Mother–Child Book‐Sharing and Children's Storytelling Skills in Ethnically Diverse,Low‐Income Families

The present study examined book‐sharing interactions between mothers and their 4‐year‐old children from African American (n = 62), Dominican (n = 67), Mexican (n = 59) and Chinese (n = 82) low‐income U.S. families, and children's independent storytelling skills one year later. Mothers' book‐sharing style was analysed in terms of how much storyline information they provided (story components), the extent to which they asked children about the story (dialogic emphasis) and which features of the story they highlighted (story content). African American mothers referred to more story components than did Dominican mothers, and Mexican mothers surpassed Dominican and Chinese mothers. Mothers of all groups were low in dialogic emphasis; they predominantly narrated rather than asked about the story, although Mexican mothers asked relatively more questions than did African American and Dominican mothers. In terms of content, compared with other groups, African American mothers were most likely to emphasize ‘individual goals’, and Chinese mothers were most likely to emphasize ‘negative consequences’. Latino mothers were more likely to emphasize ‘emotions’ than were Chinese mothers. Children's storytelling styles partially mirrored those seen in their mothers. Mothers' dialogic emphasis related to children's contributions to book‐sharing, which in turn predicted children's later independent storytelling skills. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Erratum

Behavior modification with children has been popularized through television shows such as Super Nanny and Nanny 911. The popularity of these shows may be related to the demand parents have for improving their children's behavior. Interestingly, an approach adopted by The Dog Whisperer may prove effective when used with children. The purpose of this brief review is to summarize how behavior modification with children has been used in the media and to detail the surprisingly large amount of research support for The Dog Whisperer's approach. This article also may be used as a guide for those who interact with children.     

Perpetuating the Father Christmas Story: a justifiable lie?

Most adults allow and even encourage young children to believe in Father Christmas as a real person. Although adults are usually engaged in open and rational communications with children they appear to be willing to deceive them and they often have to elaborate the story further to maintain such a reality. In the present paper, adult behaviours in perpetuating the Father Christmas story and the value, or not, of children being exposed to this story during their early years have been discussed in the light of the existing literature and the preliminary findings of the writers' own study.

In general, the discussion has shown that there appears to be a complexity of issues surrounding the Father Christmas story and many variables need to be considered before one would argue for or against the perpetuation of the story. Such variables include commercialization, traditional cultural conformity, the place of the story in diverse societies, possible adverse effects on children from being deceived, the development of children's imaginative potential, and children's access to alternative value systems and spirituality. Commercial pressures and traditional conformity may be factors for adults maintaining the story, but a further study of the unspoken and perhaps unexamined or unconscious beliefs that adults may hold about positive effects of the Father Christmas story may justify the perpetuation of the story.     

Children's understanding and production of verbal irony in family conversations

This study examined how children use and understand various forms of irony (sarcasm, hyperbole, understatement, and rhetorical questions) in the context of naturalistic positive and negative family conversations in the home. Instances of ironic language in conversations between mothers, fathers, and their two children (M_ages=6.33 and 4.39 years) were recorded during six 90‐min observations for each of 39 families. Children's responses to others' ironic utterances were coded for their understanding of meaning and conversational function. Mothers were especially likely to ask rhetorical questions and to use ironic language in conflictual contexts. In contrast, fathers used hyperbole and understatement as frequently as rhetorical questions, and employed ironic language in both positive and conflictual contexts. Children also showed evidence of a nascent ability to use ironic language, especially hyperbole and rhetorical questions. Family members used rhetorical questions and understatement proportionately more often in a negative interaction context. Finally, older siblings understood irony better than younger siblings, and both children's responses revealed some understanding of ironic language, particularly sarcasm and rhetorical questions. Overall, the results suggest that family conversations in the home may be one important context for the development of children's use and understanding of ironic language.     

The best teacher is like a famous mage everyone knows – Just not any of your favorites

This essay draws out the useful parallels between the best kind of teacher and the Good Witch of the North, Glinda, from The Wizard of Oz. Unappealing to many viewers or readers of the classic children's story, Glinda offers an inspiring reminder of four important pedagogical points: (1) the master teacher always treats her student as a peer; (2) the master teacher acknowledges and encourages her student's abilities but lets her learn how to exercise them on her own; (3) the master teacher is often not equivalent or even similar to anyone the student has encountered before; and (4) the master teacher is not a surrogate parent but a more distant figure.     

