Does Children's Colour Use Reflect the Emotional Content of their Drawings?

When children draw in clinical contexts, clinicians sometimes rely on children's colour use to make inferences about their emotional reaction to the subject of the drawing. Here, we examined whether children use colour to portray emotion in their drawings. In Experiment 1, children indicated their colour preferences and then coloured in outlines of figures characterized as nasty or nice. Children also drew complex, multi‐coloured pictures about their own happy or sad experiences. In Experiment 2, hospitalized children drew about being worried or scared in hospital and about their positive experiences. In both experiments, we examined the relation between children's colour use and their colour preferences. Three‐ to 10‐year‐old children used more preferred colours to colour in the nice outline. Although they were more likely to use non‐preferred colours to colour in the nasty outline, they tended to used a mix of preferred and non‐preferred colours. When both normal and hospitalized children produced drawings about positive and negative events, there was no relation between children's colour choices and their colour preferences; children primarily used preferred colours. These data suggest that clinicians should exercise extreme caution when interpreting the meaning of colour in children's drawings. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Sexual dimorphism of male face shape,partnership status and the temporal context of relationship sought modulate women's preferences for direct gaze

Most previous studies of face preferences have investigated the physical cues that influence face preferences. Far fewer studies have investigated the effects of cues to the direction of others' social interest (i.e. gaze direction) on face preferences. Here we found that unpartnered women demonstrated stronger preferences for direct gaze (indicating social interest) from feminine male faces than from masculine male faces when judging men's attractiveness for long‐term relationships, but not when judging men's attractiveness for short‐term relationships. Moreover, unpartnered women's preferences for direct gaze from feminine men were stronger for long‐term than short‐term relationships, but there was no comparable effect for judgements of masculine men. No such effects were evident among women with romantic partners, potentially reflecting different motivations underlying partnered and unpartnered women's judgements of men's attractiveness. Collectively these findings (1) complement previous findings whereby women demonstrated stronger preferences for feminine men as long‐term than short‐term partners, (2) demonstrate context‐sensitivity in the integration of physical and social cues in face preferences, and (3) suggest that gaze preferences may function, at least in part, to facilitate efficient allocation of mating effort.     

Assessing factors that influence young children's food preferences and choices

Researchers have identified an unbalanced diet as a key risk factor in the etiology of many chronic diseases (World Health Organization, 2003 ). Although researchers have found that numerous factors influence children's food choices, no assessment exists to identify these factors. In Experiment 1, we established preliminary empirical evidence of children's preferences for healthier and less‐healthy foods, and found that 16 of 21 children preferred less‐healthy foods to healthier foods. In Experiment 2, we established the utility of an analogue, competing parameters assessment designed to approximate children's food choices in the natural environment. We identified either quality or immediacy as the most influential parameters governing four of four childrens' food choices. We found that effort influenced the efficacy of these reinforcer parameters in a predictable manner for one of four children.     

Young Children Selectively Expect Failure Disclosure to High‐achieving Peers

Children make many decisions about whether and how to disclose their performance to peers, teachers, parents and others. Previous research has found that children's disclosure declines with age and that older children and teenagers preferentially choose a peer audience for performance disclosure based on similar achievement. This research examines younger children's choice of a disclosure audience: whether young children predict that people will distinguish between peers at different achievement levels, and whether or not younger children expect preferential selections between those peers for their performance disclosure. One hundred and thirty‐nine children, aged 3 to 6 years, were asked about a character's disclosure of classroom performance information. At least until the age of 6 years, children predicted significantly greater disclosure of failure to a high achieving peer who had been successful. When asked to predict the disclosure of success, however, children in all age groups did not discriminate between disclosing to the high‐achieving or low‐achieving peer. This evidence suggests that very young children may not show the same valence‐matching preferences as older children and that early school ages are a critical time when children begin to adopt social norms around disclosure that impinge on possible help‐seeking. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Evaluations Versus Expectations: Children's Divergent Beliefs About Resource Distribution

