Concurrent Relations Between Perspective-Taking Skills,Desire Understanding,and Internal-State Vocabulary

Recent studies suggest that there appears to be a similar developmental sequence in the understanding of mental states in both internal-state language and in standard theory-of-mind tasks. These findings suggest possible developmental relations between children's ability to talk and think about the mind. Two experiments investigated the concurrent relations between internal-state vocabulary and theory-of-mind abilities in 30-month-old toddlers. In Experiment 1, children's internal-state language vocabulary was significantly and specifically related to their concurrent understanding of others' visual and emotional perspectives and was less strongly related to desire understanding. Experiment 2 replicated and extended these findings by examining the link between internal-state vocabulary and visual perspective-taking and comprehension of own versus other's desire, controlling for general verbal skills. Children with a more developed internal-state vocabulary performed better on perspective-taking tasks. These findings suggest that labeling and reasoning about mental states are related abilities at the early stages of theory-of-mind development.     

Trust and understanding in the attorney-juvenile relationship

This study investigated whether court-experienced juveniles differ from court-experienced adults in their understanding of the defense counsel role and their trust in attorneys. Court-experienced juveniles and young adults, ages 12 to 20, were compared on measures of trust, attitudes toward authority, understanding about the role of defense counsel, trial-related knowledge, and the Trust in My Lawyer Scale. The findings showed that court-related knowledge is associated with both level of intellectual functioning and age and that court-related misunderstandings are associated with mistrust in attorneys. The findings did not support the assertion that there are significant differences between juveniles and young adults in their trust of their attorneys. Results regarding parental involvement, attorney characteristics, and interaction effects of race and intellectual functioning in relation to trust are also discussed.     

Pediatric Whole Exome Sequencing: an Assessment of Parents’ Perceived and Actual Understanding.

Whole exome sequencing (WES) is an integral tool in the diagnosis of genetic conditions in pediatric patients, but concerns have been expressed about the complexity of the information and the possibility for secondary findings that need to be conveyed to those deciding about WES. Currently, there is no validated tool to assess parental understanding of WES. We developed and implemented a survey to assess perceived and actual understanding of WES in parents who consented to clinical WES for their child between July 2013 and May 2015. Fifty-three eligible surveys were returned (57% response rate). Areas with both low perceived and actual understanding about WES included how genes are analyzed and lack of protection against life insurance discrimination. Parents also had low actual understanding for two questions related to secondary findings – reporting of secondary findings in a parent (if tested) and whether secondary findings can be related to traits such as height and hair color. Further work to develop a validated tool to assess understanding of WES would be beneficial as WES is integrated more frequently into clinical care.     

Integrating brain science research with intelligence research

Understanding the possible causes of differences in intelligence is crucial if children are to achieve their full potential. Such understanding has been hampered until recently, however, because researchers who study intelligence have neglected recent findings in the brain sciences suggesting that the brain develops in response to environmental stimulation. These findings have seemed to contradict intelligence research that suggests that intellectual abilities are inherited. However, the findings from intelligence research and the brain sciences can be integrated if it is accepted that there are individual differences in the process by which the brain adapts to the environment, such that some people's brains are better at adapting than others'. The findings obtained from intelligence research are consistent with this integrated model. Such an integration has implications for better understanding the nature of intelligence.     

What influences children's and adolescents' understanding of the complexity of the Internet?

This study aimed at analyzing complex relationships among Internet use, Internet users, and conceptual understanding of the Internet. It used path models to examine factors related to Internet use (duration of Internet use, frequency of Internet use, and informal Internet classes) and Internet users (age and gender) in affecting understanding of the technical and social complexity of the Internet for 322 elementary and middle school students. The findings of the study indicate that (a) age of young Internet users had predominant effects on both the technical and social understanding of the Internet; (b) frequency of Internet use and informal Internet classes had small but significant effects on social understanding, but no effect on technical understanding; and (c) technical understanding had a unidirectional effect on social understanding. The implications of these findings for the implementation of the Children's Internet Protection Act are discussed.     

Children with autism's perception and understanding of ambiguous figures: Evidence for pictorial metarepresentation,a research note

A large body of autism research over the last 20 years has shown that people with autism have difficulties understanding mental states. This has been conceived of as a metarepresentational deficit. An open question is whether people with autism's metarepresentational deficit is limited to the mental domain. This research explores individuals with autism's understanding of the representational nature of pictures. With the use of ambiguous figures, where a single stimulus is capable of representing two distinct referents, we compared metarepresentational abilities in the pictorial and mental domains and the perception of pictorial ambiguity. Our findings indicate that individuals with autism are impaired in mental metarepresentation but not in pictorial metarepresentation. These findings suggest that children with autism understand the representational nature of pictures. We conclude that children with autism's understanding of the representational nature of pictures is in advance of their metarepresentational understanding of mind. Their perception of figure ambiguity is comparable to the typical population.     