Whose idea is it anyway? The importance of reputation in acknowledgement

Six‐year‐old children negatively evaluate plagiarizers just as adults do (Olson & Shaw, 2011), but why do they dislike plagiarizers? Children may think plagiarism is wrong because plagiarizing negatively impacts other people's reputations. We investigated this possibility by having 6‐ to 9‐year‐old children evaluate people who shared their own or other people's ideas (stories). In Experiment 1, we found that children consider it acceptable to retell someone else's story if the source is given credit for their story (improving the source's reputation), but not if the reteller claims credit for the story (steals credit away from someone else). Experiments 2 and 3 showed that children do not consider it bad to lie by giving someone else credit for one's own good story (improving someone else's reputation), but do consider it bad to give someone else credit for one's own bad story (improving one's own reputation at the expense of someone else's). Experiment 4 demonstrated that children think it is equally bad to take credit for someone else's idea for oneself as it is to take someone else's idea and give credit to someone else, suggesting that children dislike when others take credit away from someone else, regardless of whether or not it improves the plagiarizer's reputation. Our results suggest that children dislike plagiarism because it negatively affects others' reputations by taking credit away from them.     

What Are You Really Saying? Associations between Shyness and Verbal Irony Comprehension

Verbal irony exploits the ambiguity inherent in language by using the discrepancy between a speaker's intended meaning and the literal meaning of his or her words to achieve social goals. Irony provides a window into children's developing pragmatic competence. Yet, little research exists on individual differences that may disrupt this understanding. For example, verbal irony may challenge shy children, who tend to interpret ambiguous stimuli as being threatening and who have difficulty mentalizing in social contexts. We examined whether shyness is related to the interpretation of ironic statements. Ninety‐nine children (8–12 year olds) listened to stories wherein one character made either a literal or ironic criticism or a literal or ironic compliment. Children appraised the speaker's belief and communicative intention. Shyness was assessed using self‐report measures of social anxiety symptoms and shy negative affect. Shyness was not related to children's comprehension of the counterfactual nature of ironic statements. However, shyness was related to children's ratings of speaker meanness for ironic statements. Thus, although not related to the understanding that speakers intended to communicate their true beliefs, shyness was related to children's construal of the social meaning of irony. Such subtle differences in language interpretation may underlie some of the social difficulties facing shy children. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A lag between understanding false belief and emotion attribution in young children: Relationships with linguistic ability and mothers' mental‐state language

This study examines the contribution of children's linguistic ability and mothers' use of mental‐state language to young children's understanding of false belief and their subsequent ability to make belief‐based emotion attributions. In Experiment 1, children (N = 51) were given three belief‐based emotion‐attribution tasks. A standard task in which the protagonist was a story character and the emotional outcomes were imagined, and two videos in which the story protagonist was a real infant and the emotional outcomes were observable (high and low expressed emotion conditions). Children's verbal ability (semantic competence) was also measured. In Experiment 2, children (N = 75) were given two belief‐based emotion tasks: the standard story task and the high expressed emotion video. In addition, children's verbal ability (syntactic competence) and mothers' use of mental‐state attributes when describing their children were also measured. The results showed that: (1) the lag between understanding false belief and emotion attribution was a stable feature of children's reasoning across the three tests; and (2) children who were more linguistically advanced and whose mothers' described them in more mentalistic terms were more likely to understand the association between false belief and emotion. The findings underline the continuing importance of verbal ability and linguistic input for children's developing theory‐of‐mind understanding, even after they display an understanding of false belief.     

