Attachment and cognitive skills: An investigation of mediating mechanisms

Associations between maternal attachment patterns and cognitive skills at first grade were examined, and mediators of identified associations tested using Phase I and II data from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Study of Early Care and Youth Development, a prospective study of 1364 children and families from birth through sixth grade. There were three main findings. First, ambivalent and insecure/other attachment patterns were negative predictors of cognitive skills. Second, the association between ambivalent attachment and cognitive skills was mediated by children's behaviors related to testing. Third, the association between insecure/other attachment and cognitive skills was mediated by children's exploration, maternal instruction, children's social relationships, and children's behaviors related to testing. Implications for attachment theory and education are discussed.     

Maternal employment and child cognitive outcomes: the importance of analytic approach

J. Brooks-Gunn, W. J. Han, and J. Waldfogel (2002) and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Early Child Care Research Network (ECCRN; 2000b) came to different conclusions about the effects of maternal employment--although they were addressing similar questions using the same data set. Brooks-Gunn et al. concluded that maternal employment in infancy has a negative effect on children's cognitive abilities at age 3, whereas the ECCRN found that early nonmaternal care is not related to children's cognitive abilities in their first 3 years. The authors account for this difference by comparing 2 approaches to data analysis: a top-down testing of continuous variables (the approach used by the ECCRN, 2000b) and an a priori comparison approach that involves pairwise testing of specific dichotomous contrasts (the approach used by Brooks-Gunn et al., 2002). This comparison illustrates the critical importance of analytic approach. It also suggests that Brooks-Gunn et al.'s conclusion from this data set is overstated and should not be used on its own as the basis for practical or policy decisions.     

Talk About School Between Mothers and Children With or Without ADHD

Twenty mother-child dyads including a child with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and 20 mother-child dyads containing a child without ADHD recorded a conversation about the children's school experiences. Mothers' ratings of their children's school-related performance were also assessed. Mothers of children with ADHD rated their children's behavioral conduct lower than did other mothers, and dyads including children with ADHD discussed behavioral conduct more and academics and interpersonal relationships less than did the other group of dyads. For ADHD dyads, less elaboration about children's interpersonal relationships was related to lower maternal ratings about children's school-related performance. The results are discussed in relation to potentially poorer developmental outcomes for many children with ADHD.     

Children's questions about interparent conflict and violence: what's a mother to say?

This research examined the relation between mothers' responses to children's questions about interparent conflict and children's adjustment. Participants were 134 mothers and their children (70 boys, 64 girls), aged 7 to 10. In each family, an act of intimate-partner violence (IPV) had recently occurred. Mothers' responses to children's questions about interparent conflict were assessed via a semistructured interview coded to reflect the extent to which the mothers' responses addressed the content of the children's questions. Mothers and children reported on physical IPV. Mothers also reported on interparent conflict, parent-child aggression, and maternal warmth. Children's adjustment was assessed via mothers' and children's reports at two time points 6 months apart. The extent to which mothers' responses addressed the content of the children's questions about interparent conflict was negatively associated with children's adjustment problems, after accounting for the frequency of physical IPV, frequency of interparent conflict, parent-child aggression, and maternal warmth. These associations emerged cross-sectionally and prospectively. However, in those prospective analyses that accounted for children's baseline levels of adjustment, maternal responsiveness was not associated with later children's adjustment problems.     

Welfare policies and very young children: experimental data on stage-environment fit

The authors examined the effects of welfare programs that increased maternal employment and family income on the development of very young children using data from 5 random-assignment experiments. The children were 6 months to 3 years old when their mothers entered the programs; cognitive and behavioral outcomes were measured 2-5 years later. While there were no overall program impacts, positive or negative, on the development of children in this age group, there was a pair of domain- and age-specific effects: The programs decreased positive social behavior among 1-year-olds and increased school achievement among 2-year-olds. After exploring several explanations for these results, the authors suggest that the contextual changes engendered by the programs, including children's exposure to center-based child care, interacted differentially with specific developmental transitions.     

