Attachment and preschool children's understanding of maternal versus non‐maternal psychological states

There is growing evidence that insecurely attached children are less advanced in their social understanding than their secure counterparts. However, attachment may also predict how individual children use their social understanding across different relationships. For instance, the insecure child's social‐cognitive difficulties may be more pronounced when the psychological states of an attachment figure are being considered. In the current study, forty‐eight 4‐ to 5‐year‐old children were asked about their mothers' emotions and false beliefs, as well as those of non‐attachment figures. The Separation Anxiety Test (SAT) was administered to assess children's attachment representations. Children's SAT scores predicted their overall performance on the false belief and causes of emotion tasks, even after controlling for age and verbal ability. More interestingly, however, children with high scores on the Avoidance dimension of the SAT experienced greater difficulty understanding maternal false beliefs relative to those of an unfamiliar adult female. Thus, although attachment insecurity may hinder social‐cognitive development in general, the findings suggest that there are more specific effects as well. Attachment representations that are characterized by high levels of avoidance appear to interfere with children's ability to fully engage their social‐cognitive skills when reasoning about maternal mental states.     

Two‐year‐olds’ understanding of self‐symbols

This study investigated 48 2.5‐year‐olds’ ability to map from their own body to a two‐dimensional self‐representation and also examined relations between parents’ talk about body representations and their children's understanding of self‐symbols. Children participated in two dual‐representation tasks in which they were asked to match body parts between a symbol and its referent. In one task, they used a self‐symbol and in the other they used a symbol for a doll. Participants were also read a book about body parts by a parent. As a group, children found the self‐symbol task more difficult than the doll‐task; however, those whose parents explicitly pointed out the relation between their children's bodies and the symbols in the book performed better on the self‐symbol task. The findings demonstrate that 2‐year‐old children have difficulty comprehending a self‐symbol, even when it is two‐dimensional and approximately the same size as them, and suggest that parents’ talk about self‐symbols may facilitate their understanding.     

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.     

Pre‐school children's understanding of the emotional consequences for failures to act prosocially

This study compares 4‐ and 5‐year‐old children's assessment of the emotional consequences of failures to act prosocially with their assessment of the emotional consequences for prosocial and victimization situations. After listening to stories illustrating each of the socio‐moral situations, children rated the emotional consequences for an actor, recipient and observing teacher and justified their ratings. Findings show that pre‐school children's emotion ratings for failures to act prosocially differed from their emotion ratings for prosocial and victimization behaviours. Preschool children's ratings of an actor's emotions depended on the presence or absence of an observing teacher in prosocial and victimization situations, but not in failures to act prosocially. This study illustrates the complexity of young children's reasoning about failures to act prosocially and highlights the importance of contextual influences on children's understanding of socio‐moral emotions.     

Associations of Mother–Child Reminiscing about Negative Past Events,Coping, and Self‐Concept in Early Childhood

Parent–child reminiscing conversations in early childhood have received theoretical attention as a forum for children's self‐concept development, but this has been little addressed in empirical work. This study examines associations between emotion reminiscing and children's self‐concepts and, building from the reminiscing and personality development literatures, also explores the role of children's coping. Sixty 4‐ and 5‐year‐old children and their mothers completed reminiscing conversations about events in which the child had experienced negative emotion, children completed an age‐appropriate assessment of their self‐concept, and mothers and teachers reported on children's coping strategies. Children's self‐perceived timidity was associated with their explanations for negative emotions during reminiscing. Children's self‐perceived negative affect was associated with fewer emotion resolutions during reminiscing, and with distinctive patterns of coping. Both reminiscing and coping made unique contributions to children's self‐concepts, and findings also suggest that coping may in some contexts indirectly connect reminiscing with self‐concept. These findings suggest that reminiscing conversations both reflect children's characteristics and provide a context for learning about their characteristics, along with strategies for emotion management. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The relationship between Turkish children's perceptions of marital conflict and their internalizing and externalizing problems