Developmental Differences in the Naming of Contextually Non-Categorical Objects

This study investigates the naming process of contextually non-categorical objects in children from 3 to 9 plus 13-year-olds. 112 children participated in the study. Children were asked to narrate a story individually while looking at Mercer Mayer’s textless, picture book Frog, where are you? The narratives were audio recorded and transcribed. Texts were analyzed to find out how children at different ages name contextually non-categorical objects, tree and its parts in this case. Our findings revealed that increasing age in children is a positive factor in naming objects that are parts or extended forms of an object which itself constitutes a basic category in a certain context. Younger children used categorical names more frequently to refer to parts or disfigured forms of the object than older children and adults while older children and adults used specified names to refer to the parts or extended forms of the categorical names.     

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.     

Hearing about a story character's negative emotional reaction to having been dishonest causes young children to cheat less

There is extensive research on the development of cheating in early childhood but research on how to reduce it is rare. The present preregistered study examined whether telling young children about a story character's emotional reactions towards cheating could significantly reduce their tendency to cheat (N = 400; 199 boys; Age: 3–6 years). Results showed that telling older kindergarten children about the story character's negative emotional reaction towards rule violation significantly reduced cheating, but telling them about the positive emotional reaction towards rule adherence did not. These results show that children as young as age 5 are able to use information about another child's emotional reaction to guide their own moral behavior. In particular, highlighting another child's negative emotional reaction towards a moral transgression may be an effective way to reduce cheating in early childhood. This finding, along with earlier cheating reduction findings, suggests that although cheating is common in early childhood, simple methods can reduce its occurrence.     

SELMA THE JEWISH SEER: FEMALE PROPHECY AND BOURGEOIS RELIGION IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY GERMANY

This article discusses the importance of spiritualism and mysticism for nineteenth-century German Jews though the lens of a book about a Jewish female clairvoyant in 1830s Berlin. In 1838, Morris Wiener published Selma, die jüdische Seherin, a widely read story about his sister's miraculous healing and prophetic visions after being treated by a physician specializing in Mesmerism. This article proposes that we consider Selma's unusual story as an expression of nineteenth-century German Jews' experiences of bourgeois religion. In their attempt to prove that their religion was compatible with modern life, many German Jews sought to show not only how rational their religion was, as scholars have long emphasized, they also sought to demonstrate how spiritual Jews could be and to suggest that Judaism, like Protestantism and Catholicism, could engender multiple forms of mystical religiosity.     

Mapping the contours of faith in the land of separation: spiritual geographies for children

According to Jean Piaget, children begin to develop a concept of an object, such as that it has sides that are not visible from the child's perspective or that it is likely to be where one saw it last, in early infancy. By the close of the prelinguistic phase at about 2 years old, the child has developed a mature object concept, one that comprehends the object as a continuing entity even when it is not visible. Many children's picture books demonstrate Piaget's concept of object permanence through narrative and image. This paper offers a close reading of three classics, Goodnight moon, Harold and the purple crayon and Where the wild things are, in an explanation of how children are able to develop faith in an invisible, omnipresent deity.     

Misreading Nonmonogamy in Beauvoir's She Came to Stay

Simone de Beauvoir's novel She Came to Stay follows Françoise and her partner Pierre as their intimacy becomes increasingly entangled with the young and tempestuous Xavière. Many readings of the novel explain Françoise's bad feeling and eventual violence as symptoms of sexual jealousy. The book has also been read as a veiled autobiography of Beauvoir and Sartre's similar entanglement with Olga Kosakiewicz, so that, very often, Françoise's jealousy is assumed to stand in for Beauvoir's own. This article is about misreading in two ways. First, I argue that the common view that this is a story in part or in whole about sexual jealousy reflects a radical simplification of the emotional and interpersonal dynamics of the “trio.” Second, I argue that this interpretive simplification is in fact common in mainstream readings of nonmonogamous relationships, where “jealousy” is used to name any and all bad feelings in the vicinity of the nonmonogamous relationship, and where that bad feeling is interpreted as caused by the nonmonogamy itself. To conclude, I suggest that She Came to Stay, and particularly its notorious ending, can be seen as Beauvoir's depiction—and refusal—of the misreadings that constitute the “situation” of nonmonogamy in everyday life.     

Gravity biases in a non-human primate?

