The role of language, appearance, and culture in children's social category-based induction

Four studies examined whether Israeli 5-year-olds (N = 88) and adults (N = 48) drew inferences about psychological properties based on a character's social category, personality trait, or physical appearance trait. Study 1 revealed that while children drew inferences mostly by social category, adults did it by personality trait. Study 2 showed that the children's pattern was not due to how the categorical information was conveyed. Studies 3 and 4 demonstrated that for kindergarteners, labels, not appearances, are determinant of the inductive potential of social categories. Studies indicated that "Jew" and "Arab" were the most inductively powerful social categories for both children and adults. The results carry implications for the roles of language, appearances, and culture in the conceptualization of "human kinds."     

What is to be done? Children's ascriptions of conventional obligations

It is often not apparent what people ought to do. Three experiments explored cues that children and adults may use to identify conventional obligations. Experiment 1 addressed the hypothesis that young children identify obligations with expected outcomes. Although preschool-aged (4-5 years) children often expected consistency, they and school-aged (7-8 years) and adult participants indicated that obligations may be at odds with costs and benefits. In Experiment 2, all participants realized that people may have obligations they are unaware of. Preschool-aged children often used information about obligations to identify characters' beliefs. In Experiment 3, preschool but not school-aged children reliably identified obligations with the desires of authorities. The results are discussed in terms of expectations about canonical relations between mental states, outcomes, and obligations.     

Beliefs About Moral Obligation Structure Children's Social Category-Based Expectations

Young children view social category members as morally obligated toward one another, and expect these obligations to shape people's social behavior. The present work investigates how children specify which behaviors are constrained by social categories in this way. In two studies (N = 128), 4- and 5-year-old children predicted that morally positive behaviors would be directed toward in-group members, and that morally negative behaviors would be directed toward out-group members, but did not hold equally strong expectations about behaviors described as positive or negative for reasons irrelevant to morality. Thus, notions of morality are embedded within children's representations of social categories, such that when learning about novel moral norms, children immediately expect those obligations to uniquely hold within social groups.     

Categories influence predictions about individual consistency

Predicting how people will behave in the future is a critical social-cognitive task. In four studies (N = 150, ages preschool to adult), young children (ages 4-5) used category information to guide their expectations about individual consistency. They predicted that psychological properties (preferences and fears) would remain consistent over time after hearing one example in which properties followed a category-linked distribution (e.g., children of different genders had different properties) but not when properties varied within a category (e.g., children of the same gender had different properties). The developmental course of these findings is examined. Results suggest the importance of considering how children's emerging theories of behavior and of social groups operate together to inform their expectations about the social world.     

Getting Ready to Learn—And Learning

Research Findings: The study examined children's recognition of emotion from faces and body poses, as well as gender differences in these recognition abilities. Preschool-aged children (N = 55) and their parents and teachers participated in the study. Preschool-aged children completed a web-based measure of emotion recognition skills that included 5 tasks (3 with faces and 2 with bodies). Parents and teachers reported on children's aggressive behaviors and social skills. Children's emotion accuracy on 2 of the 3 facial tasks and 1 of the body tasks was related to teacher reports of social skills. Some of these relations were moderated by child gender. In particular, the relationships between emotion recognition accuracy and reports of children's behavior were stronger for boys than girls. Practice or Policy: Identifying preschool-aged children's strengths and weaknesses in terms of the identification of emotion from faces and body poses may be helpful in guiding interventions with children who have problems with social and behavioral functioning that may be due in part to emotion knowledge deficits. Further developmental implications of these findings are discussed.     

Loneliness and Peer Relations in Young Children

Recent studies indicate that feelings of loneliness and social dissatisfaction can be reliably assessed with third- through sixth-grade children, and that children who are sociometrically rejected by their peers are significantly more lonely than other children. The present research was designed (a) to examine whether loneliness could be reliably assessed in a population younger than previously studied, (b) to learn whether young children who are poorly accepted by peers report elevated levels of loneliness and social dissatisfaction, (c) to assess whether young children understand the concept of loneliness, and (d) to examine the behavioral characteristics of lonely young children. Kindergarten and first-grade children (N = 440) responded to a questionnaire about feelings of loneliness and social dissatisfaction in school. A subset of children (N = 46) were individually interviewed to assess their understanding of loneliness. To assess sociometric status and behavior, peers were asked to respond to various sociometric measures and behavioral assessment items. Teachers also provided behavioral information about children using a newly developed instrument. Results indicated that nearly all children understood loneliness, that loneliness was reliably assessed in young children, and that poorly accepted children were more lonely than other children. In addition, children who reported the most loneliness were found to differ from others on several behavioral dimensions.     

