Children’s judgements of the obligation to help: The role of relationships

ABSTRACT

Children at ages 7 (N = 24, M _age = 6.96, SD _age =.20), 9 (N = 29, M _age = 8.76, SD _age =.44), and 11 (N = 25, M _age = 10.76, SD _age =.66), and adults (N = 30) made judgements about the obligation to help when it conflicts with a personal desire. Across ages, the obligation to help was judged to be strongest when there were positive or neutral past interactions with the person in need of help, compared to mean past interactions. Expectation of a future friendship predicted the obligation to help, even after controlling for age and sex. However, we found no effect of children helping gender in-group members more. Evidence for altruism was not found: expected positive emotions did not predict the obligation to help. We conclude that an expectation of future relationship is the strongest predictor of helping obligation.     

Children’s judgments of social interactive behaviors with peers: the influence of age and gender

Participants (138 children; 7–12 years of age) rated how often nice and not nice behaviors occurred when (a) participants (boys/girls) were the actor and peers (males/females) were the target and (b) when participants were the target of peers’ actions in a school setting. Children indicated they were nicer to their same-gender peers than to their opposite-gender peers. Also, older boys, in comparison to young boys, indicated that not nice interactions occurred more often among them and male peers. Nice (e.g., helping) and not nice (e.g., verbal aggression) behaviors were also generated, which also differed by age and gender. Finally, this study has important implications for educators in that from children’s point of view these are the types of behaviors that are occurring during their time at school. Although there are programs in schools that are aimed at decreasing physical aggression, more attention should be given to the more indirect or subtle forms of aggression, such as social manipulation and verbal. At the same time, programs that encourage nice behaviors, such as helping and sharing, should be expanded.     

BatMon II: Children’s category norms for 33 categories

Four hundred forty-eight children 3–12 years of age generated category exemplars for 33 distinct categories. The percentage of the participants reporting each exemplar, the percentage of the participants reporting each exemplar first, the percentage of the participants reporting each exemplar across age groups (3–5 years, 6–8 years, and 9–12 years), and the mean rank of each exemplar are presented. A full version of the 29 category norms may be downloaded from www.psychonomic.org/archive.     

Children’s emotional norms for 600 French words

The present study provides a French child database containing a large corpus of words (N=600) that were rated on emotional valence (positive, neutral, and negative) by French children differing in both age (5, 7, and 9 years old) and sex (girls and boys). Good response reliability was observed in each of the three age groups. The results showed some age differences in the children’s ratings. With increasing age, the percentage of words rated positive decreased, whereas the percentage of neutral words increased and the percentage of negative words remained stable. Our study did not reveal marked differences across sex groups. The database compiled here should become a useful tool for experimental studies in which verbal material is used with children. It would be worthwhile in future research to study how children process emotional words and also to control the emotional variable in the same way as other linguistic variables in the experimental design. The norms from this study may be downloaded from brm.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental.     

Children’s Binding of What-Where-When-Who in Episodic Memory: Identifying Oneself in the Past

It is usually accepted that the binding of what, where, and when is a central component of young children’s and animals’ nonconceptual episodic abilities. We argue that additionally binding self-in-past (what-where-when-who) adds a crucial conceptual requirement, and we ask when it becomes possible and what its cognitive correlates are. In the central task, children aged 3.5 years to 6.5 years watched a light display on Day 1, with 2 lights coming on simultaneously or in 1 of 2 orders. This light display was filmed from 1 of 3 positions: with the camera behind the child, above the child, or facing the child. On Day 2, children watched 3 videos from the original angle, and each represented 1 of the 3 light configurations, with the child in the video occluded. Participants had to decide which occluded child they were and justify their choice by reference to the lights. Above-chance performance was evident after 4.5 years of age. In addition, all children received the following tasks: spatial perspective taking, seeing leads to knowing, modus tollens reasoning, and second-order theory of mind. With age and verbal ability partialed out, only second-order theory of mind correlated significantly with performance on the central task.     

Children’s Developing Understanding of the Conventionality of Rules

Much research has investigated how children relate to norms taught to them by adult authorities. Very few studies have investigated norms that arise out of children’s own peer interactions. In two studies, we investigated how 5- and 7-year-old children teach, enforce, and understand rules that they either created themselves or were taught by an adult. Children (N = 240) were asked to either invent game rules on their own or were taught these exact same rules by an adult (yoked design). Children of both ages enforced and transmitted the rules in a normative way, regardless of whether they had invented them or were taught the rules by an adult, suggesting that they viewed even their own self-made rules as normatively binding. However, creating the rules led 5-year-old children to understand them as much more changeable as compared with adult-taught rules. Seven-year-olds, in contrast, regarded both kinds of rules as equally changeable, indeed allowing fewer changes to their self-created rules than 5-year-olds. While the process of creating rules seemed to enlighten preschoolers’ understanding of the conventionality of the rules, school-aged children regarded both self-created rules and adult-taught rules in a similar manner, suggesting a deeper understanding of rule normativity as arising from social agreement and commitment.     