Past research reveals a tension between children's preferences for egalitarianism and ingroup favoritism when distributing resources to others. Here we investigate how children's evaluations and expectations of others' behaviors compare. Four‐ to 10‐year‐old children viewed events where individuals from two different groups distributed resources to their own group, to the other group, or equally across groups. Groups were described within a context of intergroup competition over scarce resources. In the Evaluation condition, children were asked to evaluate which resource distribution actions were nicer. In the Expectation condition, children were asked to predict which events were more likely to occur. With age, children's evaluations and expectations of others' actions diverged: Children evaluated egalitarian actions as nicer yet expected others to behave in ways that benefit their own group. Thus, children's evaluations about the way human social actors should behave do not mirror their expectations concerning those individuals' actions.     

The effect of causal chain length on counterfactual conditional reasoning

We investigated German and Nichols' finding that 3‐year‐olds could answer counterfactual conditional questions about short causal chains of events, but not long. In four experiments (N =192), we compared 3‐ and 4‐year‐olds' performance on short and long causal chain questions, manipulating whether the child could draw on general knowledge to answer. We failed to replicate German and Nichols' result, finding instead that in two experiments (Experiments 1 and 3) there was no difference in performance on short and long causal chain questions and in two experiments (Experiments 2 and 4) children showed the opposite pattern: short causal chain questions were more difficult than long. These two unexpected patterns of results were replicated in a fifth study (N =97). Children with lower language ability found short causal chains more difficult than long. Performance by children with higher language ability was unaffected by the length of the causal chain they had to consider. We found no evidence that children showed precocious counterfactual thinking when asked about recent events in a causal chain and conclude that counterfactual thinking develops after 4 years of age.     

Subjective social status and intergroup attitudes among ethnic majority and minority children in Portugal

A measure of subjective social status (SSS) was examined among high (White), and low (Black and Roma) ethnic status children in Portugal within a developmental design including 6–8‐year‐old and 9–12‐year‐old children. White children favoured their in‐group over the Black and Roma out‐groups on the SSS measure, social preferences and positive as well as negative trait attributions. Generally, the Black and Roma showed equal SSS, preferences and trait attribution for their in‐group and the high status White out‐group, but not the other low‐status out‐group. With age White children generally demonstrated higher SSS for Black and Roma, preferred them more and attributed more positive traits. For low‐status groups, an age effect was found only for Black children who preferred the Roma more with age and attributed more positive traits. Changes on preferences and trait attribution depending on age‐group were mediated by SSS. It is concluded that minority group's SSS does not parallel the objective status hierarchy but, rather, is a dynamic reorganisation of group's relative positions serving strategies to cope with their minority condition.     

True Context‐dependent Preferences? The Causes of Market‐dependent Valuations

A central assumption of neoclassical economics is that reservation prices for familiar products express people's true preferences for these products; that is, they represent the total benefit that a good confers to the consumers and are, thus, independent of actual prices in the market. Nevertheless, a vast amount of research has shown that valuations can be sensitive to other salient prices, particularly when individuals are explicitly anchored on them. In this paper, the authors extend previous research on single‐price anchoring and study the sensitivity of valuations to the distribution of prices found for a product in the market. In addition, they examine its possible causes. They find that market‐dependent valuations cannot be fully explained by rational inferences consumers draw about a product's value and are unlikely to be fully explained by true market‐dependent preferences. Rather, the market dependence of valuations likely reflects consumers' focus on something other than the total benefit that the product confers to them. Furthermore, this paper shows that market‐dependent valuations persist when – as in many real‐life settings – individuals make repeated purchase decisions over time and infer the distribution of the product's prices from their market experience. Finally, the authors consider the implications of their findings for marketers and consumers. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Person‐centred positive emotions,object‐centred negative emotions: 2‐year‐olds generalize negative but not positive emotions across individuals