Pathways to behavior problems in Norwegian kindergarten children: The role of parent emotion socialization and child emotion understanding

More than two decades of research have shown that parental emotion-related socialization behaviors (ERSBs) significantly predict child emotion understanding and externalizing behavior problems. This study aimed to replicate these findings in a sample of 40 Norwegian preschool children and to test whether the effect of parental ERSBs on externalizing child behavior problems was mediated through child emotion understanding. Parental report on ERSBs was obtained using the Coping with Children’s Negative Emotions Scale (CCNES) questionnaire. Child emotion understanding was assessed directly using the Test of Emotion Comprehension (TEC). The results showed that parental distress reactions and externalizing child behavior problems were significantly correlated and that parental expressive encouragement was significantly correlated with child emotion understanding. Estimation of indirect effects was conducted using process analysis and showed that parental expressive encouragement was indirectly related to externalizing child behavior problems (b = −0.17) via child emotion understanding. The results suggest that better child emotion understanding, and lower parental distress are related to lower levels of behavior problems in preschool children. These findings provide support for the Parental Meta-Emotion Philosophy (PMEP) model, where the effect of parental emotion socialization on externalizing child behavior problems is mediated through emotion understanding.     

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.     

Preschoolers' understanding of knowing-that and knowing-how in the United States and Hong Kong

Two experiments on preschoolers' understanding of the effects of exposure on knowing-that and knowing-how were conducted with 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old children (N=388) in 2 locations: a small midwestern city in the United States and a suburban area of Hong Kong, China. By using both English- and Chinese-speaking samples, the authors examined differences in children's understanding of knowing-that and knowing-how as well as the impact of different types of linguistic markers on the understanding of these concepts. Across both studies, in both locations, and for judging the knowledge of self or of others, children's understanding for knowing-that preceded their understanding for knowing-how. Implications of these findings both for universal patterns of theory-of-mind development and for how culture may impact on that development are discussed.     

When the risks are low: the impact of absolute and comparative information on disturbance and understanding in US and UK samples

When Klein, W. M. gave participants absolute and comparative risk information (crossed experimentally) they were more disturbed by being above than below average, but not by being at higher rather than lower risk. The current experiment tests whether Klein's findings extend to situations involving lower risk figures more typical of genuine health risks, assesses participants’ understanding of the information, and directly compares responses of US and UK samples. Participants were presented with hypothetical information about comparative and absolute risks of deep vein thrombosis. There was a main effect of absolute risk information on disturbance and precaution intentions in the US sample, but no effects of comparative information on these measures in either sample. Understanding was poor among participants receiving both pieces of risk information. Future studies should include measures of understanding to establish whether people are failing to understand what they are told or failing to respond systematically to what they understand. Practically, the findings caution against providing comparative risk information when communicating low risk figures.     

Defending psychopathy: an argument from values and moral responsibility

How psychopaths and their capacity for moral action are viewed is not only philosophically interesting but is also important and relevant for policy. The philosophical discussion of psychopathy has focussed upon the psychological faculties that are prerequisites for moral responsibility and empirical findings regarding psychopathy that are relevant to philosophical accounts of moral understanding and motivation. However, there are legitimate worries about whether psychopathy is a robust scientific construct, and there are risks attached to reifying psychopathy or other psychiatric constructs. We defend the concept of psychopathy by pointing out the relevance of empirical studies about it for our ordinary practices of ascribing moral responsibility and folk psychological accounts of moral understanding and motivation.     

Applying a social identity paradigm to examine the relationship between men's self-esteem and their attitudes toward men and women

The authors used a psychometrically robust measure of attitudes toward men in applying a social identity framework to obtain a better understanding of the previous finding of a significant positive relationship, among men, between self-esteem and attitudes toward men. Two studies of that issue are reported. Northern Irish university students (N = 106 men) participated in the 1st study, and 56 English university students participated in a replication. In both studies, participants completed measures of attitudes toward men and women before and after an experimental intervention that was designed to produce a threat to self-esteem regarding their identity as men. The findings suggested that, following such a threat, men with a high positive regard toward men will have enhanced self-regard toward men and will tend to view women more negatively. The present findings also suggested that the application of social identity theory and the method used in the present research in investigating that theory are very relevant to the understanding of the relationship between men's self-esteem and their attitudes toward men and women.     

Children's understanding of physical illnesses and psychological states

Abstract

The present study set out to compare 5.7, and 9-year-old children's understanding of a physical illness (chicken pox) with their understanding of a psychological state (depression). In addition, information about personal experience of the illnesses and external sources of information was elicited, in order to assess the effects of both age and experience. Children at all ages showed a basic intact knowledge of both chicken pox and depression, although older children had a more sophisticated understanding of depression, and had acquired this knowledge from a greater number of sources. The clinical implications of the findings, and their relationship to both neo-Piagetian and more recent theories of conceptual development in childhood are discussed.     

