The natural emergence of reasoning about the afterlife as a developmental regularity

Participants were interviewed about the biological and psychological functioning of a dead agent. In Experiment 1, even 4- to 6-year-olds stated that biological processes ceased at death, although this trend was more apparent among 6- to 8-year-olds. In Experiment 2, 4- to 12-year-olds were asked about psychological functioning. The youngest children were equally likely to state that both cognitive and psychobiological states continued at death, whereas the oldest children were more likely to state that cognitive states continued. In Experiment 3, children and adults were asked about an array of psychological states. With the exception of preschoolers, who did not differentiate most of the psychological states, older children and adults were likely to attribute epistemic, emotional, and desire states to dead agents. These findings suggest that developmental mechanisms underlie intuitive accounts of dead agents' minds.     

Children's beliefs about the fantasy/reality status of hypothesized machines

Four-year-olds, 6-year-olds, and adults were asked to make judgments about the reality status of four different types of machines: real machines that children and adults interact with on a daily basis, real machines that children and adults interact with rarely (if at all), and impossible machines that violated a real-world physical or biological causal law. Adults generally categorized all of the machines accurately. Both groups of children categorized familiar possible machines as real, but were agnostic as to the fantasy status of unfamiliar possible machines. Children generally responded that both kinds of impossible machines were make-believe, but 4-year-olds were more likely to make these accurate judgments for the physical than biological items, different from the older children and adults (whose responses were similar). These data suggest that children's judgments about the possibility of machines are not strictly limited by first-hand experience. Young children's domain-specific causal knowledge interacts with their understanding of the fantasy/reality distinction to constrain their inferences in a rational way.     

Responses of Preschoolers in Two Frustrating Episodes: Emergence of Complex Strategies for Emotion Regulation

Although research on young children's abilities to organize emotional states has increased in recent years, little is known about the emergence of complex strategies for emotion regulation in preschoolers. In the present study, emotion-regulation strategies used by 52 normally developing 3- and 4-year-olds were examined. Children and their primary caregivers (50 mothers, 2 fathers) participated in 2 controlled frustration episodes that were videotaped. Four types of strategies were coded: comforting behaviors, instrumental behaviors, distraction behaviors, and cognitive reappraisals. Results indicated that 3-year-olds used proportionately more instrumental strategies than 4-year-olds, and parents of 3-year-olds showed the same pattern, whereas parents of 4-year-olds did not. Moreover, 3-year-olds used a variety of strategies when frustrated, including cognitive reappraisals. Significant positive correlations were found between the types of strategies used by the children and by the parents to help their children. It is suggested that children may be using strategies to organize their emotional states before they are able to accurately report on them.     

Responses of preschoolers in two frustrating episodes: emergence of complex strategies for emotion regulation

Although research on young children's abilities to organize emotional states has increased in recent years, little is known about the emergence of complex strategies for emotion regulation in preschoolers. In the present study, emotion-regulation strategies used by 52 normally developing 3- and 4-year-olds were examined. Children and their primary caregivers (50 mothers, 2 fathers) participated in 2 controlled frustration episodes that were videotaped. Four types of strategies were coded: comforting behaviors, instrumental behaviors, distraction behaviors, and cognitive reappraisals. Results indicated that 3-year-olds used proportionately more instrumental strategies than 4-year-olds, and parents of 3-year-olds showed the same pattern, whereas parents of 4-year-olds did not. Moreover, 3-year-olds used a variety of strategies when frustrated, including cognitive reappraisals. Significant positive correlations were found between the types of strategies used by the children and by the parents to help their children. It is suggested that children may be using strategies to organize their emotional states before they are able to accurately report on them.     

False memories in children. Evidence for a shift from phonological to semantic associations

Memory illusions in children of three age groups (5-, 8-, and 11-year-olds) were investigated using a modified version of the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) procedure. Children from each age group falsely recalled nonpresented items related to the study lists. However, the nature of the intrusions varied across the different groups. The 5-year-olds were more likely to falsely recall words that rhymed with the studied items than to recall unrelated items, whereas the 11-year-olds were more likely to falsely recall words that were semantically related to the list theme than to produce either rhyming or unrelated intrusions. Intrusions made by the 8-year-olds were equally likely to be semantic, rhyming, or unrelated to study items. The results are consistent with the notion of a developmental shift from phonological to semantic associations, leading to qualitatively different memory distortions in children of different ages.     

