Ethnic Differences in the Developmental Significance of Parentification

Using an ecological framework, this 2‐wave longitudinal study examined the effects of parentification on youth adjustment across the transition to adolescence in a high‐risk, low‐income sample of African American (58%) and European American (42%) mother–child dyads (T1 M_age = 10.17 years, T2 M_age = 14.89 years; 52.4% female). Children's provision of family caregiving was moderately stable from early to late adolescence. Emotional and instrumental parentification evidenced distinct long‐term effects on adolescents' psychopathology and the quality of the parent–child relationship. Ethnicity moderated these relations. Emotional and instrumental parentification behaviors were associated with predominantly negative outcomes among European American youth in the form of increased externalizing behavior problems and decreased parent–child relationship quality, whereas emotional parentification was associated with positive outcomes among African American youth in the form of increased parent–child relationship quality, and instrumental parentification was neutral. These findings support a multidimensional view of parentification as a set of culturally embedded phenomena whose effects can only be understood in consideration of the context in which they occur.     

Regulatory fit: A meta‐analytic synthesis

Regulatory fit, or the match between an individual's regulatory orientation and the strategy used to sustain it, offers a pervasive predictor of customer behavior. Merely reaching a decision in a certain way influences the value of a decision or an outcome. In this research, we conduct a meta-analysis to more fully articulate the role of important conceptual moderators and demonstrate their differential effects on evaluation, behavioral intention, and behavior. In particular, we look at the source of regulatory focus (self-prime, situation-prime, chronic), the orientation (prevention, promotion), how fit is created (sustaining, matching), how fit is constructed (action, observation), and the scope of fit (incidental, integral). We also shed light on the role of several contextual factors.     

The Self as a Moral Agent: Preschoolers Behave Morally but Believe in the Freedom to Do Otherwise

Recent work suggests a strong connection between intuitions regarding our own free will and our moral behavior. We investigate the origins of this link by asking whether preschool-aged children construe their own moral actions as freely chosen. We gave children the option to make three moral/social choices (avoiding harm to another, following a rule, and following peer behavior) and then asked them to retrospect as to whether they were free to have done otherwise. When given the choice to act (either morally or immorally), children avoided harm and abided by rules, but they endorsed their freedom to have done otherwise. When choice was restricted by adult instruction, children did not endorse their free choice and indicated feeling constrained by moral obligation in their explanatory responses. These results suggest that children believe that their moral actions afford free will, but this belief is dependent on their experience of choice.     

Lay Personality Theories in Interactive Decisions: Strongly Held,Weakly Supported

In interactive decisions, cues to what others will do are important in forming a strategy. Information about others' personalities appears to be potentially valuable for this purpose. We report a series of four studies examining how information about another actor's personality influences people's own choices in interactive decisions. The studies found widespread beliefs that others' personality characteristics are strongly predictive both of broad classes of decision behavior (competition/cooperation, risk‐seeking/risk‐aversion) (Study 1) and of specific choices (Study 2) in single‐agent settings. These beliefs extended to predicting others' choices in interactive decisions (Study 3) and to shaping the predictor's own decisions in interactive play in Chicken and Assurance games (Study 4). Overall, we found extensive evidence that laypeople believe that the personality traits we selected (angry‐hostility, anxiety, assertiveness, excitement‐seeking, and warmth) have substantial effects on behavior in interactive decisions and they act on those beliefs when making their own decisions. The empirical evidence supporting the predictive validity of these traits was, however, quite weak. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Pedagogical cues encourage toddlers' transmission of recently demonstrated functions to unfamiliar adults

Young children use pedagogical cues as a signal that others' actions are social or cultural conventions. Here we show that children selectively transmit (enact in a new social situation) causal functions demonstrated pedagogically, even when they have learned and can produce alternative functions as well. Two‐year‐olds saw two novel toys, each with two functions. One experimenter demonstrated one function using pedagogical cues (eye contact and child‐directed speech) and a second experimenter demonstrated the alternative function using intentional actions towards the object, but without pedagogical cues. Children imitated both functions at equal rates initially, indicating equal causal learning from both types of demonstration. However, they were significantly more likely to enact the pedagogical function for a new adult not present during the initial demonstrations. These results indicate that pedagogical cues influence children's transmission of information, perhaps playing a role in the dissemination of cultural conventions from a young age.     

