The Lord's Prayer in Eastern Spirituality

This article first speaks briefly of prayer in general and its essence; and then discusses various kinds of prayer in the Orthodox Christian tradition, chief among which is personal prayer made in private, and liturgical prayer celebrated in church. There is also spontaneous prayer, less favored in Orthodoxy, where the model prayer is the Lord's Prayer. The main part of the article examines the petitions that make up the Lord's Prayer and the interpretation given to them by patristic writers. It concludes by affirming the unique character of the prayer, which can be regarded as the perfect summary of the Christian message.     

Evaluating the effect of educational media exposure on aggression in early childhood

Preschool-aged children (M = 42.44 months-old, SD = 8.02) participated in a short-term longitudinal study investigating the effect of educational media exposure on social development (i.e., aggression and prosocial behavior) using multiple informants and methods. As predicted, educational media exposure significantly predicted increases in both observed and teacher reported relational aggression across time. Follow-up analyses showed that educational media exposure also significantly predicted increases in parent reported relational aggression across more than a two year period. Results replicate and extend prior research that has demonstrated links between educational media exposure and relational aggression, but not physical aggression, during early childhood.     

Social problem solving in early childhood: Developmental change and the influence of shyness

The purpose of this study was to examine developmental change and the influence of shyness on social problem-solving (SPS). At 24, 36, and 48 months, children (N = 570) were observed while interacting with an unfamiliar peer during an SPS task and at 24 months, maternal report of shyness was collected. Results showed that across the full sample, children displayed low but stable levels of withdrawn SPS and increasing levels of SPS competence over development. In addition, results showed multiple trajectories of withdrawn and competent SPS. Shyness was associated with high-increasing and high-decreasing withdrawn SPS trajectories compared with the low-increasing withdrawn SPS trajectory. Shyness was also associated with the low-increasing compared with the high-increasing SPS competence trajectory. Findings demonstrate the development of SPS competence over early childhood, and the influence of early shyness on this developmental course, with some shy children showing improvement in SPS skills and others continuing to show SPS difficulties over time.     

Understanding how children's engagement and teachers' interactions combine to predict school readiness

This study examined the quality of preschool classroom experiences through the combination of children's individual patterns of engagement and teachers' classroom-level interactions in predicting children's gains in school readiness. A sample of 605 children and 309 teachers participated. The quality of children's engagement and teacher interactions was directly observed in the classroom, and direct assessments of children's school readiness skills were obtained in the fall and again in the spring. Latent profile analysis was used to examine children's patterns of engagement with teachers, peers, and tasks. Children's engagement and the quality of teacher interactions were associated with gains in school readiness skills. The effect of children's individual classroom engagement on their expressive vocabulary was moderated by classroom-level teacher interactions. The results suggest that when teachers engage in highly responsive interactions across the children in their classrooms, children may develop more equitable school readiness skills regardless of their individual engagement patterns.     

Preschoolers’ emotion knowledge: Self-regulatory foundations,and predictions of early school success

Preschoolers (N=322 in preschool, 100 in kindergarten) were assessed longitudinally to examine the self-regulatory roots of emotion knowledge (labelling and situation) and the contributions of emotion knowledge to early school adjustment (i.e., including social, motivational, and behavioural indices), as well as moderation by age, gender, and risk. Age, gender, and risk differences in emotion knowledge were also examined. Emotion knowledge skills were found to be more advanced in older children and those not at economic risk, and in those with higher levels of self-regulation. Overall, the results support the role of emotion knowledge in early school adjustment and academic success even with gender, age, and risk covaried, especially for boys, older preschoolers, and those at economic risk.     

