A Comparative Study on Storytelling Perceptions of Chinese,Vietnamese, American,and German Education Students

The study compared the perceptions of adults from four countries about storytelling. Americans (N = 153), Germans (N = 163), Chinese (N = 324), and Vietnamese (N = 356) completed a survey. Americans' scores on measures of storytelling experiences were the highest overall. Americans and Germans reported having significantly more childhood experiences of storytelling than the Chinese and Vietnamese. Vietnamese reported that storytelling experiences have impacted their resilience and propensity to use storytelling for teaching more than Chinese and Germans. Practical implications are that educators should investigate their students' stance on storytelling so they may leverage culturally responsive literacy practices.     

Enhanced discrimination in autism

Children with autism are superior to typically developing children at visual search tasks (O'Riordan, Plaisted, Driver, & Baron-Cohen, in press; Plaisted, O'Riordan, & Baron-Cohen, l998b). This study investigates the reasons for this phenomenon. The performance of children with autism and of typically developing children was compared on a series of visual search tasks to investigate two related problems. The first issue was whether the critical determinant of search rate in children is the discriminability of the display items, as it is in normal adults. The second question investigated was whether the superior performance of individuals with autism on visual search tasks is due to an enhanced ability to discriminate between display items. The results demonstrated that discriminability is the rate-determining factor for children with and without autism, replicating earlier findings with normal adults, and that children with autism have an enhanced ability to discriminate between display items. Thus, it seems that an enhanced ability to discriminate between display items underlies superior visual search in autism.     

Exposure to behavioral regularities in everyday life predicts infants’ acquisition of mental state vocabulary

There are two broad views of children's theory of mind. The mentalist view is that it emerges in infancy and is possibly innate. The minimalist view is that it emerges more gradually in childhood and is heavily dependent on learning. According to minimalism, children initially understand behaviors rather than mental states, and they are assisted in doing so by recognizing repeating patterns in behavior. The regularities in behavior allow them to predict future behaviors, succeed on theory-of-mind tasks, acquire mental state words, and eventually, understand the mental states underlying behavior. The present study provided the first clear evidence for the plausibility of this view by fitting head cameras to 54 infants aged 6 to 25 months, and recording their view of the world in their daily lives. At 6 and 12 months, infants viewed an average of 146.5 repeated behaviors per hour, a rate consistent with approximately 560,000 repetitions in their first year, and with repetitions correlating with children's acquisition of mental state words, even after controlling for their general vocabulary and a range of variables indexing social interaction. We also recorded infants’ view of people searching or searching for and retrieving objects. These were 92 times less common and did not correlate with mental state vocabulary. Overall, the findings indicate that repeated behaviors provide a rich source of information for children that would readily allow them to recognize patterns in behavior and help them acquire mental state words, providing the first clear evidence for this claim of minimalism.

Research Highlights

• Six- to 25-month-olds wore head cameras to record home life from infants’ point-of-view and help adjudicate between nativist and minimalist views of theory-of-mind (ToM).
• Nativists say ToM is too early developing to enable learning, whereas minimalists say infants learn to predict behaviors from behavior patterns in environment.
• Consistent with minimalism, infants had an incredibly rich exposure (146.5/h, >560,000 in first year) to repeated behaviors (e.g., drinking from a cup repeatedly).
• Consistent with minimalism, more repeated behaviors correlated with infants’ mental state vocabulary, even after controlling for gender, age, searches witnessed and non-mental state vocabulary.

     

Attentional bias for threat: Evidence for delayed disengagement from emotional faces

This study examined cognitive aspects of coping with stress, how these related to religiosity, and how they related to outcomes (positive mood and distress). Participants (n=126) were of Protestant or Jewish background, and had all experienced recent major stress. They were assessed on measures of religiosity, religious coping, perception of the consequences of the stressful event, attributions for its occurrence, and distress, intrusive unpleasant thoughts, and positive affect. Religiosity affected ways of thinking about the stressful situation, namely: Belief that G-d is enabling the individual to bear their troubles (religious/spiritual support), belief that it was all for the best, and (more weakly) belief that all is ultimately controlled by G-d. Religiosity affected neither the proportion of positive consequences perceived as outcomes of the event, nor the causal attributions examined. Religious background (Protestant vs. Jewish) had negligible effects on the cognitions measures. Causal pathway analysis suggested that religion-related cognitions might directly affect positive affect, but not distress. Problems of design and interpretation are discussed. The study suggests some cognitively mediated means by which religion may have comforting effects.