Maternal Prenatal Stress and Other Developmental Risk Factors for Adolescent Depression: Spotlight on Sex Differences

Maternal stress during pregnancy has been linked to premorbid abnormalities associated with depression (e.g., difficult temperament, cognitive deficits) in offspring. However, few studies have looked across developmental periods to examine maternal stress during pregnancy and offspring depression during adolescence and whether these associations differ by sex. The current study used data from 1711 mother-offspring dyads (offspring sex: 49.8% male) in a longitudinal birth cohort study. Maternal narratives collected during pregnancy were qualitatively coded for stress-related themes by independent raters. Latent class analysis (LCA) identified distinct subgroups of offspring based on exposure to maternal prenatal stress and other developmental factors from the prenatal, childhood, and adolescent periods that have been associated with depression and/or maternal prenatal stress. LCA identified subgroups that were compared to determine whether and to what extent they differed on adolescent depressive symptoms. LCA revealed a subgroup of “high-risk” individuals, characterized by maternal factors during pregnancy (higher ambivalence/negativity and lower positivity towards the pregnancy, higher levels of hassles, lower maternal education and higher maternal age at birth, higher pre-pregnancy BMI) and offspring developmental factors (decreased cognitive functioning during childhood and adolescence, lower perceived parental support during adolescence, and higher levels of maternal depression during adolescence). High-risk females exhibited elevated conduct symptoms and higher birth order, while high-risk males exhibited decreased internalizing symptoms and lower birth order. Both high-risk males and females reported elevated depressive symptoms during adolescence relative to their “low-risk” counterparts.     

Contributions of Functional Neuroimaging to the Study of Social Cognition

ABSTRACT— Increasingly, researchers have been applying the methods of cognitive neuroscience—especially functional neuroimaging—to address questions about how humans make inferences about the mental states of others. At the same time, a number of critics have warned against the use of these new techniques by suggesting that functional neuroimaging has been unable to provide novel insights into the nature of social cognition. Addressing these critiques, this article briefly describes some of the ways in which functional neuroimaging has indeed redirected the study of the social mind, reviewing not only the novel data these techniques have provided but also the ways in which cognitive neuroscience has prompted researchers to consider entirely new questions about the organization of human social cognition. Such questions include whether or not there are cognitive processes dedicated for social thought; what the constituent parts of our social-cognitive system might be; how social cognition overlaps with other mental processes in previously unanticipated ways; and whether social cognition might play a privileged role in the human cognitive repertoire.     

Individual differences in the emergence of depressive symptoms in children and adolescents: a longitudinal investigation of parent and child reports

The authors address questions about the rate that depressive symptoms emerge, developmental and gender differences in this rate, and differences between parent and child estimates of this rate. In a 12-wave, cohort-sequential, longitudinal design, 1,570 children (Grades 4-11) and parents completed reports about children's depression. Cross-domain latent growth curve analysis revealed that (a) the rate of symptom growth varied with developmental level. (b) gender differences symptom growth preceded emergence of mean level gender differences, (c) the rate of symptom development varied with age, and (d) parent-child agreement about rate of symptom change was stronger than agreement about time-specific symptoms. The authors suggest that predictability of depressive symptoms varies with age and the dimension under investigation.     

Helping children correctly say "I don't know" to unanswerable questions

Adults ask children questions in a variety of contexts, for example, in the classroom, in the forensic context, or in experimental research. In such situations children will inevitably be asked some questions to which they do not know the answer, because they do not have the required information ("unanswerable" questions). When asked unanswerable questions, it is important that children indicate that they do not have the required information to provide an answer. These 2 studies investigated whether preinterview instructions (Experiment 1) or establishing a memory narrative (Experiment 2) helped children correctly indicate a lack of knowledge to unanswerable questions. In both studies, 6- and 8-year-olds participated in a classroom-based event about which they were subsequently interviewed. Some of the questions were answerable, and some were unanswerable. Results showed that preinterview instructions increased the number of younger children's appropriate "don't know" responses to unanswerable questions, without decreasing correct responses to answerable questions. This suggests that demand characteristics affect children's tendency correctly to say "I don't know." The opportunity to provide a narrative account increased children's appropriate "don't know" responses to unanswerable yes/no questions, and increased the number of younger children's correct responses to answerable questions. This suggests that cognitive factors also contribute to children's tendency correctly to say "I don't know." These results have implications for any context where adults need to obtain information from children through questioning, for example, a health practitioner asking about a medical condition, in classroom discourse, in the investigative interview, and in developmental psychology research.     

