Learning about life and death in early childhood

have argued that young children initially understand biological phenomena in terms of vitalism, a mode of construal in which "life" or "life-force" is the central causal-explanatory concept. This study investigated the development of vitalistic reasoning in young children's concepts of life, the human body and death. Sixty preschool children between the ages of 3 years, 7 months and 5 years, 11 months participated. All children were initially given structured interviews to assess their knowledge of (1) human body function and (2) death. From this sample 40 children in the Training group were taught about the human body and how it functions to maintain life. The Control group (n=20) received no training. All 60 children were subsequently reassessed on their knowledge of human body function and death. Results from the initial interviews indicated that young children who spontaneously appealed to vitalistic concepts in reasoning about human body functioning were also more sophisticated in their understanding of death. Results from the posttraining interviews showed that children readily learned to adopt a vitalistic approach to human body functioning, and that this learning coincided with significant development in their understanding of human body function, and of death. The overall pattern of results supports the claim that the acquisition of a vitalistic causal-explanatory framework serves to structure children's concepts and facilitates learning in the domain of biology.     

Potential traumatic events in early childhood and behavioural resilience: a longitudinal case control study

Abstract

Resilience can be evidenced when an exposure to potentially traumatic event (PTE) has no negative impact on behavior. This study explored the effects of exposure to PTE applying a longitudinal design with 592 children (mean age 4 years) followed across three years. Children who had experienced a PTE and those who had not, were compared over time. Behavioral difficulties and prosocial behaviour for children experiencing PTE did not differ from those who had not experienced a PTE suggesting resilience among the exposed children. PTE in itself seems to carry minimal risk for symptoms of behaviour difficulties among preschool children.     

Freeze-Frame: a new infant inhibition task and its relation to frontal cortex tasks during infancy and early childhood

The current study investigated a new, easily administered, visual inhibition task for infants termed the Freeze-Frame task. In the new task, 9-month-olds were encouraged to inhibit looks to peripheral distractors. This was done by briefly freezing a central animated stimulus when infants looked to the distractors. Half of the trials presented an engaging central stimulus, and the other half presented a repetitive central stimulus. Three measures of inhibitory function were derived from the task and compared with performance on a set of frontal cortex tasks administered at 9 and 24 months of age. As expected, infants' ability to learn to selectively inhibit looks to the distractors at 9 months predicted performance at 24 months. However, performance differences in the two Freeze-Frame trial types early in the experiment also turned out to be an important predictor. The results are discussed in terms of the validity of the Freeze-Frame task as an early measure of different components of inhibitory function.     

Philosophy and religion in the face of death and bereavement

While the ways in which people deal with dying and bereavement have been comprehensively researched, there is little which integrates psychological, emotional, philosophical, and religious perspectives. The role of religion is generally considered in terms of a simple linear relationship between presence or absence of religious belief and coping capacity. This article uses qualitative material from a small-scale study concerned with individuals' philosophical and religious frameworks to point towards multi-factor analysis. Comment is offered around the themes of theodicy; meaning; death-transcendence modes, and psychological and emotional adjustment.     

The death of a parent: Its impact on middle-aged sons and daughters

Coming to terms with finitude is the central task of mid-life. The death of a parent of middle-aged sons and daughters intensifies that crisis in three ways: being without a parent is like being a middle-aged orphan; the death of one or both parents may finally make autonomy possible; when the last parent dies, death seems closer because the buffer is gone. Pastoral theological implications of this thesis are explored.     

The use of culturally congruent spiritual beliefs in the successful treatment of two cases of complicated bereavement for infant death

The cognitive model of clinical practice involves identifying significant beliefs, including spiritual beliefs. Traditional belief in Taoism was elicited from two Cantonese-speaking women referred for assessment after psychiatric admission for complicated bereavement. Their belief was incorporated into the formulations and the treatment plans. Pathological guilt was addressed by gentle cognitive challenge and reframing. Relevant spiritual practices were explored and supported, which allowed recovery to proceed. These cases highlight the value of cross-cultural consultation and illustrate that spiritually sensitive intervention is compatible with evidence-based practice.     

The integration of cognition and emotion during infancy and early childhood: regulatory processes associated with the development of working memory

This study was an attempt to integrate cognitive development (i.e., cognitive control) and emotional development (i.e., emotion regulation) in the first years of life. The construct of temperament was used to unify cognition and emotion because of its focus on attentional and regulatory behaviors. Children were seen at 8 months and 412-years of age in a study designed to examine the correlates of working memory development. Frontal brain electrical activity and temperament predicted working memory performance at 8 months. Similarly, frontal brain electrical activity, temperament, and language predicted working memory at age 412-years. Temperament in early childhood mediated the relation between infant temperament and early childhood working memory performance. These associated temperament characteristics highlight the value of early-learned regulatory and attentional behaviors and the impact of these early skills on later development.     

