Developmental changes in ideas about lying

Videotaped stories depicting deliberate lies and unintentionally untrue statements were presented to 200 subjects evenly divided into the following age groups: 5, 8, 9, and 11 years and adult. Definitions of lying were seen to change gradually over this age range. Adults were more lenient than children in their moral evaluations of all the statements. All age groups rated a guess that did no harm as better than one that caused trouble, and they all judged selfishly motivated lies to be worse than both unintended falsehoods and "jocose" lies that aimed to please the listener. 11-year-olds tended to justify the prohibition against lying in terms of trust and fairness, whereas younger children cited authority's punitive sanctions.     

Children's Reasoning about Interpersonal and Moral Conflicts

2 studies were conducted to determine if children make judgments about both justice and interpersonal relations in conflictful situations. In Study 1, 48 subjects (24 males and 24 females) in the third, sixth, and ninth grades (mean ages = 8.40, 11.38, 14.38 years) were administered 2 stories entailing conflicts between justice and interpersonal concerns. Children judged and justified acts in 4 conditions systematically varying interpersonal and justice concerns. Children generally gave priority to justice and rights over friendship, based primarily on considerations of welfare or rights. In Study 2, 76 subjects (39 males and 37 females) in the third, sixth, and ninth grades (mean ages = 9.08, 12.10, 14.92 years) were presented with 3 stories entailing conflicts between justice and interpersonal relations. Subjects gave greater priority to interpersonal considerations in Study 2 than in Study 1, and their evaluations varied according to the salience of the different concerns. In both studies, few gender differences were obtained. The results demonstrate that across development, concerns with justice and interpersonal relationships coexist in judgments of male and female children, and that the ways they are applied depend on the situation.     

Learning to Learn From Stories: Children's Developing Sensitivity to the Causal Structure of Fictional Worlds

Fiction presents a unique challenge to the developing child, in that children must learn when to generalize information from stories to the real world. This study examines how children acquire causal knowledge from storybooks, and whether children are sensitive to how closely the fictional world resembles reality. Preschoolers (N = 108) listened to stories in which a novel causal relation was embedded within realistic or fantastical contexts. Results indicate that by at least 3 years of age, children are sensitive to the underlying causal structure of the story: Children are more likely to generalize content if the fictional world is similar to reality. Additionally, children become better able at discriminating between realistic and fantastical story contexts between 3 and 5 years of age.     

"新媒体时代"小学生最喜欢阅读哪类课外书——小学生课外阅读调查研究之六

尽管从本调查结果中只能看到小学生课外阅读的某些不足,如喜欢读科普知识、儿童小说、儿童诗、古典诗歌等的比例还低于甚或远远低于喜欢读明星趣事、魔幻小说、作文辅导、鬼故事和武侠小说等的比例,但是,如果联系一下当前小学生何以会有这样的阅读"需求"以及社会"供给"状况来看,则可以说今日之小学生的课外阅读还是存在着不小的问题.倘若想让孩子们真正地热爱上读书并多读值得一读的书,那么,我们的社会就必须在很多很多的事上先做好.     

Relations among parental causal attributions and children’s math performance and task persistence

The present longitudinal study examined the cross-lagged relations between parental causal attributions of children’s math success to children’s ability, parental help, children’s math performance and task persistence. A total of 735 children, their mothers, fathers and teachers were assessed twice – at the end of the second and the third grades. Children were tested in math and parents filled out questionnaires measuring causal attributions. Children’s task persistence was reported both by parents and by class teachers. The results of path analyses indicated mutual negative effects between mothers’ and fathers’ help attributions and children’s math performance, and a positive effect of mothers’ ability attributions on children’s math performance. Cross-lagged relations were also found for children’s math performance and task persistence. However, relations between parental attributions and children’s task persistence were evident only for fathers’ ability attributions. The findings emphasise the importance of examining both mothers and fathers, home and school context.     

Children's distributive justice judgments: aversive racism in Euro-American children?

Euro-American 2nd- and 4th-grade children (Ms=7.67 and 9.82 years) heard stories about Black and White characters who produced artwork yielding a windfall reward. Children allocated rewards to characters, justified their allocations, and judged the fairness of patterns representing different justice principles. Older children allocated more money to Black than White productive characters and to White than Black needy characters, consistent with predictions from aversive racism theory. Rationales most often relied on equality principles; older children gave more equity-based justifications for Black than for White characters. Fairness ratings of patterns representing 4 justice principles revealed effects for age and character race. Implications for understanding the developmental course of moral judgments as they apply to racial differences are discussed.     