Pre-school children expect falling objects to travel in a straight line even when there are clear physical mechanisms that deviate the object's path (Hood, 1995). The current study set out to determine whether this expectancy is limited to humans. Cotton-top tamarins (Saguinus oedipus oedipus), a New World monkey species, were tested on Hood's (1995) experimental task where objects are dropped down a chimney connected by an opaque tube to one of three containers. Like human children, there was a significant tendency to search in the container underneath the chimney where the food was dropped on the first trial, even though aligned chimneys and containers were never connected. These search errors suggest that there may be a gravity bias that operates when both primate species fail to understand the constraints operating on object trajectories. Unlike human children however, tamarins were generally more likely to perseverate in making errors even though repeated testing and cost incentives were used.     

A Bishop Saving ‘Singers’: Tales of Torture in Pinochet's Chile

Abstract : The article provides a brief biographical introduction of Lutheran Bishop Helmut Frenz, co‐founder of the Committee for Peace, credited with saving at least 6,000 lives of persecuted Chileans following the September 1973 military coup at the hands of the brutal general Agosto Pinochet. Excerpts from Frenz' book, Mi Vida Chilena, document Pinochet's acknowledgment that torture was the regime's official policy, and share the poignant story of one suspected leftist's brutal torture.     

THE TRIPLISM OF PRACTICAL REASON

There can be reasons for belief, for action, and for feeling. In each case, knowledge of such reasons requires non‐empirical knowledge of some truths about them: these will be truths about what there is reason to believe, to feel, or to do – either outright or on condition of certain facts obtaining. Call these a priori truths about reasons, ‘norms’. Norms are a priori true propositions about reasons. It's an epistemic norm that if something's a good explanation that's a reason to believe it. It's an evaluative norm that if someone's cheated you that's a reason to be annoyed with them. There are many evaluative norms, relating to a variety of feelings. Equally, there may be various epistemic norms, even though in this case they all relate to belief. My concern here, however, is with practical norms: a priori truths about what there is reason to do. I have a suggestion about what fundamental practical norms there are, which I would like to describe and explain. It is that there are just three distinct kinds of practical norm governing what there is reason to do – three categories or generic sources of practical normativity, one may say. I call them the Bridge principle, the principle of Good, and the Demand principle – Bridge, Good and Demand for short. I have said more about them in my book, The Domain of Reasons; 1 here my aim is simply to set them out and sketch some questions to which this ‘triplism of practical reason’ 2 gives rise. In particular, since these norms are about practical reasons, not about morality, a question I'll touch on is how moral obligation comes onto the scene.     

WHAT ABOUT ISAAC?: Rereading Fear and Trembling and Rethinking Kierkegaardian Ethics

In this essay I offer a reading of Fear and Trembling that responds to critiques of Kierkegaardian ethics as being, as Brand Blanshard claims, “morally nihilistic,” as Emmanuel Levinas contends, ethically violent, and, as Alasdair MacIntyre charges, simply irrational. I argue that by focusing on Isaac's singularity as the very condition for Abraham's “ordeal,” the book presents a story about responsible subjectivity. Rather than standing in competition with the relation to God, the relation to other people is, thus, inscribed into this very relation. Fear and Trembling, I contend, advocates a bidirectional responsibility that is constitutive of subjectivity itself and, as such, actually resonates with certain aspects of Levinasian ethics. I conclude by suggesting that Abraham's ordeal is not due to the conflict between a nonreligious duty and the duty to God, but instead reflects a tension that is internal to the life of faith itself.     

The Politics of Pears: Augustine on the Ethics of Privative Versus Eucharist Communities

In my essay, I interpret Augustine's Confessions as a political text that portrays Augustine's attempt to find a true community. This search includes a critique of various defective communities that cannot provide the public good necessary for a true public. To show this, I focus on Augustine's account of the pear theft as an example par excellence of a privative community. I examine the story as an account of an inexplicable act of willing against the good that unmakes the will. I then argue that the supposed resolution—that Augustine was willing the good of community—in fact exacerbates the inexplicability of the pear theft. In feasting on iniquity, this community un-makes itself. I conclude by showing how the pear thieves represent a perverted imitation of the eucharistic community, which does not steal but shares the Good and so shares its goods.