Attachment Security,Personality, and Adjustment of Elementary School Children

Children's development is assumed to be closely related to their attachment security and their personality. The authors’ aim was to examine the joint contribution of attachment security and personality traits to children's adjustment by examining diverse children's outcomes (emotional symptoms, social functioning, and behavioral problems) and using various perspectives (children, parents, and teachers). The sample comprised 247 8–12-year-old children from low socioeconomic status neighborhoods. Personality and attachment contribute to the different domains of adjustment. In cases of moderation, attachment security moderates the implications of personality traits on children's adjustment. The findings highlight the contribution of positive personality tendencies in playing down the difficulties of insecurely attached children.     

Theory of Mind Understanding and Conversational Patterns in Middle Childhood

The author investigated the longitudinal relations between theory of mind (ToM) understanding and perceptions of self and social conversations in 17 school-aged children (12 girls, 5 boys, age 8–12 years). ToM was assessed at Time 1 (T1; M age = 8 years 5 months, SD = 8.7 months, and perceptions of self and conversational experiences assessed two years later at Time 2 (T2; M age = 10 years 4 months, SD = 7.9 months. Most importantly, longitudinal findings showed that children who scored relatively high on ToM at T1 reported relatively lower perceptions of self-worth and higher number of mental states verbs in their perceptions of peer and family conversations at T2. Significant negative longitudinal associations were found between children's number of siblings and their perceptions of self-worth (T1) and number of cognitive terms in their perceptions of peer and family conversations (T2). Frequency analysis suggested that girls’ perceptions of conversations referred to more social and psychological aspects of self and relationships, whereas boys focused mainly on physical activities. Most children were more likely to prefer listening to talking during social conversations. The majority of children reported feelings of mixed or ambiguous emotions during experiences of silence. Implications for socioemotional and cognitive development in early adolescents are discussed.     

Order of Attainment of the Mental Structures for Five of Piaget's Logical,Infralogical, and Formal Tasks

This study explored the relationship between illegitimate birth and cognitive development among 513 boys on probation. Prior research has shown that being part of a single-parent household leads to diminished verbal capacities and often puts a child in greater danger of abuse and neglect. Frequent abuse is thought to lead to the enhancement of visual and spatial skills relative to verbal skills through a process of “frozen watchfulness”. I hypothesized that illegitimate boys from one-parent homes would have greater verbal-performance discrepancy scores than would boys from other combinations of birth status and family structure. These boys had the lowest verbal IQ and highest performance IQ scores and, hence, the largest discrepancy. These boys also suffered the highest degree of abuse and neglect of all four birth status/family structure combinations studied.     

The Relation of Distressful Childhood Experiences and Empathy in College Undergraduates

We assessed the relation between the empathic responsiveness of young adults and the relative frequency and intensity of distressful events they experienced as children. Undergraduate subjects (N = 111; 56 men and 55 women) were led to believe that they were participating in two separate studies. In the first study, students completed the Distress Experiences in Childhood questionnaire, a filler task, and a slightly abbreviated version of the Mehrabian and Epstein (1972) empathy measure. In the second study, students watched an emotion-laden videotape of a patient (actually an actress) in a therapy session and subsequently completed an emotional-response questionnaire adapted from Batson, O'Quin, Fultz, Vanderplas, and Isen (1983). Students who rated their distressful childhood experiences as highly distressing scored higher on both measures of empathy than did students who rated their experiences as relatively less distressing. In contrast, the number of distressful childhood experiences reported was generally unrelated to empathy scores.     

The Semantics of Secrecy: Young Children's Classification of Secret Content

The authors explored whether young children can distinguish potential secrets from nonsecrets by their content, as can older children, adolescents, and adults. Ninety children, 4, 5, and 6 years old, rated the secrecy of items from an adult-validated list of personal information about an age- and gender-appropriate puppet. Two factors of the children's data corresponded to the adult categories of nonsecrets and secrets, and a third factor corresponded to surprises. All ages rated surprises as significantly more secret than nonsecret items; however, the surprise items contained linguistic cues to secrecy. A tendency to rate nonsecrets as secret decreased with age, but only the 6-year-olds rated secrets other than surprises as significantly more secret than nonsecrets. Thus, children acquire the implicit rules defining secret content from a somewhat later age than that reported for the cognitive or behavioral capacities for secrecy.     

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.     

Psychological consequences of collective violence in childhood: the case of Monterrey,Mexico / Consecuencias psicológicas de la violencia colectiva en la niñez: el caso de Monterrey,México

Abstract

During the last years, different types of violence have severely damaged Mexico. In this paper we examine the consequences that violence could have in children, one of the most vulnerable segments of society. In short, we predict that exposure to any type of violence will lead to higher depression and that this could be explained through the effects of violence on childhood well-being. Our hypothesis was supported in two studies, showing that exposure to street violence (Study 1, N = 607) and exposure to collective violence (Study 2, N = 172) can increase childhood depression. Moreover, in both studies, this effect was explained by the decrease of childhood well-being caused by violence exposure. The implications of these results are discussed.