Discriminatory peer aggression among children as a function of minority status and group proportion in school context

This study investigates discriminatory peer aggression among primary school aged children as a function of minority status (based on nationality, ethnicity, religion) of the target and the relative proportions of minority and majority children in the school. Participants were 925 8‐ to 12‐year‐olds attending schools in Britain. Children of minority status were no more likely than children of majority background to experience peer aggression in general. However, minority children were more likely to experience being the victims of discriminatory aggression. Two contrasting predictions were tested: that discriminatory aggression would be more likely when the minority group was relatively small in number or, alternatively, that as the proportions of children of minority backgrounds increased across schools, discriminatory aggression would be greater. The latter hypothesis was supported. Findings also revealed that in schools with a lower minority presence, discriminatory aggression experienced by majority children was significantly lower than that reported by minority children. When the school minority rate exceeded 81%, discriminatory aggression was more commonly experienced among majority children than among minority children. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Children's nighttime fears: parent-child ratings of frequency, content, origins, coping behaviors and severity

The present study investigated nighttime fears in normal school children aged 4 to 12 yr (N=176). Children and their parents were interviewed about the frequency, content, origins, coping behaviors and severity of children's nighttime fears. Results showed that 73.3% of the children reported nighttime fears, indicating that these fears are quite prevalent. Inspection of the developmental course of nighttime fears revealed that these fears are common among 4- to 6-year-olds, become even more frequent in 7- to 9-year-olds and then remain relatively stable in 10- to 12-year-olds. Inspection of the origins of nighttime fears revealed that most of the children (i.e., almost 80%) attributed their fear to negative information; conditioning and modeling were endorsed less frequently (25.6% and 13.2%, respectively). A substantial percentage of the children (24.0%) indicated that learning experiences had not played a role in the acquisition of their nighttime fears. Children reported a variety of coping strategies in order to deal with their nighttime fears and generally rated these strategies as helpful in reducing anxiety. Furthermore, children's nighttime fears were associated with moderate levels of anxiety. Moreover, in about 10% of the children, nighttime fears were related to one or more DSM-III-R anxiety disorders. Finally, parental reports of children's nighttime fears substantially deviated from children's reports. Most importantly, parents provided a marked underestimation of the frequency of nighttime fears, at least as reported by their children.     

Three experiences affecting spatial discrimination learning by ambulatory children

Children 1 and 3 years of age were given a two-choice spatial discrimination task. They were placed in front of a barrier and encouraged to walk around it; one route around the barrier was blocked. Three experiments studied the effects of different types of experience with this spatial problem. The first examined trial and error experience, in which the child was allowed to walk the route he or she had chosen. Although most children readily learned to choose the open route, the pattern of choices indicated that 3-year-olds were more likely to achieve a learning criterion after an error than 1-year-olds. A second experiment looked at the effects of showing the children the layout of the problem prior to trial and error experience. The 3-year-olds were again more likely than the 1-year-olds to achieve criterion after an error; furthermore, they were likely to know the correct route on the first trial. The third experiment let the children watch their parents take the correct route. This procedure eliminated age differences in performance. The initial choices of the 1-year-olds indicated that they were likely to know the correct route, and if they did not, they were just as likely to learn from their mistakes as the 3-year-olds. The data were interpreted within a mathematical model of learning. Based upon these analyses, we propose two developmental trends. One involves a growth in sensitivity to the consequences of a choice of route. The other is a progression from social learning to more independent and ideational methods of spatial problem solving.     

Higher Education as Moral Community: Institutional Influences on Religious Participation During College

Borrowing from the literature on religion and deviance, the concept of moral communities is applied to religious and secular postsecondary education to explain institutional influences on student religious participation. Results from nationally representative panel data indicate that students attending Catholic and mainline Protestant affiliated institutions decline in religious participation at a faster rate than students attending evangelical institutions or students attending nonreligious public colleges and universities. This finding is consistent with Catholic and mainline Protestant institutions less successfully providing a shared moral order that legitimates religious language, motive, and behavior when compared to conservative Protestant colleges. At the same time, the religious and ethnic pluralism that activates minority religious identity at nonreligious public institutions is also less likely to be present on Catholic and mainline Protestant college campuses. Additional results indicate that evangelical students' religious participation declines while attending Catholic colleges and universities, while Catholic students increase their participation while attending evangelical institutions. The religious composition of students may act to alter friendship networks, and thus participation rates, on these campuses, although further research is necessary to validate the proposed institutional mechanisms.     