Psychological and social-structural influences on commitment to volunteering

A model is described in which commitment to volunteering is hypothesized to be the result of demographic qualities, personality, identity, values, and social relationships. The model is tested and cross-validated using data from a nationally representative sample of American adults. The results from structural equation modeling analyses suggest that the hypothetical model provides a good fit to the data. Moreover, the findings suggest that the relations of personality and demographic characteristics to hours devoted to volunteering are largely mediated by latent constructs capturing helping identity and community participation. The implications of the model and the findings for our understanding of volunteering are discussed.     

The Significance of Military Contexts and Culture for Understanding Family Well-Being: Parent Life Satisfaction and Adolescent Outcomes

Formal systems and informal networks are presumed to be significant contexts that affect military families. Their effects on both parents and adolescents in active duty military families are examined (N = 236 families). Social organization and contextual model of family stress theories are employed as frameworks for the analyses of how dimensions of military culture influence parents’ life satisfaction, as well as key developmental outcomes of their adolescents (for example, mental health). Key findings from our analyses included a positive relationship between parents support from military leaders and fellow soldiers and parental well-being findings revealed the importance of civilian parents’ satisfaction with military life on adolescent outcomes for families that have experienced stressful military contexts. These findings provide support for the significance of multiple contexts for understanding resilience among military members and their families.     

Novelty, stimulus control, and operant variability

Although behavior analysis has been criticized for failure to account for response novelty, many common behavior-analytic concepts and processes (e.g., selectionism, the operant, reinforcement, and stimulus control) assume variability both in the environment and in behavior. The importance of the relation between variability and novelty, particularly for verbal behavior, is discussed, and concepts used to account for novel behavior are examined. Experimental findings also are reviewed that suggest that variability in behavior can come under discriminative control, and these findings are applied to describe novel instances of behavior that may arise during problem solving. We conclude that variations provided and selected by the terms of the three-term contingency are powerful means for understanding novel behavior.     

Antiwomen But Proquota: Disaggregating Sexism and Support for Gender Quota Policies

Previous research on support for gender quotas focuses on attitudes toward gender equality and government intervention as explanations. We argue the role of attitudes toward women in understanding support for policies aiming to increase the presence of women in politics is ambivalent—both hostile and benevolent forms of sexism contribute in understanding support, albeit in different ways. Using original data from a survey conducted on a probability-based sample of Australian respondents, our findings demonstrate that hostile sexists are more likely to oppose increasing of women's presence in politics through the adoption of gender quotas. Benevolent sexists, on the other hand, are more likely to support these policies than respondents exhibiting low levels of benevolent sexism. We argue this is because benevolent sexism holds that women are pure and need protection; they do not have what it takes to succeed in politics without the assistance of quotas. Finally, we show that while women are more likely to support quotas, ambivalent sexism has the same relationship with support among both women and men. These findings suggest that aggregate levels of public support for gender quotas do not necessarily represent greater acceptance of gender equality generally.     

Establishing operations, cognition, and emotion

In this paper we argue that behavior analysts have tended to neglect the study of important aspects of complex human behavior, including cognition and emotion. This relative neglect has been costly in terms of mainstream psychology's perception of the field of behavior analysis and in terms of our ability to provide a more thorough account of human behavior. Observations and findings from the clinical context are offered as examples of behavior that are not readily explained by the three-term contingency, and we argue that an adequate account of these behaviors must include principles derived from recent behavior-analytic work, in particular a better understanding of the short- and long-term effects of establishing operations. The concept of the establishing operation and its implications for understanding complex human behavior are discussed.     

Relationships between Machiavellianism, emotional intelligence and theory of mind in children

The current study investigates the associations of Machiavellianism (Mach) with trait and ability emotional intelligence (EI), and theory of mind (ToM) in 109 primary school children. Consistent with previous research with adults, negative associations were found between Mach and social and emotional understanding. Subsequent multiple regression analyses for girls showed that being more adept at emotional and social understanding does not lead them to manipulate others in social encounters. This was not the case for boys. These findings are discussed in relation to other social and individual difference variables that impact on Mach, particularly amongst boys.     

Exploring Individual and Contextual Antecedents of Attitudes Toward the Acceptability of Cheating and Plagiarism

The purpose of this study was to identify the relative contribution of individual and contextual predictors to students’ attitudes toward the acceptability of cheating and plagiarism. A group of 324 students from a tertiary institution in New Zealand completed an online survey. The findings indicate that gender, justice sensitivity, and understanding of university policies regarding academic dishonesty were the key predictors of the students’ attitudes toward the acceptability of cheating and plagiarism, both as agents of dishonest conduct and as witnesses of misconduct among their peers. The implications of these findings for the development of policies and initiatives in tertiary institutions are discussed.