Early Attachment Relationships as Predictors of Preschool Children's Emotion Regulation with a Distressed Sibling

The present study examined (1) the emotion regulation of preschool children by observing their emotional responses to a distressed younger sibling during a separation episode; (2) whether children's regulatory responses were related to sibling interaction observed during the separation episode, and (3) whether individual differences in these children's regulatory responses and the quality of sibling interaction could be predicted from early attachment relationships. Older siblings who ignored their younger siblings' distress were more likely to experience personal distress and use avoidant coping strategies. Emotion regulation strategies were related to the quality of sibling interaction such that older siblings who offered comfort to a distressed younger sibling were more likely to express positive affect in sibling interaction, whereas older siblings seeking adult assistance were less likely to engage in conflict and hostile behavior with a younger sibling. Preschool children who had an insecure-resistant infant-mother attachment at 1 year, were more likely to seek comfort from their younger siblings and engaged in more sibling conflict and hostility when they were 4 years old. The quality of infant-father attachment relationships was not significantly related to the child's emotion regulation at 4 years of age. Results are discussed with respect to the social origins of preschool children's emotional self-regulation and the consequences of emotional dysregulation in preschool settings.     

Shyness-Sensitivity and Social, School, and Psychological Adjustment in Rural Migrant and Urban Children in China

The purpose of this study was to examine relations between shyness-sensitivity and social competence, school performance, and psychological well-being in Chinese children with rural and urban backgrounds. Participants were students in rural migrant children schools and city schools in China ( N s = 411 and 518, respectively; M age = 10 years). Data were obtained from peer evaluations, teacher ratings, self-reports, and school records. It was found that shyness was associated with social and school problems and depression in urban children. However, shyness was generally associated with indexes of adjustment such as leadership, teacher-rated competence, and academic achievement in rural migrant children. The results indicate the role of context in defining the functional meaning of social behavior in children's adjustment.     

Children's Undrstanding of Epistemic Conduct in Self-Deception and Other False Belief Stories

In self-deception persons accept false belief through a motivated disregard for countervailing evidence. Such epistemic misconduct renders them responsisble for their own deception. It was hypothesized that children's understanding of this responsibility would be associated with an understanding of how evidence informs belief. In the study 4- to 9-year-old children's understanding of the relations between false belief, evidence, and epistemic responsibility was examined using stories involving self-deception, lying, and misleading appearances. Results indicated that younger children who understood false belief understood simpler types of deception, but that understanding self-deceivers' epistmic responsibility was limited to older children who understood the relevance of evidence to belief formation.     

Emotion regulation in context: the jealousy complex between young siblings and its relations with child and family characteristics

Jealousy is a social emotion that has received little attention by developmental researchers. The current study examined sibling jealousy and its relations to child and family characteristics in 60 families with a 16-month-old toddler and an older preschool-age sibling. Sibling jealousy was elicited in social triads consisting of a parent (mother or father) and the two siblings. Positive marital relationship quality (i.e., love and relationship maintenance) was a particularly strong predictor of the older siblings' abilities to regulate jealousy reactions in the mother sessions. Younger siblings' jealous affect with mothers was linked to the child's temperament, whereas older siblings' jealous affect with mothers was related to the child's emotional understanding. Younger siblings displayed more behavioral dysregulation in the mother-sibling triads if there was greater sibling rivalry reported by mothers. Session order (i.e., which sibling was challenged first in the jealousy paradigm) had a strong effect on both the affect and behavioral dysregulation displayed by the older and younger siblings. Results are discussed with respect to the need for future research to consider social relationships as developmental contexts for young children's emotion regulation.     

False Belief, Emotion Understanding, and Social Skills Among Head Start and Non-Head Start Children

The present study investigated relationships among false belief, emotion understanding, and social skills with 60 3- to 5-year-olds (29 boys, 31girls) from Head Start and two other preschools. Children completed language, false belief, and emotion understanding measures; parents and teachers evaluated children's social skills. Children's false belief performance related to their understanding of their friend's emotions and to teacher's ratings of social skills. Aspects of emotion understanding related to social skills. Head Start (n =30) and non-Head Start preschoolers (n = 30) performed similarly on social skills and emotion understanding measures, however, non-Head Start children performed significantly better on false belief tasks than Head Start children. Results demonstrate the importance of including diverse groups of children in studies of social cognition.     

Parent-Child Relationships, Family Problem-Solving Behavior, and Sibling Relationship Quality: The Moderating Role of Sibling Temperaments

In this study we sought to determine whether sibling temperaments moderated the associations of parent-child relationship quality and family problem-solving behavior with sibling relationship quality. Observational assessments of mother-child and father-child relationship quality, family problem-solving behavior, and sibling relationship quality were obtained from the families of 49 pairs of brothers and 46 pairs of sisters. Mean ages were 10-2 for older siblings and 7-6 for younger siblings. Parent-reported child temperament assessments were also obtained. The links among mother–older child relationship quality, father–older child relationship quality, and sibling relationship quality were moderated by the older sibling's temperament. The younger and older siblings' temperaments moderated the associations between the quality of the father–younger sibling and sibling relationships. The association between family problem-solving behavior and sibling relationship quality was not moderated by sibling temperaments.     