Social skills and problem behaviors as mediators of the relationship between behavioral self-regulation and academic achievement

Early behavioral self-regulation is an important predictor of the skills children need to be successful in school. However, little is known about the mechanism(s) through which self-regulation affects academic achievement. The current study investigates the possibility that two aspects of children's social functioning, social skills and problem behaviors, mediate the relationship between preschool self-regulation and literacy and math achievement. Additionally, we investigated whether the meditational processes differed for boys and girls. We expected that better self-regulation would help children to interact well with others (social skills) and minimize impulsive or aggressive (problem) behaviors. Positive interactions with others and few problem behaviors were expected to relate to gains in achievement as learning takes place within a social context. Preschool-aged children (n = 118) were tested with direct measures of self-regulation, literacy, and math. Teachers reported on children's social skills and problem behaviors. Using a structural equation modeling approach (SEM) for mediation analysis, social skills and problem behaviors were found to mediate the relationship between self-regulation and growth in literacy across the preschool year, but not math. Findings suggest that the mediational process was similar for boys and girls. These findings indicate that a child's social skills and problem behaviors are part of the mechanism through which behavioral self-regulation affects growth in literacy. Self-regulation may be important not just because of the way that it relates directly to academic achievement but also because of the ways in which it promotes or inhibits children's interactions with others.     

Prior knowledge and exemplar encoding in children's concept acquisition

Three experiments examined how children's domain knowledge and observation of exemplars interact during concept acquisition and how exposure to novel exemplars causes revision of such knowledge. In Experiments 1 (N = 126) and 2 (N = 64), children aged 4 to 10 years were shown exemplars of fictitious animal categories that were either unrelated to, or consistent with, their prior knowledge in 25% or 75% of presented exemplars. In Experiment 3, children (N = 290) saw fictitious animal, artifact, or unfamiliar social categories that were either consistent or inconsistent with their prior knowledge in 20%, 40%, 60%, or 80% of exemplars. In the test, children made judgments about the likely co-occurence of features. In all experiments, prior knowledge and exemplar observation independently influenced children's categorization judgments. Utilization of prior knowledge was consistent across age and domain, but 10-year-olds were more sensitive to observed feature covariation. Training with larger categories increased the impact of observed feature covariation and decreased reliance on prior knowledge.     

Protective longitudinal paths linking child competence to behavioral problems among African American siblings

A 4-wave longitudinal design was used to examine protective links from child competence to behavioral problems in first- (M=10.97 years) and second- (M=8.27 years) born rural African American children. At 1-year intervals, teachers assessed child behavioral problems, mothers reported their psychological functioning, and both mothers and children reported parenting practices. Structural equation modeling indicated that child competence was linked with residualized positive changes in mothers' psychological functioning from Wave 1 to Wave 2. Mothers' psychological functioning and child competence at Wave 2 forecast involved-supportive parenting at Wave 3, which was associated negatively with externalizing and internalizing problems at Wave 4. The importance of replicating processes leading to outcomes among children in the same study is discussed.     

Shyness-sensitivity and unsociability in rural Chinese children: relations with social, school, and psychological adjustment

The purpose of this study was to examine how shyness-sensitivity and unsociability were associated with social, school, and psychological adjustment in rural Chinese children. Participants were third- to fifth-grade students (N = 820; M age = 10 years) in rural schools in P. R. China. Data on shyness-sensitivity, unsociability, and adjustment were obtained from multiple sources including peer assessments, sociometric nominations, teacher ratings, self-reports, and school records. It was found that unsociability was associated with social, school, and psychological problems, whereas shyness was generally associated with indexes of adjustment such as social status, teacher-rated competence, and academic achievement. The results indicate that rural Chinese context may play an important role in defining the functional meanings of children's social behaviors.     

Mind what mother says: narrative input and theory of mind in typical children and those on the autism spectrum

In 2 studies mothers read wordless storybooks to their preschool-aged children; narratives were analyzed for mental state language. Children's theory-of-mind understanding (ToM) was concurrently assessed. In Study 1, children's (N=30; M age 3 years 9 months) ToM task performance was significantly correlated with mothers' explanatory, causal, and contrastive talk about cognition, but not with mothers' simple mentions of cognition. In Study 2, the same pattern was found in an older sample of typically developing children (N=24; M age 4 years 7 months), whereas for children on the autism spectrum (N=24; M age 6 years 7.5 months), ToM task performance was uniquely correlated with mothers' explanatory, causal, and contrastive talk about emotions.     

