Do children think that inheritance determines height and weight?

Three studies were conducted to investigate if children think that physical growth is determined by inheritance. All three studies employed the “switched‐at‐birth” task. Study 1 investigated if children and adults thought that height and weight were determined by parentage. Study 2 examined preschoolers and elementary school children's and adults' understanding of the role of parentage and nutrition in determining weight. Study 2a examined children's and adults' understanding of the role of parentage and nutrition in determining height. Results indicate that overall, preschoolers and third graders have more of an inheritance bias for height than for weight. However, when nutrition was introduced, apart from third graders, all other grades reasoned that nutrition played a greater role in determining weight. Overall, these results indicate that even young children have a rudimentary but differentiated theory of the role of inheritance in determining height and weight.

Highlights

• Participants were presented with switched‐at‐birth tasks to determine if they thought that parentage and/or nutrition influences height and weight.
• Young children viewed height as determined more by parentage than weight, suggesting that they have a differentiated and autonomous theory for the determination of height.

     

Children's Judgments of Certainty and Uncertainty on a Problem Where the Possible Solutions Differ in Likelihood

In this study the author examined why children and adults think they need to eat. Preschoolers through adults were provided with physiological, social, psychological, and routine causes for eating breakfast, lunch, snack, and dinner, and were asked to either agree or disagree with the causal responses provided. A 4 Reason × 4 Meal repeated measures analysis of variance revealed significant main effects for meals and reasons, as well as significant Meal × Reason and Meal × Reason × Grade interactions. The effect sizes ranged from 0.1 to 0.7. Across all age groups, participants acknowledged physiological needs and desires (fulfilling hunger and needs to stay healthy) and routine (e.g., it is dinner time) as the primary causes for eating breakfast, lunch, and dinner. However, for snack physiological needs were the primary reason. Second-grade students onward spontaneously produced biological justifications such as the need for energy and nutrition as important reasons for food consumption. These results lend support to the developmental model that children's and adults’ understanding of eating changes in middle childhood.     

FOOD: ITS MANY ASPECTS IN SCIENCE,RELIGION, AND CULTURE

Food is a sine qua non for life on Earth. It has more significance than nutrition and sustenance, more variety than many aspects of human culture. Food has religious as well as historical dimensions. The complexity of the food chain and of the related ecological balance is one of the wonders of the biological world. In the human context, food has found countless expressions and regional richness. Food has provoked feasts, as its lack and maldistribution have caused famines. While being a source of physical satisfaction food has also had environmental impacts. Some of these matters are explored in these reflections.     

Religion,Kultur und Psychotherapie bei muslimischen Migranten

Patients from collective cultures with a tradition-bound Islamic cultural background (e.g. people from the Middle East and some Far East countries, such as Pakistan and Indonesia) have different values, norms and perceptions of spirituality and religion. These concepts of spirituality and religion have a different perception of disease and different conceptions of healing, which up to now have not been sufficiently appreciated in modern multimodal therapeutic approaches and health management. The notions of magic, healing ceremonies and religious rituals can be used as intercultural resources by taking scientific psychotherapeutic standards into consideration. Taking patients’ value systems also into consideration in a culturally sensitive way, they can promote the medical psychotherapeutic work and lead to establishing partnership-like relationships between patient and therapist.     

How do Children Associate Food Type to Illustrated Height and Obesity?

The following three studies examined young children’s and adults’ recognition of the impact of healthy and unhealthy foods on height and weight. Study 1 examined the impact of foods on height and weight. Study 2 examined the role of foods on characters of different ethnicities. Study 3 controlled for participants’ prior knowledge about the impact of food by presenting fictitious alien characters. The results indicated that preschoolers recognized that healthy foods promoted an increase in height but only for African-American images. Adults recognized the impact of nutrition on both height and weight with a greater emphasis of nutrition for weight than height. These results demonstrate that preschoolers’ biological model is more sophisticated and differentiated than previously reported.     