Eyewitness memory for a touching experience: accuracy differences between child and adult witnesses

Children, ages 5-6 and 9-10 years, and adults spent 6 min with a man (toucher) who administered a test that required interpersonal touch. The test was briefly interrupted by a woman (intruder). Afterward, the participant-witnesses provided a memory report that included free recall, answers to objective-memory questions, and two lineup identifications. Relative to the adults and older children, the 5- to 6-year-olds gave less complete free recall and made more errors in answering objective questions about the features and actions of the toucher and the intruder. On recognition tests, both the 5- to 6- and 9- to 10-year-olds were somewhat less likely than adults to make accurate lineup decisions about the toucher and much less likely to accurately identify the briefly seen intruder. Children may remember even salient stimuli and actions more poorly than adults do, but there was no evidence that children misremembered touches that did not occur.     

Tell Me a Story: How Children's Developing Domain Knowledge Affects Their Story Construction

Young children distinguish between the physical and biological domains of knowledge. The current study examines how this distinction is expressed in a story construction task. Three- and 4-year-olds were shown pairs of pictures, one that depicted a normal event and one that depicted an event that violated either physical or biological causal structure. Children were asked to choose which picture to include in a story. Three-year-olds generally showed no systematic patterns of responses when constructing their stories. Four-year-olds, in contrast, made more normal than violation choices overall, and their stories were relatively consistent with regard to the fictional world's internal coherence. When 4-year-olds did include violation events in their stories, those violations tended to be of physical rather than biological causality. These data suggest that a general understanding of impossible events is underpinned by causal domain knowledge.     

Catholic Schooling, Protestant Schooling, and Religious Commitment in Young Adulthood

If and how Catholic and Protestant schools influence the religious lives of their students once they have graduated is unclear. Methodological limitations and inconsistencies in previous studies have resulted in confusing and often contradictory findings. Using data from two waves of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health ( N  = 11,212), I compare the religious lives of young adults who attended Catholic, Protestant, and secular schools as adolescents. The results suggest that Protestant schoolers are far more religious as young adults than those who attended a secular school, a difference that is at least partially explained by the schools' religious environment. But young adults who attended Catholic schools report levels of religiosity that are similar to those educated in a secular school, and are actually lower for some outcomes. Studies of religious schoolers that ignore the religious tradition of the school overlook these differing effects and forfeit statistical explanatory power.     

“They Danced Around in My Head and I Learned Them”: Children's Developing Conceptions of Learning

Two studies examined how 3–6-year-olds understand the process of learning. In study 1 examined how children spontaneously talk about learning via a CHILDES language analysis. Talk about the learning process increased between the ages of 3–5. Talk specifically about learning in terms of desire decreased during this period. This suggests the possibility that desire is important to children's initial understanding of learning, and children develop an understanding that various mental states including desire, attention, and intention, play a role in the learning process. In Study 2, we presented 4- and 6-year-olds with a set of stories designed to test their understanding of the role of these mental states. In both their judgments about whether someone learns and their justifications of their responses, younger children relied more on the character's desires whereas older children were more likely to integrate desire, attention, and intention together. These data suggest that children's understanding of the process of learning is developing during the early elementary school years.     

Predictors of Preschoolers' Self-Knowledge: Reference to Emotion and Mental States in Mother-Child Conversation about Past Events

Reference to emotion and mental states were expected to predict the organization of children's self-knowledge. Thirty-three 3.5- to 4.5-year-olds (17 females and 15 males) discussed 4 past events with their mothers. Conversations were coded for emotional content and reference to mental states. Children completed the Children's Self-View Questionnaire (CSVQ; Eder, 1990). Organization of self-knowledge was defined as the consistency with which children rated themselves as either high or low with respect to the dispositions indexed by the CSVQ. Hierarchical multiple regression showed that reference to emotion was a significant predictor of organization scores after controlling for linguistic skill, but that mental state reference was not. Mothers initiated talk about emotion more often than their children did. The results are consistent with theories of the early social construction of the self-concept and have implications for developing models of autobiographical memory.     