A Longitudinal Study of Forms and Functions of Aggressive Behavior in Early Childhood

The purpose of this study was to investigate the distinct forms (i.e., physical and relational) and functions (i.e., proactive and reactive) of aggressive behavior during early childhood ( n  =   101; M age = 45.09 months). Forms, but not functions, of aggressive behavior were stable over time. A number of contributors to aggression were associated with distinct subtypes of aggressive behavior. Females and socially dominant children were more relationally aggressive and older children were less physically aggressive than their peers. Longitudinal analyses indicated that social dominance predicted decreases in physical aggression and peer exclusion predicted increases in relational aggression. Overall, the results provide support for the distinction between subtypes of aggression in early childhood.     

How siblings resolve their conflicts: the importance of first offers, planning, and limited opposition

Sixty-four sibling dyads (4-12 years old; 61% males; 83% European-American) were asked to resolve an ongoing conflict. Older siblings provided leadership by suggesting, modifying, justifying, and requesting assent to plans for conflict resolution. Younger siblings countered and disagreed, but also contributed to planning and agreed to their siblings' plans. Compromises were associated with first offers that met both children's goals, future-oriented planning, and limited opposition. Win-loss outcomes followed offers favoring only one child and arguments over older siblings' plans. Conflicts were unresolved when negotiations included frequent accusations and opposition, but little planning. Thus mutually beneficial conflict resolution required that children shift focus from debating past wrongs to developing plans to meet their unrealized goals in future interaction.     

Why Siblings Are Important Agents of Cognitive Development: A Comparison of Siblings and Peers

This study explored older siblings' and peers' influence on young children's cognitive development. Although we anticipated many similarities in siblings' and peers' influence, our principal goal was to test the hypothesis that siblings are unique agents of cognitive development. Young children, their older siblings, and an older, familiar peer first participated in an unstructured building session where each built their own construction. Then, one of the older children taught the younger child how to copy a model windmill. Finally, the younger child was given an individual posttest in which he or she copied the windmill. Although there were many similarities in older siblings' and peers' guidance, the results highlighted the uniqueness of the sibling relationship. In the unstructured building session, young children were more likely to observe, imitate, and consult their older siblings than their older peers, and older siblings were more likely than older peers to provide them with guidance spontaneously. In the teaching session, older siblings provided more explanations and positive feedback and gave learners more control of the task than older peers. However, older siblings' behavior was not independent from the learners', as young children often prompted the siblings' explanations and pressured them into giving them more control of the task. These differences in teaching and learning strategies affected young children's task mastery; Children taught by siblings obtained higher posttest scores than children taught by peers. The discussion interprets these findings within the context of shared and unique functions of siblings and peers in cognitive development and highlights the role of the learner in promoting his or her own development.     

Social and cognitive correlates of children's lying behavior

The relation between children's lie-telling and their social and cognitive development was examined. Children (3–8 years) were told not to peek at a toy. Most children peeked and later lied about peeking. Children's subsequent verbal statements were not always consistent with their initial denial and leaked critical information revealing their deceit. Children's conceptual moral understanding of lies, executive functioning, and theory-of-mind understanding were also assessed. Children's initial false denials were related to their first-order belief understanding and their inhibitory control. Children's ability to maintain their lies was related to their second-order belief understanding. Children's lying was related to their moral evaluations. These findings suggest that social and cognitive factors may play an important role in children's lie-telling abilities.     

American and Chinese Early Adolescents' Inclusion of Their Relationships With Their Parents in Their Self-Construals

This research examined children's interdependent self-construals as manifest in their seeing their relationships with their parents as self-defining. Four times over early adolescence, 825 children (mean age = 12.73 years) in the United States and China reported on their inclusion of their relationships with their parents in their self-construals as well as other dimensions of their psychological functioning. Although there was continuity in children's inclusion of their relationships with their parents in their self-construals, American, but not Chinese, children decreased their inclusion over time. In both the United States and China, the more children defined themselves in terms of their relationships with their parents, the more their perceptions of the quality of these relationships mattered for their subsequent emotional functioning.     

Being hurt and hurting others: children's narrative accounts and moral judgments of their own interpersonal conflicts

Children's narrative accounts and moral evaluations of their own interpersonal conflicts with peers were examined. Girls and boys (N = 112) in preschool (M= 4.8 years), first grade (M = 6.9 years), fifth grade (M = 10.9 years), and tenth grade (M = 16.2 years) provided one narrative of a time when they had been hurt by a peer ("victim"), and one of a time when they had hurt a peer ("perpetrator"). Victim and perpetrator narratives were equally long and detailed and depicted similar types of harmful behaviors, but differed significantly in terms of various measures of content and coherence. Narratives given from the victim's perspective featured a self-referential focus and a fairly coherent structure. When the same children gave accounts of situations in which they had been the perpetrators, their construals were less coherent and included multiple shifts between references to their own experience and the experience of the other. Children's moral judgments also varied by perspective, with the majority of victims making negative judgments and nearly half the perpetrators making positive or mixed judgments. These differences in moral judgments were related to the distinct ways in which victims and perpetrators construed conflict situations. Age differences were also found in both narrative construals and moral evaluations, but regardless of their age children construed conflict situations differently from the victim's and the perpetrator's perspectives. By integrating, within the study of moral development, children's interpretations of the social interactions that are at the basis of moral thinking, this approach brings us a step closer to conceptualizing the study of children's moral behavior.     