Self-reported shyness in Chinese children: Validation of the Children’s Shyness Questionnaire and exploration of its links with adjustment and the role of coping

The aims of the present study were to: (1) examine the psychometric properties of the Chinese version on the Children’s Shyness Questionnaire (Crozier, 1995) among elementary school children; and (2) explore the links between shyness, coping style, and indices of socio-emotional functioning. Participants were N = 580 children (311 boys, 269 girls, M_age = 11.14 years, SD = 1.37) in Shanghai, People’s Republic of China. Measures of shyness, coping style, and adjustment were gathered using multi-source assessments, including self-reports, peer nominations, teacher-ratings. Consistent with findings in North American samples, results from factor analysis suggested a single-factor model of shyness among Chinese youth. Shyness was also associated with a wide range of negative socio-emotional difficulties. As well, emotion-focused coping was found to partially mediate relations between shyness and children’s adjustment. Results are discussed in terms of the validity of this self-reported measure of shyness and the role of coping for shy children’s adjustment in China.     

Dimensionality of the Children’s Depression Inventory: Meta-analysis of Pattern Matrices

This meta-analysis of 24 studies, comprising 35 independent samples with 18,099 participants, examined the factor structure of the Children’s Depression Inventory (CDI). The 5-factor solution involving Somatic Concerns, Externalizing, Negative Self-Concept, Lack of Personal and Social Interest, and Dysphoric Mood was supported for all samples. The 5-factor solution was appropriate for child, adolescent, general, at-risk/clinical, and English-speaking samples, whereas the 4-factor solution was the best for samples using non-English versions of the CDI. As the factor structure varied among study subgroups, the strength of relations between scale items and their underlying depressive symptoms varied. Hence, comparisons of mean CDI scores can be misleading.     

Nietzsche’s pragmatic genealogy of justice

This paper analyses the connection between Nietzsche’s early employment of the genealogical method and contemporary neo-pragmatism. The paper has two goals. On the one hand, by viewing Nietzsche’s writings in the light of neo-pragmatist ideas and reconstructing his approach to justice as a pragmatic genealogy, it seeks to bring out an under-appreciated aspect of his genealogical method which illustrates how genealogy can be used to vindicate rather than to subvert, and accounts for Nietzsche’s lack of historical references. On the other hand, by highlighting what Nietzsche has to offer neo-pragmatism, it seeks to contribute to neo-pragmatism’s conception of genealogy. The paper argues that Nietzsche and the neo-pragmatists share a naturalistic concern and a pragmatist strategy in responding to it. The paper then shows that Nietzsche avoids a reductive form of functionalism by introducing a temporal axis, but that this axis should be understood as a developmental model rather than as historical time. This explains Nietzsche’s failure to engage with history. The paper concludes that pragmatic genealogy can claim a genuinely Nietzschean pedigree.     

Benjamin’s Children’s Theater and the Problem of Pure Means

Studies in Philosophy and Education -     

The Role of Masculinity in Children’s Bullying

The aim of the present study was to explore the association between gender role, in terms of self-attribution of masculine and feminine characteristics, and children's involvement in bullying problems during the elementary-school years. A total of 113, six- to ten-year-old children completed self-report measures of bullying and victimization and a masculinity–femininity scale. Their teachers provided ratings of pupils’ reactive and proactive aggressive behavior. Data from a hierarchical regression on bullying scores showed that, irrespective of sex, masculine traits predicted active bullying behavior. Moreover, bullying was also related to victimization and to teacher's evaluation of reactive aggression. Our findings suggest the need for longitudinal and cross-cultural studies in this line of research.     

Within-Family Differences in Internalizing Behaviors: The Role of Children’s Perspectives of the Mother-child Relationship

The goal of this exploratory, within-family, longitudinal study was to examine whether children’s perspectives of the mother-child relationship explained within-family differences in children’s responses to a shared family stressor (maternal depressive symptoms) over time. Children (ages 8 to 15 years; N = 68) residing in 34 families were drawn from a general population study in the UK. Predictor variables were assessed at Time 1 and change in internalizing behavior from Time 1 to Time 2 (2 years later) was examined. As children were nested within families, data were analyzed using multilevel modeling, controlling for previous child behavior. Child perspective of the mother-child relationship, in interaction with maternal depressive symptoms, was found to explain within-family differences in internalizing over time. Children with a negative perspective (compared to mothers’ perspectives) were the most vulnerable to the adverse effects of maternal depressive symptoms.     