Prior work suggests that young children do not generalize others' preferences to new individuals. We hypothesized (following Vaish et al., 2008, Psychol. Bull., 134, 383–403) that this may only hold for positive emotions, which inform the child about the person's attitude towards the object but not about the positivity of the object itself. It may not hold for negative emotions, which additionally inform the child about the negativity of the object itself. Two‐year‐old children saw one individual (the emoter) emoting positively or negatively towards one and neutrally towards a second novel object. When a second individual then requested an object, children generalized the emoter's negative but not her positive emotion to the second individual. Children thus draw different inferences from others' positive versus negative emotions: Whereas they view others' positive emotions as person centred, they may view others' negative emotions as object centred and thus generalizable across people. The results are discussed with relation to the functions and implications of the negativity bias.     

Guessing versus choosing – and seeing versus believing – in false belief tasks

Three‐ and 4‐year‐old children were tested using videos of puppets in various versions of a theory of mind change‐of‐location situation, in order to answer several questions about what children are doing when they pass false belief tests. To investigate whether children were guessing or confidently choosing their answer to the test question, a condition in which children were forced to guess was also included, and measures of uncertainty were compared across conditions. To investigate whether children were using simpler strategies than an understanding of false belief to pass the test, we teased apart the seeing‐knowing confound in the traditional change‐of‐location task. We also investigated relations between children's performance on true and false belief tests. Results indicated that children appeared to be deliberately choosing, not guessing, in the false belief tasks. Children performed just as well whether the protagonist gained information about the object visually or verbally, indicating that children were not using a simple rule based on seeing to predict the protagonist's behaviour. A true belief condition was significantly easier for children than a false belief condition as long as it was of low processing demands. Children's success rate on the different versions of the standard false belief task was influenced by factors such as processing demands of the stories and the child's verbal abilities.     

When Choices Are Not Personal: The Effect of Statistical and Social Cues on Children's Inferences About the Scope of Preferences

Individual choices are commonly taken to manifest personal preferences. The present study investigated whether social and statistical cues influence young children's inferences about the generalizability of preferences. Preschoolers were exposed to either 1 or 2 demonstrators’ selections of objects. The selected objects constituted 18%, 50%, or 100% of all available objects. We found that children took a single demonstrator's choices as indicative only of his or her personal preference. However, when 2 demonstrators made the same selection, then children inferred that it generalized to other agents of the same kind as the original demonstrator's, but not to agents of a different kind. Lastly, only when both demonstrators blatantly violated random selection (i.e., in the 18% condition) did children generalize the preference even to an agent of a different kind. Thus, from a young age, social and statistical cues inform children's naïve sociology.     

Religion insulates ingroup evaluations: the development of intergroup attitudes in India

Research on the development of implicit intergroup attitudes has placed heavy emphasis on race, leaving open how social categories that are prominent in other cultures might operate. We investigate two of India's primary means of social distinction, caste and religion, and explore the development of implicit and explicit attitudes towards these groups in minority‐status Muslim children and majority‐status Hindu children, the latter drawn from various positions in the Hindu caste system. Results from two tests of implicit attitudes find that caste attitudes parallel previous findings for race: higher‐caste children as well as lower‐caste children have robust high‐caste preferences. However, results for religion were strikingly different: both lower‐status Muslim children and higher‐status Hindu children show strong implicit ingroup preferences. We suggest that religion may play a protective role in insulating children from the internalization of stigma.     

Learning to Decide with and without Reasoning: How Task Experience Affects Attribute Weighting and Preference Stability

Certain experiments have shown that reasoning may weaken the stability of people's preferences, especially with regard to well‐learned perceptual judgment and decision‐making tasks, while learning has an opposite, consistency‐enhancing effect on preferences. We examined the effects of these factors in a visual multi‐attribute decision‐making task where reasoning, in contrast, has been found to benefit judgments by making them more stable. The initial assumption in this study was that this benefit would be typical for novel tasks, like the one employed here, and that it would decrease when the task is thoroughly learned. This assumption was examined in three experiments by contrasting it with an alternative assumption that this previously obtained beneficial effect is caused solely by learning, not by reasoning. It was found that learning indeed makes preferences more stable by consolidating the weights of the attributes. Reasoning, however, does not benefit this task when it is completely novel but facilitates learning and stability of the preferences long run, therefore increasing the consistency of the participants in the macrolevel. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Parents' structuring of children's daily lives in relation to the quality and stability of children's friendships