Training parents to mediate sibling disputes affects children's negotiation and conflict understanding

The effects of training parents to use formal mediation procedures in sibling disputes were examined in 48 families with 5- to 10-years-old children, randomly assigned to mediation and control conditions. Children whose parents were trained in mediation were compared with those whose parents intervened normally. Parents reported that children used more constructive conflict resolution strategies, compromised more often, and controlled the outcomes of conflicts more often in mediation families than in control families. Observations indicated less negativity in children's independent negotiations of recurrent conflicts, better understanding of the role of interpretation in assessing blame, and better knowledge of their siblings' perspectives in the mediation group. Thus, both social and social-cognitive gains resulted from experience with constructive conflict resolution.     

False Belief,Emotion Understanding,and Social Skills Among Head Start and Non-Head Start Children

The present study investigated relationships among false belief, emotion understanding, and social skills with 60 3- to 5-year-olds (29 boys, 31girls) from Head Start and two other preschools. Children completed language, false belief, and emotion understanding measures; parents and teachers evaluated children's social skills. Children's false belief performance related to their understanding of their friend's emotions and to teacher's ratings of social skills. Aspects of emotion understanding related to social skills. Head Start (n =30) and non-Head Start preschoolers (n = 30) performed similarly on social skills and emotion understanding measures, however, non-Head Start children performed significantly better on false belief tasks than Head Start children. Results demonstrate the importance of including diverse groups of children in studies of social cognition.     

Prevention Effects Moderate the Association of 5-HTTLPR and Youth Risk Behavior Initiation: Gene × Environment Hypotheses Tested via a Randomized Prevention Design

A randomized prevention design was used to investigate a moderation effect in the association between a polymorphism in the SCL6A4 ( 5HTT ) gene at 5-HTTLPR and increases in youths' risk behavior initiation. Participation in the Strong African American Families (SAAF) program was hypothesized to attenuate the link between 5-HTTLPR status and risk behavior initiation. Youths ( N  =   641, M age = 11.2 years) were assigned randomly to a SAAF or control condition. Risk behavior initiation across 29 months was linked positively with the 5-HTTLPR genotype and negatively with SAAF participation. Control youths at genetic risk initiated risk behavior at twice the rate of SAAF youths at genetic risk and youths not at genetic risk in either condition.     

The Motivational Landscape of Early Adolescence in the United States and China: A Longitudinal Investigation

This research examined motivational trajectories during early adolescence in the United States and China. Upon their entry into middle school at 7th grade and every 6 months thereafter until the end of 8th grade, 825 American and Chinese children (mean age = 12.73 years) reported on their motivational beliefs (e.g., mastery orientation) and behavior (e.g., self-regulated learning strategies). The quality of children's motivational beliefs deteriorated over the 7th and 8th grades (e.g., children became less mastery oriented) in both the United States and China. American children also valued academics less, with declines in their motivational behavior as well. Chinese children continued to value academics, sustaining their motivational behavior. In both countries, children's motivational beliefs and behavior predicted their grades over time.     

Young Children''s Understanding of Other People''s Feelings and Beliefs: Individual Differences and Their Antecedents

Individual differences in young children's understanding of others' feelings and in their ability to explain human action in terms of beliefs, and the earlier correlates of these differences, were studied with 50 children observed at home with mother and sibling at 33 months, then tested at 40 months on affective-labeling, perspective-taking, and false-belief tasks. Individual differences in social understanding were marked; a third of the children offered explanations of actions in terms of false belief, though few predicted actions on the basis of beliefs. These differences were associated with participation in family discourse about feelings and causality 7 months earlier, verbal fluency of mother and child, and cooperative interaction with the sibling. Differences in understanding feelings were also associated with the discourse measures, the quality of mother-sibling interaction, SES, and gender, with girls more successful than boys. The results support the view that discourse about the social world may in part mediate the key conceptual advances reflected in the social cognition tasks; interaction between child and sibling and the relationships between other family members are also implicated in the growth of social understanding.     

Mixed-Age Interactions in Family Child Care

Preschool-age children's experiences within the mixed-age setting of family child care homes and the influences of these experiences on development were examined. Development variables included social and cognitive play, and receptive and expressive language. Consistent with Vygotsky's developmental theory, children's interactions with mixed-age peers were more powerful predictors of development than the mere availability of mixed-age peers. Interactions with older peers were associated with more complex cognitive play behaviors. Interactions with younger and same-age peers were associated with less complex social and cognitive play and lower receptive language scores. Characteristics of the child care setting appeared to moderate children's behavior in the mixed-age environment. Children in higher quality family child care homes with responsive caregivers were less likely to interact with younger children. No evidence was found of different developmental outcomes across developmental domains for older versus younger children.