School readiness. Integrating cognition and emotion in a neurobiological conceptualization of children's functioning at school entry

The author examines the construct of emotionality, developmental relations between cognition and emotion, and neural plasticity and frontal cortical functioning and proposes a developmental neurobiological model of children's school readiness. Direct links are proposed among emotionality, use-dependent synaptic stabilization related to the prefrontal cortex, the development of executive function abilities, and academic and social competence in school settings. The author considers research on the efficacy of preschool compensatory education in promoting school readiness and recommends that programs expand to include curricula directly addressing social and emotional competence. Research should focus on the ontogeny of self-regulation and successful adaptation to the socially defined role of student, the development of prevention research programs to reflect this orientation, and interdisciplinary collaborations that integrate scientific methods and questions in the pursuit of comprehensive knowledge of human developmental processes.     

Self-other differences in children's perceptions about the causes of important events

Three studies examined differences between children's (ages 8-15) beliefs about the effectiveness of multiple internal and external causes for producing outcomes in their own lives versus in those of their peers. Differences specific to the school domain were found: Starting at age 11 or 12, children perceived internal causes as more important for others than for themselves; and only beliefs about the self related to perceived control. More strikingly, a sample of gifted children, who presumably receive social feedback that they are different from their peers, reported that (a) they exerted more control and possessed more ability than their peers and (b) other children knew less about the causes of school performance and had to rely more on effort and powerful others; only beliefs about the self correlated to cognitive performance. These results suggest that self-other differences are produced by both developmental change and environmental opportunities.     

Predicting individual differences in attention, memory, and planning in first graders from experiences at home, child care, and school

This study adds to the growing literature linking children's experiences in the environment to individual differences in their developing skills in attention, memory, and planning. The authors asked about the extent to which stimulating and sensitive care in the family and in the child-care or school environments would predict these cognitive outcomes. The authors also questioned the primacy of experiences in the first 3 years of life. Data from a sample of 700 first graders whose experiences in the home and in child care or school were evaluated since early infancy revealed that the cumulative quality of the child-rearing environment was related to attention and memory but not to planning and that the quality of the family environment was more strongly associated with outcomes than was the quality of child care and of school. The quality of both children's early (6 through 36 months) and later (54 months and first grade) environments predicted performance on the attention and memory tasks.     

7～11岁儿童失言理解及与母亲教养方式的关系

采用失言任务和改编后的教养方式问卷探讨7~11岁儿童心理理论的发展及其与母亲教养方式的相关。结果表明,在学龄期,儿童在不同层面上对失言的理解能力仍在提高,高年级时已超出单一维度。7岁儿童对包含意图的信念理解与母亲的"过度偏爱"显著负相关;8岁儿童对包含意图的信念理解与母亲的"惩罚和严厉"显著负相关。结果提示在某些年龄阶段,儿童心理理论的发展可能与母亲特定的教养方式有关。     

The promotive effects of family educational involvement for low-income children's literacy

Longitudinal data for 167 low-income children were analyzed to examine associations between family educational involvement during kindergarten, children's feelings about literacy, and children's literacy achievement from kindergarten through fifth grade. The promotive effect of family educational involvement for feelings about literacy and literacy achievement was moderated by maternal education such that involvement was more positively associated with literacy outcomes for children whose mothers were less educated compared with children whose mothers were more educated. In addition, children's feelings about literacy mediated associations between family educational involvement and literacy achievement. Implications for intervention efforts are discussed.     

Conscience in childhood: old questions, new answers

Although conscience has been the focus of reflection for centuries, fundamental questions regarding its organization have not been fully answered. To address those questions, the authors applied structural equation modeling techniques to longitudinal data comprising multiple behavioral measures of children's conscience, obtained in parallel fashion at 33 and 45 months. The measures encompassed moral emotion (guilt and empathic distress) and rule-compatible conduct (internalization of maternal prohibitions and requests and of another adult's rules). Confirmatory factor analyses supported a differentiated view of conscience with 2 latent factors at both ages: Moral Emotion and Rule-Compatible Conduct. The structure of conscience was remarkably stable over time. The coherence between Moral Emotion and Rule-Compatible Conduct factors increased as children grew older.     