This study focused on the implications of parents' structuring of their children's home lives for the friendships of their children. Participants were 224 elementary‐school children (108 girls and 116 boys) from four grade levels in two schools in Aix‐en‐Provence, France. Most of the families were of middle or high socio‐economic status. The participating children were seen twice during the same school year in order to assess the stability of their friendship choices and the quality of their friendships. We used Lautrey's (1989) questionnaire in order to assess the parents' styles in the structuring of family life and related child‐rearing practice. This questionnaire delineates three structuring styles: 1) rigid, characterized by considerable imposition of routines with little leeway for exceptional circumstances; 2) flexible, in which established routines can be modified as circumstances dictate; and 3) laissez‐faire, characterized by an absence of predictability and routine. We measured friendship quality by means of Friendship Quality Scale developed by Bukowski, Hoza, and Boivin (1989). This scale consists of 23 items representing five dimensions: companionship, help, security, closeness and conflict. This tool was designed to elicit children's perceptions of a specific relationship with a friend. Results indicated a significant link between parenting style and both of the dimensions of child friendship we studied. Children from homes characterized by a laissez‐faire style of parenting have friendships with more positive features than children from homes with flexible or rigid styles. We also found that friendships were generally less stable and rated as less positive than in similar studies conducted in other countries.     

Monolingual and bilingual children's social preferences for monolingual and bilingual speakers

Past research has shown that young monolingual children exhibit language‐based social biases: they prefer native language to foreign language speakers. The current research investigated how children's language preferences are influenced by their own bilingualism and by a speaker's bilingualism. Monolingual and bilingual 4‐ to 6‐year‐olds heard pairs of adults (a monolingual and a bilingual, or two monolinguals) and chose the person with whom they wanted to be friends. Whether they were from a largely monolingual or a largely bilingual community, monolingual children preferred monolingual to bilingual speakers, and native language to foreign language speakers. In contrast, bilingual children showed similar affiliation with monolingual and bilingual speakers, as well as for monolingual speakers using their dominant versus non‐dominant language. Exploratory analyses showed that individual bilinguals displayed idiosyncratic patterns of preference. These results reveal that language‐based preferences emerge from a complex interaction of factors, including preference for in‐group members, avoidance of out‐group members, and characteristics of the child as they relate to the status of the languages within the community. Moreover, these results have implications for bilingual children's social acceptance by their peers.     

Young Children Have Difficulty Predicting Future Preferences in the Presence of a Conflicting Physiological State

This study examined children's predictions about their future preferences when they were in two different physiological states (thirsty and not thirsty). Ninety 3‐ to 7‐year‐olds were asked to predict what they would prefer tomorrow: pretzels to eat or water to drink after having consumed pretzels, and again after having had the opportunity to quench their thirst with water. Results showed that although children initially preferred pretzels to water at baseline, they more often indicated that they would prefer water the next day after they had consumed pretzels. After consuming water, however, the same children indicated they would prefer pretzels the next day. Children's verbal justifications for their choices rarely made reference to their current or future states, but rather justifications were more likely to make reference to their general preferences when they were no longer thirsty compared to when they were thirsty. Results suggest that current physiological states have a powerful influence on future preferences. The findings are discussed in the context of the development of episodic foresight, the Bischof‐Kohler hypothesis, and the important and often overlooked role that children's current states play in future decision making. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

‘We are the good guys but they are not bad’. In‐group positivity and cognitive performance in preschoolers

