Children’s understanding of the mind’s involvement in pretense: do words bend the truth?

Many have thought that children have an early appreciation of the role of the mind in pretense, fitting with the notion that pretend play is, in general, a ‘zone of proximal development’ ( Vygotsky, 1978 ). Although results from several experiments are against this hypothesis, the evidence from that line of research has been questioned because the experiments thus far have always used the word ‘pretend’. Young children might have a perfectly clear understanding that pretense involves the mind, but have mismapped the word ‘pretend’ onto non‐mental correlates of pretending, like action and costume. Two experiments tested this possibility. Four‐year‐olds were shown videos of people engaging in real and pretend activities and asked questions regarding the role of mind; for half the children the word ‘pretend’ was used to describe the activity, and for half it was not. Contrary to the hypothesis, even when the word ‘pretend’ was not used, roughly half of the 4‐year‐olds failed to designate pretense as involving mental activity. Consistent with prior work, more children of this age were cognizant of the mind’s involvement in pretense than were cognizant of the mind’s involvement in physical actions.     

From negative reactivity to empathic responding: Infants high in negative reactivity express more empathy later in development,with the help of regulation

Empathy has great effect on human well‐being, promoting healthy relationships and social competence. Although it is increasingly acknowledged that infants show empathy toward others, individual differences in infants’ empathy from the first year of life have rarely been investigated longitudinally. Here we examined how negative reactivity and regulation, two temperament traits that predict empathic responses in older children and adults, relate to infants’ empathy. Infants were studied at the ages of nine (N = 275) and 18 (N = 301) months (194 infants were studied at both ages). Empathic responses were assessed by infants’ observed reactions to an experimenter's simulated distress. Negative reactivity (fear, sadness, and distress to limitations) and regulation (soothability and effortful control) were assessed by parental reports. Negative reactivity was also examined by infants’ observed reactions to an adult stranger (fear) and during interaction with their mothers (displays of sadness/distress). When examined cross‐sectionally, infants’ fear and distress to limitations associated with self‐distress in response to others’ distress. In contrast, when examined longitudinally, early sadness and distress to limitations, but not fear, associated with later empathic concern and inquisitiveness. Moreover, this longitudinal relation was moderated by infants’ soothability and was evident only for children that had high soothability by the later time‐point. Our findings suggest that infants who at an earlier age show negative reactivity, react later in development with more empathy if they achieve sufficient regulation abilities. By that, the findings stress the developmental nature of temperament–empathy relations during infancy.     

Revisiting the revisit: added evidence for a social chemosignal in human emotional tears

In a study by Gelstein et al., we found that human emotional tears act as a social chemosignal. In the first of three different experiments in that study we observed that sniffing women’s emotional tears reduced the sexual attractiveness attributed by men to pictures of women’s faces. In a study partly titled “Chemosignaling effects of human tears revisited”, Gra?anin et al. claim failed replication of this effect in a series of experiments, one they described as “exactly the same procedure” as Gelstein. Given that Gra?anin et al. refused our extended offer to jointly replicate the experiment at our expense, we can merely comment on their effort. We find that Gra?anin, who are not a chemosignaling laboratory, used methodology that falls short of standards typically applied in chemosignaling research. Thus, their experiments were profoundly different from Gelstein. Finally, we found that in reanalysing their raw data we could in fact replicate the effect from Gelstein. Thus, we conclude that the failed replication in Gra?anin is neither a replication nor failed.     

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.     

Randomized, controlled trial of Behavioral Family Systems Therapy for Diabetes: maintenance and generalization of effects on parent-adolescent communication

We report a randomized trial of a revised Behavioral Family Systems Therapy for Diabetes (BFST-D) intervention. Families of 104 adolescents with diabetes were randomized to standard care (SC) or to 6 months of an educational support group (ES) or BFST-D. Family communication and problem-solving skills were assessed at 0, 6, 12, and 18 months by independent rating of videotaped family problem-solving discussions. BFST-D improved individual communication of adolescents and mothers, but not fathers. BFST-D significantly improved quality of family interaction compared to SC (10 of 12 comparisons) and ES (6 of 12 comparisons). Changes in family communication were differentially associated with changes in glycemic control, adherence, and family conflict. BFST-D improved family communication and problem solving relative to SC and modestly relative to ES.     

Bayes nets and babies: infants' developing statistical reasoning abilities and their representation of causal knowledge

A fundamental assumption of the causal graphical model framework is the Markov assumption, which posits that learners can discriminate between two events that are dependent because of a direct causal relation between them and two events that are independent conditional on the value of another event(s). Sobel and Kirkham (2006) demonstrated that 8-month-old infants registered conditional independence information among a sequence of events; infants responded according to the Markov assumption in such a way that was inconsistent with models that rely on simple calculations of associative strength. The present experiment extends these findings to younger infants, and demonstrates that such responses potentially develop during the second half of the first year of life. These data are discussed in terms of a developmental trajectory between associative mechanisms and causal graphical models as representations of infants' causal and statistical learning.