The present study investigated the relationship between children's perceptions of marital conflict and children's internalizing and externalizing problems. Additionally, investigating gender and age differences in children's perceptions and the type of problems they exhibited were the other purposes of the study. The sample consisted of 9‐ to 12‐year‐old, nonclinical children from intact families (N = 232), one of their parents, and teachers. The data were gathered by administering the Child Behavior Checklist for Ages 4–18 and the Teacher's Report Form to adult participants and the Children's Perception of Interparental Conflict Scale and the Children's Depression Inventory to the child participants. Findings indicated that there was a significant relationship between children's perceptions of marital conflict and their internalizing and externalizing problems. More specifically, children's perceptions of conflict properties were associated with their internalizing problems in parents', teachers', and children's reports. Children's perceptions of threat were associated with child‐reported depression. Children's perceptions of self‐blame were associated with child‐reported depression, parent‐reported internalizing and externalizing problems, and teacher‐reported externalizing problems. Furthermore, it was found that there were gender and age differences in children's perceptions of marital conflict and their internalizing and externalizing problems. Findings indicated that boys have higher self‐blame scores and teacher‐reported externalizing problems than girls and that girls have more parent‐ and teacher‐reported internalizing problems than boys. Additionally, it was found that 9‐year‐old children have more teacher‐reported internalizing and externalizing problems than 12‐year‐old children. Also, 9‐year‐old boys have higher parent‐reported externalizing problems than 9‐year‐old girls and 9‐year‐old boys have higher parent‐reported externalizing problems than 12‐year‐old boys.     

Children's Preference for Television Programs: Long‐Tail Evidence1

It has been hypothesized recently that many social phenomena and consumer choices are characterized by a long‐tail distribution. We investigated the preferences of 4‐ to 8‐year‐old children in the domain of television programs, and found a long‐tail distribution of children's preference, characterized by Zipf's law. We also found a high awareness of parents about the preferences of their children, even about those that they judged negatively. Our findings might have useful implications for the study of consumers' behavior and for research on complex interactions between psychological and socioeconomic factors.     

The effect of peer collaboration on children's problem‐solving ability

Background. A Vygotskian framework links cognitive change to collaborative interaction with a more competent partner whereas a Piagetian perspective supports the view that cognitive conflict arising from peer interaction leads to cognitive change. Aims. The study investigated the effect of collaborative learning on children's problem‐solving ability and whether differences in knowledge status or the use of explanatory language were contributing factors. Sample. Participants were 100 Year 2 children (aged between 6 and 7 years), from schools in high socio‐economic areas, who individually completed a pre‐ and post‐test comprising a block sorting task. Method. During the experimental phase, children completed a card sorting activity, either individually or in same‐gender dyads. The dyads consisted of same or different ability children who operated under either a ‘talk’ or ‘no‐talk’ condition. Results. It was found that children who collaborated collectively obtained a significantly higher number of correct sorts than children who worked individually. However, post‐testing indicated that only those children of lower sorting ability who collaborated with higher sorting ability peers showed a significant improvement in sorting ability from pre‐test scores. In addition, it was found that when analysis was limited to this particular group, only those children who were required to explain the sort for their partner to carry out improved significantly from pre‐ to post‐test. Conclusion. It is suggested that perhaps the two theoretical positions are not as mutually exclusive as they are often portrayed. Implications of these findings for teachers and children's learning are also discussed.     

Mothers' Attention‐getting Utterances During Shared Book Reading: Links to Low‐income Preschoolers' Verbal Engagement,Visual Attention,and Early Literacy

This study examined associations among low‐income mothers' use of attention‐getting utterances during shared book reading, preschoolers' verbal engagement and visual attention to reading, and their early literacy skills (N = 51). Mother–child shared book reading sessions were videotaped and coded for each utterance, including attention talk, contextualized talk, de‐contextualized talk, and print talk. Preschoolers' attention during book reading was assessed using two measures: verbal engagement by using a rating scale of preschoolers' involvement in book reading discussion and visual attention by coding visual gaze. Findings indicated that mothers' attention talk was positively associated with children's verbal engagement, while maternal print talk was associated with children's visual attention. Further, low‐level maternal print talk was associated with higher early decoding scores of children when it was accompanied with high‐level maternal attention talk. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Children prefer to learn from mind‐readers

Kim and Harris ( 2014 , J. Cogn. Dev.) showed that children selectively learned from an informant who produced apparently magical outcomes as compared to another informant who produced only ordinary outcomes in the domain of everyday physics. In the present study, we tested children's ability to differentiate between and selectively learn from informants who displayed either an extraordinary or an ordinary ability in the domain of everyday psychology. Prior studies have shown that children come to appreciate what is ordinarily involved in knowing the private mental states of other people. Drawing on this research, we asked whether 3‐ to 4‐ and 5‐ to 6‐year‐old children preferentially learned from an informant who knew another person's mind via either an ordinary or an extraordinary form of communication. As compared to younger children, older children were more likely to learn from the extraordinary informant. Moreover, children's ability to differentiate between the two informants was a better predictor of their learning from the extraordinary informant than age. We discuss the findings in the light of prior work on selective learning, children's ideas about prayer and their understanding of impossibility.     