Assessing children's representational attachment models: links to mother-child attachment quality in infancy and childhood

The authors examined whether the finding of a correspondence between specific behavioral patterns of attachment in infancy and childhood and specific representational patterns in childhood could be replicated using children's responses to a story depicting an imagined parent-child separation experience. The participants were 33 German mothers and their children (16 girls, 17 boys). Attachment quality was assessed via standard and exploratory attachment observations at ages 12 months, 18 months, and 6 years. Chi-square analyses indicated that there was a good level of concordance between the behavioral and representation attachment patterns in infancy and childhood.     

Effects of parent enhancement therapy on the treatment outcome and generalization of a parent training program

The purpose of the present study was to examine the effectiveness of parent enhancement training in facilitating treatment and maintenance effects of a parent training program. Seventeen mothers and their clinic-referred noncompliant children were assigned to either a parent training alone group or a parent training plus parent enhancement therapy group. Fifteen mothers and their nonclinic children served as a quasi-control group. All clinic-referred mother-child dyads were treated individually by teaching the mother to reward compliance and other prosocial behavior and to use time-out for noncompliance. In addition, mothers in the parent training plus parent enhancement group also received treatment related to the following areas: parent's perception of their child's behavior, parent's personal adjustment, parent's marital adjustment, and parent's extrafamilial relationships. Assessment consisted of four home observations by independent observers prior to treatment, after treatment, and at a 2-month follow-up. The data indicated that the parent training plus parent enhancement therapy was more effective than parent training alone in changing child deviant behavior at posttreatment and in maintaining child compliance, child deviant behavior, parental rewards and parent contingent attention at follow-up. The control group did not change over the three assessment periods.     

The sociobiology of bereavement: a reply to Littlefield and Rushton

This article offers a critique of Littlefield and Rushton's (1986) application of sociobiological principles to bereavement following the death of a child. The following general issues are considered: (a) whether behavior is always adaptive and (b) the distinction between proximate and ultimate explanations. It is argued that grief is a maladaptive by-product of another, adaptive feature and that hypotheses about the severity of grief are best derived from proximate considerations rather than genetic relatedness. The use of a single-item rating scale to measure grief is questioned, and it is noted that interspouse reliabilities reported in the article were low, a problem not solved (as claimed) by aggregation. Criticisms are made of the specific hypotheses, notably in terms of their origins in sociobiological theory. It is argued that functional hypotheses are not alternatives to proximate mechanisms, but enable some proximate mechanisms to be viewed from the perspective of evolutionary biology.     

Categorization in early infancy and the continuity of development

Arguments and evidence are presented for the conclusion that the young infant's perceptually based categorical representations for natural kinds - animals in this case - are the basis for their mature conceptual counterparts. In addition, it is argued that conceptual development is continuous in nature and without the need for special developmental processes. A consideration of the development of the syllabic, segmental, and featural categories of phonology shows a more complex pattern of change - one marked by both continuities and discontinuities in the representations themselves and the processes that produce them.     

Emerging sensitivity to the timing and structure of protoconversation in early infancy.

Thirty-six 2-, 4-, and 6-month-old infants were videotaped while interacting with a female adult stranger engaging in either organized or disorganized 1-min peekaboo games. Two-month-old infants gazed and smiled equally at the stranger, regardless of the relative organization of the peekaboo game. In contrast, 4- and 6-month-old infants smiled significantly more and gazed significantly less in the organized peekaboo condition than in the disorganized peekaboo condition. These results suggest that from a diffuse sensitivity to the presence of a social partner, infants by 4 months develop a new sensitivity to the narrative envelope of protoconversation, in particular the timing and the structure of social exchanges scaffolded by adults. These observations are interpreted as evidence of developing social expectations in the first 6 months of life. This early development is viewed as announcing and preparing the communicative competence that blossoms by the end of the 1st year.     

Externalising behaviour from infancy to mid-adolescence: Latent profiles and early predictors

The overall aim of the current study was to identify typical trajectory classes of externalising behaviour, and to identify predictors present already in infancy that discriminate the trajectory classes. 921 children from a community sample were followed over 13 years from the age of 18 months. In a simultaneously estimated model, latent class analyses and multinomial logit regression analyses suggested a five-class solution for developmental patterns of externalising problem behaviours: High stable (18% of the children), High childhood limited (5%), Medium childhood limited (31%), Adolescent onset (30%), and Low stable (16%). Six risk factors measured at 18 months significantly discriminated among the classes. Family stress and maternal age discriminated the High stable class from all the other classes. The results suggest that focusing on enduring problems in the relationship with the partner and partners' health may be important in preventive and early intervention efforts.