Implications of Timing of Maternal Depressive Symptoms for Early Cognitive and Language Development

: Statistically, women, particularly pregnant women and new mothers, are at heightened risk for depression. The present review describes the current state of the research linking maternal depressed mood and children's cognitive and language development. Exposure to maternal depressive symptoms, whether during the prenatal period, postpartum period, or chronically, has been found to increase children's risk for later cognitive and language difficulties. The present review considers both the timing of maternal depression and the chronicity of mothers' depression on children's risk for cognitive and language delays. Infancy is frequently identified as a sensitive period in which environmental stimulation has the potential to substantially influence children's cognitive and language development. However, children's exposure to chronic maternal depression seems to be associated with more problematic outcomes for children, perhaps because depression interferes with mothers' ability to respond sensitively and consistently over time. Consistent with this expectation, interventions targeting parenting practices of depressed mothers have been found to increase children's cognitive competence during early childhood. The current review provides a synthesis of the current state of the field regarding the association between maternal depression and children's cognitive and language development during early childhood.     

儿童社会观点采择能力发展的干预研究

本研究针对小学低年级学生的认知发展特点,编制了有关心理活动课程,并选取小学一年级学生进行了为期半年的干预研究。研究结果表明,通过干预训练发展儿童的社会观点采择能力是可行的,且本研究中所编制的心理活动课程对于促进儿童该能力的发展具有良好的效果。     

婴儿期母亲将心比心对儿童5岁共情的预测:母亲陪伴总时间的调节作用

使用追踪设计，以68对母婴为被试，探讨母亲养育质量、陪伴时间影响儿童共情发展的机制。在婴儿期（9、14个月）评估母亲将心比心并调查母亲每周陪伴婴儿的总时间与母亲参与的互动时间；在儿童5岁时，采用“陌生人假装受伤情境”范式测查儿童共情。结果发现：（1）婴儿期母亲恰当的心理相关评论能够正向预测5岁时儿童的行为共情，而对情绪共情与认知共情的预测则受到婴儿期母亲陪伴总时间的调节：母亲恰当的心理相关评论能够显著正向预测陪伴总时间短的儿童的情绪共情与母亲陪伴总时间长的儿童的认知共情；（2）婴儿期母亲不协同的心理相关评论能够显著正向预测儿童5岁时的认知共情；（3）婴儿期母亲陪伴总时间能够显著正向预测5岁时儿童的情绪共情。     

Maternal coping strategies and emotional distress: results of an early intervention program for low birth weight young children

Several questions were examined with Infant Health and Development Program (IHDP) data (N = 843). Are effects of intervention services found for maternal emotional distress and coping strategies, and are these effects different for different groups of mothers? Do maternal distress, coping, and life events moderate (or mediate) the intervention effects reported earlier for children's test scores and behavior problems (IHDP, 1990)? The intervention reduced maternal distress, especially for women with less than a high school education. Maternal distress did not moderate or mediate the influence of the intervention on child outcomes. Maternal coping was not influenced by the intervention and did not moderate the influence of the intervention on child outcomes. Life events moderated the influence of the intervention on children's test scores; the intervention was more effective for children whose mothers had fewer life events.     

A longitudinal study of the relationship of maternal autonomy support to children's adjustment and achievement in school

A longitudinal study examined the relations of maternal autonomy support to children's school adjustment. Autonomy support and other parenting dimensions were measured when children were 5 years old. School measures were teacher-rated academic and social adjustment and achievement in reading and math in grade 3. Regression analyses controlling for age 5 family and child factors (e.g., socioeconomic status [SES], kindergarten adjustment, IQ) revealed that autonomy support was positively related to grade 3 adjustment (social and academic) and reading achievement. Maternal emphasis on school performance was positively related to achievement measures but negatively related to social adjustment. Maternal use of rewards and praise was unrelated to grade 3 school measures. Finally, supplemental analyses revealed that autonomy support was associated with greater consistency in children's adjustment across social and academic domains as well as higher overall adjustment. These results highlight the developmental significance of parental autonomy support in early childhood.