Children's Explanations as a Window Into Their Intuitive Theories of the Social World

Social categorization is an early emerging and robust component of social cognition, yet the role that social categories play in children's understanding of the social world has remained unclear. The present studies examined children's (N = 52 four‐ and five‐year olds) explanations of social behavior to provide a window into their intuitive theories of how social categories constrain human action. Children systematically referenced category memberships and social relationships as causal‐explanatory factors for specific types of social interactions: harm among members of different categories more than harm among members of the same category. In contrast, they systematically referred to agents' mental states to explain the reverse patterns of behaviors: harm among members of the same category more than harm among members of different categories. These data suggest that children view social category memberships as playing a causal‐explanatory role in constraining social interactions.     

Theory of mind selectively predicts preschoolers’ knowledge‐based selective word learning

Children can selectively attend to various attributes of a model, such as past accuracy or physical strength, to guide their social learning. There is a debate regarding whether a relation exists between theory‐of‐mind skills and selective learning. We hypothesized that high performance on theory‐of‐mind tasks would predict preference for learning new words from accurate informants (an epistemic attribute), but not from physically strong informants (a non‐epistemic attribute). Three‐ and 4‐year‐olds (N = 65) completed two selective learning tasks, and their theory‐of‐mind abilities were assessed. As expected, performance on a theory‐of‐mind battery predicted children's preference to learn from more accurate informants but not from physically stronger informants. Results thus suggest that preschoolers with more advanced theory of mind have a better understanding of knowledge and apply that understanding to guide their selection of informants. This work has important implications for research on children's developing social cognition and early learning.     

Is understanding regret dependent on developments in counterfactual thinking?

Children's understanding of counterfactual emotions such as regret and relief develops relatively late compared to their ability to imagine counterfactual worlds. We tested whether a late development in counterfactual thinking: understanding counterfactuals as possibilities, underpinned children's understanding of regret. Thirty 5‐ and 6‐year‐olds completed tasks assessing counterfactual thinking and understanding regret. Performance on the counterfactual task was better than that on the regret task. We suggest that thinking about counterfactuals as possibilities is a necessary but not sufficient cognitive development in children's understanding of regret. We discuss how other developments in counterfactual thinking may underpin children's emotional understanding.     

The development of emotion recognition from facial expressions and non‐linguistic vocalizations during childhood

Sensitivity to facial and vocal emotion is fundamental to children's social competence. Previous research has focused on children's facial emotion recognition, and few studies have investigated non‐linguistic vocal emotion processing in childhood. We compared facial and vocal emotion recognition and processing biases in 4‐ to 11‐year‐olds and adults. Eighty‐eight 4‐ to 11‐year‐olds and 21 adults participated. Participants viewed/listened to faces and voices (angry, happy, and sad) at three intensity levels (50%, 75%, and 100%). Non‐linguistic tones were used. For each modality, participants completed an emotion identification task. Accuracy and bias for each emotion and modality were compared across 4‐ to 5‐, 6‐ to 9‐ and 10‐ to 11‐year‐olds and adults. The results showed that children's emotion recognition improved with age; preschoolers were less accurate than other groups. Facial emotion recognition reached adult levels by 11 years, whereas vocal emotion recognition continued to develop in late childhood. Response bias decreased with age. For both modalities, sadness recognition was delayed across development relative to anger and happiness. The results demonstrate that developmental trajectories of emotion processing differ as a function of emotion type and stimulus modality. In addition, vocal emotion processing showed a more protracted developmental trajectory, compared to facial emotion processing. The results have important implications for programmes aiming to improve children's socio‐emotional competence.     

Encouraging children to mentalise about a perceived outgroup increases prosocial behaviour towards outgroup members

We investigated whether encouraging young children to discuss the mental states of an immigrant group would elicit more prosocial behaviour towards them and impact on their perception of a group member's emotional experience. Five‐ and 6‐year‐old children were either prompted to talk about the thoughts and feelings of this social group or to talk about their actions. Across two studies, we found that this manipulation increased the extent to which children shared with a novel member of the immigrant group who was the victim of a minor transgression. The manipulation did not lead to greater sharing towards a victim from the children's own culture and did not influence their perception of a victim's negative emotions. These results may ultimately have implications for interventions aimed at fostering positive intergroup relations within the context of immigration.     