‘My mother messed with me’ The legacy of abuse by his mother for a 10-year-old boy

This paper seeks to explore some of the effects of abuse by a mother on her very young son. It considers how the primitive capacity for coping with anxiety by splitting and projection has been rendered ineffectual, and how the structures that have evolved to compensate have profoundly affected the boy's emotional and mental capacities. In the first fifteen months of therapy, the boy has begun to make some tentative moves towards effective splitting and projection, with its hope of healthier growth. This hope is hard for him to bear, involving, as it must, searing depressive pain. There is consequently a powerful pull towards a pathological organization where omnipotence and omniscience offer, disastrously, an exciting and pain-free alternative. The boy's therapy and his therapist are exposed to the full impact of the omnipotent onslaught, and evolving ways of bearing this and continuing to think was not only essential for survival but, also, a major tool of the therapy.     

Processing of non-canonical word-order: A case-series on lesion-induced reorganized language and age-effects in typical development

Complex grammatical structures are mastered late in language acquisition. We studied age-effects on performance in object topicalization in 48 typically developing German-speaking participants (aged 8–30 years) and in five patients (children and adolescents) with lesion-induced atypical language representation. Production was tested by a sentence repetition task, comprehension by an acting out task. Three topicalized conditions with differing disambiguation (agreement, case, and case plus agreement) were contrasted with canonical control sentences.     

Young Children's Trust in Overtly Misleading Advice

The ability of 3‐ and 4‐year‐old children to disregard advice from an overtly misleading informant was investigated across five studies (total n = 212). Previous studies have documented limitations in young children's ability to reject misleading advice. This study was designed to test the hypothesis that these limitations are primarily due to an inability to reject specific directions that are provided by others, rather than an inability to respond in a way that is opposite to what has been indicated by a cue. In Studies 1 through 4, a puppet identified as The Big Bad Wolf offered advice to participants about which of two boxes contained a hidden sticker. Regardless of the form the advice took, 3‐year olds performed poorly by failing to systematically reject it. However, when participants in Study 5 believed they were responding to a mechanical cue rather than the advice of the Wolf, they were better able to reject misleading advice, and individual differences in performance on the primary task were systematically correlated with measures of executive function. Results are interpreted as providing support for the communicative intent hypothesis, which posits that children find it especially difficult to reject deceptive information that they perceive as being intentionally communicated by others.     

The Idea of an Exact Number: Children's Understanding of Cardinality and Equinumerosity

Understanding what numbers are means knowing several things. It means knowing how counting relates to numbers (called the cardinal principle or cardinality); it means knowing that each number is generated by adding one to the previous number (called the successor function or succession), and it means knowing that all and only sets whose members can be placed in one‐to‐one correspondence have the same number of items (called exact equality or equinumerosity). A previous study (Sarnecka & Carey, 2008) linked children's understanding of cardinality to their understanding of succession for the numbers five and six. This study investigates the link between cardinality and equinumerosity for these numbers, finding that children either understand both cardinality and equinumerosity or they understand neither. This suggests that cardinality and equinumerosity (along with succession) are interrelated facets of the concepts five and six, the acquisition of which is an important conceptual achievement of early childhood.     

Is preschool executive function causally related to academic achievement?

The primary objective of this study was to reevaluate the well-established result that preschoolers' performance on executive function tasks are positively associated with their performance on academic achievement tests. The current study replicated the previously established concurrent associations between children's performance on EF tasks and academic achievement tests. Specifically, children's performance on measures of inhibitory and motor control were positively associated with their performance on tests of reading, writing, and mathematics achievement (rs?=?.2?.5); moreover, although diminished in magnitude, most of these associations held up even after including an earlier measure of academic achievement as a covariate (rs?=?.1?.3). However, the application of an alternative analytic method, fixed effects analysis, a method that capitalizes on repeated measures data to control for all time stable measured and unmeasured covariates, rendered the apparent positive associations between executive function and academic achievement nonsignificant (rs?=?.0?.1). Taken together, these results suggest that the well-replicated association between executive function abilities and academic achievement may be spurious. Results are discussed with respect to the importance of utilizing analytic methods and research designs that facilitate strong causal inferences between executive function and academic achievement in early childhood, as well as the limitations of making curriculum development recommendations and/or public policy decisions based on studies that have failed to do so.