Intrusive Psychological Control and Children’s Behaviors in Chinese Multigenerational Families: Role of Children’s Temperamental Reactivity

Journal of Child and Family Studies - The coparenting between grandparents and parents is increasingly prevalent in Chinese society. Based on the family system theory and the differential...     

The physician’s role in the protection of human research subjects

Responsibility for the protection of human research subjects is shared by investigators, research ethics committees, sponsors/funders, research institutions, governments and, the focus of this article, physicians who enrol patients in clinical trials. The article describes the general principles of the patient-physician relationship that should regulate the participation of physicians in clinical trials and proposes guidelines for determining when and how such participation should proceed. The guidelines deal with the following stages of the trial: when first considering participation, when deciding whether to enrol patients, when asking patients to participate, when the trial is underway and when it is completed.     

The portrayal of women’s images in magazine advertisements: Goffman’s gender analysis revisited

The research objective of this paper was to study the specific behaviors mentioned above and determine what gender behavior patterns have been most prevalent in magazine advertisements in 1979 and 1991. In this research, comparisons were made regarding gender displays between the years of 1979 and 1991 with random samples of print advertisements. The basic and essential starting question of this research project is: What messages about women have been given to society through magazine advertisements? This study was intended to be a conceptual replication of Erving Gofian’s study of Gender Advertisements to see how gender images in print advertisements have changed since Goffman’s study. For this research, advertisements were analyzed the gender behavior portrayed, utilizing Goffman’s categories of decoding behavior: relative size, feminine touch, function ranking, ritualization of subordination, and licensed withdrawal. Body display and IndependencelSelf-assertiveness categories were added. Advertisements that featured human subjects were collected from 1979 and 1991 women’s popular magazines. The random sampling procedure resulted in 252 samples in 1979 magazine advertisements and 252 samples in 1991 counterparts. This research showed that few changes have been made in the images of women in magazine advertisements since Goffman’s 1979 study. The findings indicate that the images of women in 1991 advertisements did not significantly change from the images found in 1979 advertisements. However; distribution or dispersion of stereotypical portrayal of women did change. In the categories of licensed withdrawal and body display, the magazine advertisements from 1991 showed more stereotyping of women than those from 1979. Two of Goffman’s categories-Relative Size and Function Ranking-were not prevalent depictions in magazine advertisements.     

Children’s On-line Processing of Scrambling in Japanese

This study investigates the on-line processing of scrambled sentences in Japanese by preschool children and adults using a combination of self-paced listening and speeded picture selection tasks. The effects of a filler-gap dependency, reversibility, and case markers were examined. The results show that both children and adults had difficulty in comprehending scrambled sentences when they were provided as reversible sentences. The reversibility effect was significant for children, whereas the interaction of reversibility and a filler-gap dependency was significant for adults. However, this does not indicate that children’s parsing is fundamentally different from that of adults. For those children who processed the nominative and accusative case markers equally fast, the reactivation of the dislocated constituent was observed in the gap position. These results suggest that children’s processing is basically the same as adults’ in that their sentence processing is incremental and they parse a gap to form a filler-gap dependency.     

Children and Violence: The Role of Children’s Regulation in the Marital Aggression–Child Adjustment Link

Exposure to marital psychological and physical abuse has been established as a risk factor for children’s socio-emotional, behavioral, and cognitive problems. Understanding the processes by which children develop symptoms of psychopathology and deficits in cognitive functioning in the context of marital aggression is imperative for developing efficient and effective treatment programs for children and families, and has far-reaching mental health implications. The present paper outlines our research program, Child Regulation and Exposure to Marital Aggression, which focuses on children’s emotional and physiological reactivity and regulation as pathways in the marital aggression–child development link. Findings from our research program, which highlight the importance of children’s regulatory processes for understanding children’s adjustment in contexts of intimate partner violence, are presented, and future directions in this line of inquiry are outlined.     

‘At the level of the word: Nurturing justice in therapeutic conversations’

The issue of social justice and how it unfolds in the lives of persons seeking counselling has been steadily gaining attention in recent times. This development marks a departure from an individualistic perspective that construes problems as functions of personal deficits, thereby overlooking the many social inequities that contribute to the challenges people face. The turn towards social justice manifests primarily in a call for advocacy on behalf of therapy clients. While celebrating these developments, this article suggests that it is not just in interactions outside the consulting room that injustices may be perpetrated. The author invites attention to the ways in which social justice, or the lack thereof, can be understood to unfold within counselling conversations.