Development of beliefs about storybook reality

The goal of this research was to assess children's beliefs about the reality status of storybook characters and events. In Experiment 1, 156 preschool age children heard realistic, fantastical, or religious stories, and their understanding of the reality status of the characters and events in the stories was assessed. Results revealed that 3-year-olds were more likely to judge characters as real than were 4- and 5-year-olds, but most children judged all characters as not real for all story types. Children of all ages who heard realistic stories made more claims that the events in the stories could happen in real life than did children who heard fantastical stories. Five-year-olds made significantly more claims that events in religious stories could happen in real life than did younger children. In Experiment 2, 136 4- and 5-year-olds heard similar stories. Results replicated those from Experiment 1, and also indicated a growing awareness of the basic nature of realistic fiction.     

The effect of question repetition within interviews on young children's eyewitness recall

This study investigated the influence of question repetition and question type (answerable, unanswerable, or opinion seeking) on children's recall. A total of 136 children (5-, 7-, and 9-year-olds) watched a live 15-min presentation. One week later, the children were asked 20 questions that were repeated an additional two times within the interview. Accuracy of children's responses to unanswerable questions declined with repetition. Children were more likely to change a response to an unanswerable question than to an answerable question. Overall, children maintained the same answers to only three-quarters of the repeated questions. The most common pattern of change was for children to change their answer the second time a question was asked and then to maintain that answer when questioned again. The high percentage of changed answers within a single interview has important implications for forensic interviewing.     

Three-year-old children can access their own memory to guide responses on a visual matching task

Many models of learning rely on accessing internal knowledge states. Yet, although infants and young children are recognized to be proficient learners, the ability to act on metacognitive information is not thought to develop until early school years. In the experiments reported here, 3.5-year-olds demonstrated memory-monitoring skills by responding on a non-verbal task originally developed for non-human animals, in which they had to access their knowledge states. Children learned a set of paired associates, and were given the option to skip uncertain trials on a recognition memory test. Accuracy for accepted items was significantly higher than for skipped on a subsequent memory task that included all items. Additionally, children whose memory-monitoring assessments more closely matched actual memory performance showed superior overall learning, suggesting a correlation between memory-monitoring and memory itself. The results suggest that children may have implicit access to internal knowledge states at very young ages, providing an explanation for how they are able to guide learning, even as infants.     

小学儿童一维空间方位传递性推理能力的发展

研究了小学儿童一维空间方位传递性推理能力的发展水平及认知策略 ,同时 ,对心理模型理论进行了检验。被试为城市中等小学 7岁、9岁、11岁儿童各 2 4名 ,男女各半。 4种实验任务分别为三前提单模型、三前提双模型、四前提单模型和四前提双模型。采用个别实验 ,儿童在前提呈现的情况下进行推理。主要研究结果 :(1)从小学 7岁到 11岁 ,儿童的一维空间方位传递性推理能力明显提高 ,7岁儿童初步形成了一维空间方位推理能力 ,9岁和 11岁基本具有了这种能力 ;(2 )随着年龄增长 ,使用模型建构策略解决问题的儿童人次越来越多 ,绝大部分 11岁儿童都能使用这一策略进行推理。但即使儿童使用了模型建构策略 ,他们的推理成绩也没有反映出模型数量所造成的任务难度差异 ,即不符合心理模型理论关于模型数量的主要预期。     

Fears, worries, and scary dreams in 4- to 12-year-old children: their content, developmental pattern, and origins

Investigated anxiety symptoms in normal school children 4 to 12 years of age (N = 190). The percentages of children reporting fears, worries, and scary dreams were 75.8, 67.4, and 80.5%, respectively, indicating that these anxiety symptoms are quite common among children. Inspection of the developmental pattern of these phenomena revealed that fears and scary dreams were common among 4- to 6-year-olds, became even more prominent in 7- to 9-year-olds, and then decreased in frequency in 10- to 12-year-olds. The developmental course of worry deviated from this pattern. This phenomenon was clearly more prevalent in older children (i.e., 7- to 12-year-olds) than in younger children. Furthermore, although the frequency of certain types of fears, worries, and dreams were found to change across age groups (e.g., the prevalence of fears and scary dreams pertaining to imaginary creatures decreased with age, whereas worry about test performance increased with age), the top intense fears, worries, and scary dreams remained relatively unchanged across age levels. An examination of the origins of these common anxiety phenomena showed that for fears and scary dreams, information was the most commonly reported pathway, whereas for worry, conditioning experiences were more prominent.