The general purpose of this study was to analyse the developmental relations between the early forms of ethnic attitudes, and the classification abilities of the young child. We designed new cognitive tasks within a detection paradigm adapted to preschoolers and attitudinal tasks that were presented as games in a computer screen. Participants were 75 majority‐group children of 3, 4, and 5 years of age. Children's preferences and positive/negative attitudes towards the in‐group (Spaniards) and three out‐groups (Latin‐Americans, Africans, and Asians) were measured. The results showed a remarkable preference and positivity for the in‐group, but not out‐group derogation. Children's cognitive performance, to a greater extent than their age, was positively associated with in‐group favouritism and positivity. On the other hand, we found some interesting differences and developmental changes in children's positive orientation to the out‐groups that are discussed in the last section.     

Why computational models are better than verbal theories: the case of nonword repetition

Tests of nonword repetition (NWR) have often been used to examine children's phonological knowledge and word learning abilities. However, theories of NWR primarily explain performance either in terms of phonological working memory or long‐term knowledge, with little consideration of how these processes interact. One theoretical account that focuses specifically on the interaction between short‐term and long‐term memory is the chunking hypothesis. Chunking occurs because of repeated exposure to meaningful stimulus items, resulting in the items becoming grouped (or chunked); once chunked, the items can be represented in short‐term memory using one chunk rather than one chunk per item. We tested several predictions of the chunking hypothesis by presenting 5–6‐year‐old children with three tests of NWR that were either high, medium, or low in wordlikeness. The results did not show strong support for the chunking hypothesis, suggesting that chunking fails to fully explain children's NWR behavior. However, simulations using a computational implementation of chunking (namely CLASSIC, or Chunking Lexical And Sub‐lexical Sequences In Children) show that, when the linguistic input to 5–6‐year‐old children is estimated in a reasonable way, the children's data are matched across all three NWR tests. These results have three implications for the field: (a) a chunking account can explain key NWR phenomena in 5–6‐year‐old children; (b) tests of chunking accounts require a detailed specification both of the chunking mechanism itself and of the input on which the chunking mechanism operates; and (c) verbal theories emphasizing the role of long‐term knowledge (such as chunking) are not precise enough to make detailed predictions about experimental data, but computational implementations of the theories can bridge the gap.     

Children's understanding of their own and others' mental states. Part A. Self‐understanding precedes understanding of others in pretence

We examined 3‐ to 6‐year‐old children's attributions of pretence when their own or another's behaviours were characterized as similar (usually unintentionally) to that of a real or nonexistent animal. In some pretence tasks, we asked children if they were trying to look like or looked like the animal they were characterized as looking like; in others, if and how they could (or why they could not) pretend to be a real or nonexistent animal. Children at 4–6 years of age understood their own pretences better than another's pretences, but even by 6 years of age children continued to fail to understand pretence by another. Across ages children tended to be consistent in their claims about whether or not they looked liked (or were trying to look like) the animal, and whether or not they were pretending to be it. Children appear to take someone's merely looking like an animal as evidence that the person (whether self or other) is pretending to be that animal. Their success on self‐pretence tasks probably results from their unwillingness to believe that their own actions look like those of the animal because they had not intended to look like it.     

Reducing an in‐group bias in preschool children: the impact of moral behavior

How impressionable are in‐group biases in early childhood? Previous research shows that young children display robust preferences for members of their own social group, but also condemn those who harm others. The current study investigates children's evaluations of agents when their group membership and moral behavior conflict. After being assigned to a minimal group, 4‐ to 5‐year‐old children either saw their in‐group member behave antisocially, an out‐group member act prosocially, or control agents, for whom moral information was removed. Children's explicit preference for and willingness to share with their in‐group member was significantly attenuated in the presence of an antisocial in‐group member, but not a prosocial out‐group member. Interestingly, children's learning decisions were unmoved by a person's moral behavior, instead being consistently guided by group membership. This demonstrates that children's in‐group bias is remarkably flexible: while moral information curbs children's in‐group bias on social evaluations, social learning is still driven by group information.