Relationships among parenting practices,parental stress,child behaviour,and children's social‐cognitive development

The present study included observational and self‐report measures to examine associations among parental stress, parental behaviour, child behaviour, and children's theory of mind and emotion understanding. Eighty‐three parents and their 3‐ to 5‐year‐old children participated. Parents completed measures of parental stress, parenting (laxness, overreactivity), and child behaviour (internalizing, externalizing); children completed language, theory of mind, and emotion understanding measures. Parent–child interactions also were observed (N=47). Laxness and parenting stress predicted children's theory of mind performance and parental usage of imitative gestures and vocalizations accounted for unique variance in emotion understanding. Associations also were found between child behaviour and emotion understanding. Results provide support for direct and indirect associations between parent–child interactions and early social‐cognitive development. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Coparenting Conflict and Academic Readiness in Children of Teen Mothers: Effortful Control as a Mediator

Children's exposure to coparenting conflict has important implications for their developmental functioning, yet limited work has focused on such processes in families with diverse structures or ethnically and culturally diverse backgrounds. This longitudinal study examined the processes by which Mexican‐origin adolescent mothers' coparenting conflict with their 3‐year‐old children's grandmothers and biological fathers (N = 133 families) were linked to children's academic and social skills at 5 years of age, and whether children's effortful control at 4 years of age mediated the link between coparenting conflict and indices of children's academic readiness. Findings revealed that adolescent mothers' coparenting conflict with their child's biological father was linked to indices of children's academic and social school readiness through children's effortful control among girls, but not boys, whereas conflict with grandmothers was directly linked to boys' and girls' social functioning 2 years later. Findings offer information about different mechanisms by which multiple coparenting units in families of adolescent mothers are related to their children's outcomes, and this work has important implications for practitioners working with families of adolescent mothers.     

Children's interpretive understanding,moral judgments,and emotion attributions: Relations to social behaviour

The study investigated interpretive understanding, moral judgments, and emotion attributions in relation to social behaviour in a sample of 59 5‐year‐old, 123 7‐year‐old, and 130 9‐year‐old children. Interpretive understanding was assessed by two tasks measuring children's understanding of ambiguous situations. Moral judgments and emotion attributions were measured using two moral rule transgressions. Social behaviour was assessed using teachers' ratings of aggressive and prosocial behaviour. Aggressive behaviour was positively related to interpretive understanding and negatively related to moral reasoning. Prosocial behaviour was positively associated with attribution of fear. Moral judgments and emotion attributions were related, depending on age. Interpretive understanding was unrelated to moral judgments and emotion attributions. The findings are discussed in regard to the role of interpretive understanding and moral and affective knowledge in understanding children's social behaviour.     

Young children's beliefs about self‐disclosure of performance failure and success

Self‐disclosure of performance information involves the balancing of instrumental, learning benefits (e.g., obtaining help) against social costs (e.g., diminished reputation). Little is known about young children's beliefs about performance self‐disclosure. The present research investigates preschool‐ and early school‐age children's expectations of self‐disclosure in different contexts. In two experiments, 3‐ to 7‐year‐old children (total N = 252) heard vignettes about characters who succeeded or failed at solving a puzzle. Both experiments showed that children across all ages reasoned that people are more likely to self‐disclose positive than negative performances, and Experiment 2 showed that children across all ages reasoned that people are more likely to self‐disclose both positive and negative performances in a supportive than an unsupportive peer environment. Additionally, both experiments revealed changes with age – Younger children were less likely to expect people to withhold their performance information (of both failures and successes) than older children. These findings point to the preschool ages as a crucial beginning to children's developing recognition of people's reluctance to share performance information.     

Predicting changes in children's self‐perceptions from playground social activities and interactions

The general aim of this study was to examine the concurrent and longitudinal (6 month) associations between 8‐ to 9‐year‐old children's (N=75) social activities and interactions during recess and their self‐perceptions, and to test for gender differences in those associations. The underlying rationale was that recess provides an important, and hitherto unstudied, context in which children's experiences can impact on their views of themselves. Consistent with this proposition, several of the playground variables were significantly correlated concurrently with participants' self‐perceptions regarding social acceptance, and, particularly, athletic competence. Even stronger evidence came from the longitudinal analyses which indicated that group size positively predicted changes in social acceptance and global self‐worth scores; network positively predicted changes in physical appearance and global self‐worth scores; rule games positively predicted changes in athletic competence, physical appearance and global self‐worth scores; conversation negatively predicted changes in athletic competence, and alone negatively predicted changes in physical appearance and global self‐worth scores. Several significant gender differences were obtained: the association between rule games and changes in social acceptance was negative for girls but positive for boys; a positive association between conversation and social acceptance was evident among girls but not boys; and a negative association between conversation and changes in athletic competence was evident among boys but not girls. The theoretical and practical implications of these results are discussed.