Children's Adjustment in a Climate of Political Violence: Comparing Mother and Child Reports

There is a dearth of research on parent and child reports regarding a parent’s parenting and its contribution to a child’s adjustment. Therefore, the current study examined: (a) the differences between mother and child reports of aspects of maternal parenting (i.e., care and control), among both boys and girls; (b) which parenting report (i.e., mother’s or child’s) makes a stronger contribution to mother and child reports of the child’s adjustment in the context of political violence. One hundred and twenty-one mother-child dyads (children aged seven to 12 years old (M?=?10.02, SD?=?1.03)), who were exposed to prolonged political violence, participated in this study. Maternal care and control were assessed by mother and child reports on the Parental Bonding Instrument. Child’s adjustment was assessed both by mother’s report of child’s total difficulties and child’s self-report of posttraumatic stress symptoms (PTSS). Results revealed that both the mothers of girls and the girls themselves reported higher care, in comparison to mothers of boys and the boys themselves, while mothers of boys and the boys themselves reported higher control. Higher maternal control, as reported by the child, was associated with the child’s self-reported PTSS. Higher maternal control, as reported by the mother, was associated with the child’s total difficulties, as reported by the mother. However, maternal care, whether reported by mother or child, was not found to be associated with the child’s adjustment. School-aged children and their mothers were in agreement regarding maternal dimensions and their contribution to children’s adjustment.     

Cognates interfere with language selection but enhance monitoring in connected speech

The current study investigated the contribution of phonology to bilingual language control in connected speech. Speech production was elicited by asking Mandarin–English bilinguals to read aloud paragraphs either in Chinese or English, while six words were switched to the other language in each paragraph. The switch words were either cognates or noncognates, and switching difficulty was measured by production of cross-language intrusion errors on the switch words (e.g., mistakenly saying 巧克力 (qiao3-ke4-li4) instead of chocolate). All the bilinguals were Mandarin-dominant, but produced more intrusion errors when target words were written in Chinese than when written in English (i.e., they exhibited robust reversed dominance effects). Most critically, bilinguals produced significantly more intrusions on Chinese cognates, but also detected and self-corrected these same errors more quickly than with noncognates. Phonological overlap boosts dual-language activation thus leading to greater competition between languages, and increased response conflict, thereby increasing production of intrusions but also facilitating error detection during speech monitoring.     

Do production patterns influence the processing of speech in prelinguistic infants?

The headturn preference procedure was used to test 18 infants on their response to three different passages chosen to reflect their individual production patterns. The passages contained nonwords with consonants in one of three categories: (a) often produced by that infant (‘own’), (b) rarely produced by that infant but common at that age (‘other’), and (c) not generally produced by infants. Infants who had a single ‘own’ consonant showed no significant preference for either ‘own’ (a) or ‘other’ (b) passages. In contrast, infants’ with two ‘own’ consonants exhibited greater attention to ‘other’ passages (b). Both groups attended equally to the passage featuring consonants rarely produced by infants of that age (c). An analysis of a sample of the infant-directed speech ruled out the mothers’ speech as a source of the infant preferences. The production-based shift to a focus on the ‘other’ passage suggests that nascent production abilities combine with emergent perceptual experience to facilitate word learning.     

Cross-language intrusion errors in aging bilinguals reveal the link between executive control and language selection

Bilinguals outperform monolinguals on measures of executive control, but it is not known how bilingualism introduces these advantages. To address this question, we investigated whether language-control failures increase with aging-related declines in executive control. Eighteen younger and 18 older Spanish-English bilinguals completed a verbal-fluency task, in which they produced words in 18 categories (9 in each language), and a flanker task. Performance on both tasks exhibited robust effects of aging, but cross-language and within-language errors on the verbal-fluency task differed in a number of ways. Within-language errors occurred relatively often and decreased with higher levels of education in both younger and older bilinguals. In contrast, cross-language intrusions (e.g., inadvertently saying an English word on a Spanish-language trial) were rarely produced, were not associated with education level, and were strongly associated with flanker-task errors in older but not younger bilinguals. These results imply that executive control plays a role in maintaining language selection, but they also suggest the presence of independent forces that prevent language-selection errors.