Development of norms for executive functions in typically-developing Indian urban preschool children and its association with nutritional status

Executive functions (EFs) are essential and important for achieving success in children’s everyday lives and play a fundamental role in children’s cognitive, academic, social, emotional and behavioral functioning. A cross-sectional study was carried out to develop age- and sex-specific norms for EFs using the Behavior Rating Inventory of Executive Function – Preschool Version (BRIEF-P) among 2- to 5-year-olds from urban Bangalore, India. In addition, the association between EFs and anthropometric measures, a marker of nutritional status, is also examined. Primary caregivers of 412 children, equally distributed by age and sex, participated. Raw scores for each domain and indices were converted to standard t-scores and percentiles were computed. A t-score at or above 63 corresponding to the 90th percentile was considered as the cutoff for executive dysfunction in this sample. The prevalence of executive dysfunction is 10% based on the Global Executive Composite score of the BRIEF-P. The cutoff score for identifying executive dysfunction using existing United States (US) norms is higher compared to the cutoff score obtained in the current study. Therefore, using US norms for Indian children could result in the prevalence of executive dysfunction been underestimated. Multiple linear regression analysis revealed that stunted and underweight children have significantly elevated EF scores after adjusting for age, sex and socioeconomic status (SES; p < .01). A greater understanding of EFs in preschool children is important for the early identification of executive dysfunction and implementing interventions to improve their future prospects. This study also shows that undernourished children are more likely to have executive dysfunction.     

Relational and Contextual Reasoning: Philosophical and Logical Aspects

This essay is a commentary on Helmut Reich's recently published book on relational and contextual reasoning (RCR). Reich's ideas are relevant in contexts of conflict, and they enable us to consider the notion of objectivity differently. He makes us see the constraints in individual perspectives. His book also can enable people to formulate problems of human concern in a wider and richer framework, which may lead to solutions not obtainable on the basis of binary logic.     

TECHNO‐SECULARISM: COMMENTS AND REFLECTIONS

Abstract. I comment on some of the points made in John Caiazza's thesis on techno‐secularism and offer some of my own further reflections on the subject. Tertullian's rhetorical question about Athens and Jerusalem has universal relevance, not just for Western culture, and, notwithstanding the many positive contributions of science and technology to human culture and civilization, they may not take the place of religion of one kind or another in the foreseeable future. What is needed is to transform religions in ways that meet the challenges of a world drastically transformed by science and technology.     

Relationship Between Miscarriage and Dysfunctional Cognitions About Trauma,Coping Mechanisms,and Posttraumatic Growth

Many studies have described grief and psychiatric symptomatology as a typical feature following miscarriage. How women who had a miscarriage (MG) respond to trauma in terms of negative cognitions about their selves and the world, the coping strategies they employ to overcome the effects of the trauma, and what factors might be indicative of posttraumatic growth (PTG) in this population have not been extensively studied so far. We aimed to identify whether women who had a miscarriage (N = 74 vs. N = 82 control subjects) exhibited higher levels of psychological distress symptoms, dysfunctional cognitions, and maladaptive coping strategies, and whether women with lower PTG employed more maladaptive coping strategies, and reported higher levels of dysfunctional cognitions. Group comparisons according to the diagnostic groups based on self-report measures for depression, anxiety, posttraumatic stress disorder and according to the level of PTG, and stepwise linear regression analyses with PTG as the outcome were performed. Our study demonstrated that the MG does not necessarily differ from the control group on some measures of psychopathology, coping mechanisms, dysfunctional cognitions, or PTG. Yet, the MG who exhibited higher levels of PTG had specific predictors, and women with a psychiatric diagnosis differed from participants with no diagnoses on some measures of dysfunctional cognitions, coping mechanisms, and PTG. Further studies with a prospective design could further clarify the needs of the MG requiring psychotherapeutic interventions.