older children compared to younger children. Results suggest that young children hold differentiated notions of the mental states and dispositions that underlie behavior and that these notions vary as a function of category membership. These findings support the conclusion that even young children can hold and use multiple folk psychologies.