Development and validation of the Childhood Perfectionism Inventory (I.P.I.)

There are a few studies linking children's perfectionism with diverse internalized or externalized disorders. Likewise, in Spanish, there is no scale that measures the diverse aspects that comprise it. This paper presents the Children's Perfectionism Inventory (IPI). The sample comprised 2,260 participants (51.2% males and 48.8% females). The age range is between 8 and 13 years (mean= 9.94 and SD= 1.27). Sampling was stratified and random. Of the sample, 78.1% are from public education and 21.9% from private education. 16.2% reside in rural areas and 83.8% in urban areas. To study the validity of the questionnaire, cross-validation was performed. Initially three factors were obtained through exploratory factor analysis: Self-assessment, Self-imposed and External Pressures, with adequate reliability indices (Cronbach's alpha= .89, .87 and .88, respectively). Subsequently, using a confirmatory method, it was found that the three initial factors were explained by a single second-order factor called Perfectionism.     

Remembering Early Childhood: How Much, How, and Why (or Why Not)

In this article, we consider recent research on three questions about people's memories for their early childhood: whether childhood amnesia is a real phenomenon, whether implicit memories survive when explicit memories do not, and why early episodic memories are sketchy. The research leads us to form three conclusions. First, we argue that childhood amnesia is a real phenomenon, as long as the term is defined clearly. Specifically, people are able to recall parts of their lives from the period between ages 2 and 5 years, but they recall less from that period than from other periods. Second, we conclude that implicit memories from early childhood may be evident even when explicit memories are not, a finding that suggests early experience may affect behavior in ways that people do not consciously recognize. Third, we argue that although young children are well known to be wonderfully efficient learners of semantic information, they have difficulty in either encoding or retrieving the interlinked aspects of events that lend them their autobiographical character. Although more evidence is needed, the relative lack of episodic memories of early childhood may be linked to maturation of prefrontal cortex.     

Development of Social Problem Solving in Early Childhood: Stability,Change, and Associations With Social Competence

Kindergarten and 1st-grade boys were administered social cognitive interviews in 2 consecutive years to investigate the response-generation step of N. R. Crick and K. A. Dodge's (1994) social information processing model. Boys generated responses to 4 types of hypothetical social dilemmas. Responses to these situations were primarily prosocial, with a large minority of avoidant and antisocial solutions. In general, older boys provided more effective solutions than did their younger peers, and stabilities were modest but significant for subcategories of both prosocial and antisocial responses. Boys who were accepted by their peers provided more prosocial and effective solutions than did boys of lower peer status, but no status differences emerged for antisocial responses. The data also suggest that young children view aggression as an acceptable means to solving peer conflict.