The impact of family obligation on the daily activities and psychological well-being of Chinese American adolescents

A daily diary method was employed to examine the extent to which Chinese adolescents in the United States assist and spend time with their families, and the implications of such behaviors for their involvement in other activities and psychological well-being. Adolescents (N = 140) completed checklists in which they reported their activities and psychological well-being every day for a period of 2 weeks. Adolescents showed a greater propensity to balance family obligations with their academic demands than with their social life with peers on a daily basis. Girls experienced slightly more daily conflict between activities than boys. Neither the extent of involvement in family obligations nor the balancing of family obligations with other activities were associated with psychological distress among adolescents. These findings demonstrate the complex manner in which adolescents from immigrant families attempt to combine their cultural traditions with selected aspects of American society on a daily basis. In contrast to the expectations of some observers, the youths in this study appeared to accomplish such an integration with little cost to their psychological well-being.     

Developmental changes in the coherence of essentialist beliefs about psychological characteristics

Essentialism is the belief that certain characteristics (of individuals or categories) may be relatively stable, unchanging, likely to be present at birth, and biologically based. The current studies examined how different essentialist beliefs interrelate. For example, does thinking that a property is innate imply that the property cannot be changed? Four studies were conducted, examining how children (N=195, grades 1-7; ages 7-13) and adults (N=187) reason about familiar and novel social characteristics. By 3rd grade (9 years), children showed some coherence of essentialist beliefs. In contrast, younger children expected less interrelatedness among dimensions than older children or adults. These findings suggest that essentialist attributions at first consist of separate strands that children eventually link together into a more coherent understanding.     

女性语言的责任型情态的人际意义研究——以美剧《丑女贝蒂》的女性语言为例

以功能语言学为视角,分析女性语言中责任型情态人际意义的实现。在女性语言中,责任型情态的人际意义主要通过＂语调＂、＂话语多声＂来实现,其中表示可能性的责任型情态则更多用疑问句来实现其人际意义。此外,文章还分析探讨了这些实现方式的心理原因,如女性的谦卑心理;历史原因,如西方女性运动前女性低微的社会地位等等。正是这些原因,导致女性语言中责任型情态人际意义的实现方式的不同。     

Social Status Profiles Among First Grade Children

The focus of our study is social status among first graders. In particular, we will consider the relationship between acceptance and rejection, and how these are connected to three social behavioral traits: bullying, victimization, and social withdrawal. The data set is from peer nominations of 748 children from 49 classrooms in the southwest of Finland, collected by interviews. A Social Network Analysis technique was used to analyze the data. The results indicated a negative correlation between acceptance and rejection, bullying, and social withdrawal, but did not correlate victimization. Positive correlations, however, were observed between rejection and all social behavioral traits. Based on cluster analysis, the first graders can be divided into Liked Children (N?=?447), Popular Bullies (N?=?68), Unpopular Bullies (N?=?28), Marginalized Children (N?=?135) and High Risk Children (N?=?21). All Unpopular Bullies and almost all High Risk children were boys. Boys were also nominated more often than girls as Popular Bullies, whilst girls were more often reported as marginalized or as Liked Children.     

Talk and the Development of Social Understanding

Our theme is that parent-child talk about the mental world plays a central role in the development of children's social understanding. This view is supported by Wittgenstein's argument that public criteria are necessary for learning the meaning of mental state terms. We propose that children, mainly in talk, learn the patterns of interaction that are criterial for the use of mental state terms. Two examples of empirical research illustrate this proposal. The first, a qualitative analysis of how criteria for psychological terms are displayed in mother-child talk, revealed that criteria were variously displayed and were presented in temporal, cause and effect sequences. The second, a quantitative analysis of key elements for understanding false beliefs present in mother-child talk, compared dyads in which children Failed (N = 14) or Passed (N = 10) false belief tests. In both Fail and Pass dyads, mothers elicited the vast majority of elements but produced about the same number as children. Only Pass children produced elements without mothers eliciting them. There were no instances of child-elicited/mother-produced elements. Overall, Fail children were less competent at recognizing and commenting on important aspects of a situation of false belief. We conclude that the development of talk and social understanding are inextricably intertwined.     

女性语言的责任型情态的人际意义研究——以美剧《丑女贝蒂》的女性语言为例

以功能语言学为视角,分析女性语言中责任型情态人际意义的实现。在女性语言中,责任型情态的人际意义主要通过＂语调＂、＂话语多声＂来实现,其中表示可能性的责任型情态则更多用疑问句来实现其人际意义。此外,文章还分析探讨了这些实现方式的心理原因,如女性的谦卑心理;历史原因,如西方女性运动前女性低微的社会地位等等。正是这些原因,导致女性语言中责任型情态人际意义的实现方式的不同。