Does the Cognitive Interview Promote the Coherence of Narrative Accounts in Children With and Without an Intellectual Disability?

We examined whether the cognitive interview (CI) procedure enhanced the coherence of narrative accounts provided by children with and without intellectual disabilities (ID), matched on chronological age. Children watched a videotaped magic show; one day later, they were interviewed using the CI or a structured interview (SI). Children interviewed using the CI reported more correct details than those interviewed using the SI. Additionally, children interviewed using the CI reported more contextual background details, more logically ordered sequences, more temporal markers, and fewer inconsistencies in their stories than those interviewed using the SI. However, the CI did not increase the number of story grammar elements compared with the SI. Overall children interviewed with the CI told better stories than those interviewed with the SI. This finding provided further support for the effectiveness of the CI with vulnerable witnesses, particularly children with ID.     

Children's Counterfactual Reasoning About Causally Overdetermined Events

In two experiments, one hundred and sixty-two 6- to 8-year-olds were asked to reason counterfactually about events with different causal structures. All events involved overdetermined outcomes in which two different causal events led to the same outcome. In Experiment 1, children heard stories with either an ambiguous causal relation between events or causally unrelated events. Children in the causally unrelated version performed better than chance and better than those in the ambiguous condition. In Experiment 2, children heard stories in which antecedent events were causally connected or causally disconnected. Eight-year-olds performed above chance in both conditions, whereas 6-year-olds performed above chance only in the connected condition. This work provides the first evidence that children can reason counterfactually in causally overdetermined contexts by age 8.     

Chinese and Canadian Children's Evaluations of Lying and Truth Telling: Similarities and Dfferences in the Context of pro-and Antisocial Behaviors

The present study compared Chinese and Canadian children's moral evaluations of lie and truth telling in situations involving pro- and antisocial behaviors. Seven-, 9-, and 11-year-old Chinese and canadian children were presented 4 brief stories. Two stories involved a child who intentionally carried out a good deed, and the other2 stories involved a child who intentionally carried out a bad deed. When story characters were questioned by a teacher as to who had committed the deed, they either lied or told the truth. Children were asked to evaluate the story characters' deeds and their verbal statements. Overall, Chinese children rated truth telling less positively and lie telling more positively in prosocial settings than Canadian children, indicating that the emphasis on self-effacement and modesty in Chinese culture overrides Chinese children's evaluations of lying in some situations. Both Chinese and canadian children rated trugh telling positively and lie telling negatively in antisocial situations, reflecting the emphasis in both cultures on the distinction between misdeed and truth/lie telling. The findings of the present study suggest that, in the realm of lying and truth telling, a close relation between sociocultural practices and moral judgment exists. Specific social and cultural norms have an impact on children's developing moral judgments, which in turn, are modified by age and experience in a particular culture.     

Children’s Beliefs About Possibility Differ Across Dreams,Stories, and Reality

Are children’s judgments about what can happen in dreams and stories constrained by their beliefs about reality? This question was explored across three experiments, in which four hundred and sixty-nine 4- to 7-year-olds judged whether improbable and impossible events could occur in a dream, a story, or reality. In Experiment 1, children judged events more possible in dreams than in reality. In Experiment 2, children also judged events more possible in dreams than in stories. Both experiments also suggested that children’s beliefs about reality constrain their judgments about dreams and stories. Finally, in Experiment 3 children were asked about impossible events more typical of dreams and stories. In contrast with the other experiments, children now affirmed the events could happen in these worlds.     

Children exposed to obscene phone calls: what they remember and tell

OBJECTIVE: This case study examined children's reports from an obscene phone call (i.e., a verbal sexual abuse). We investigated which type of information the children reported, the completeness and accuracy of the children's statements, and whether there were systematic patterns in terms of memory distortions and omissions. METHOD: The completeness and the accuracy of the children's statements were examined by matching 64 children's statements given during police interviews with a detailed documentation of each phone call, made by the perpetrator during the actual phone calls. RESULTS: All children remembered the phone call per se, but they were found to omit almost all of the sexual and sensitive information (perpetrator's questions and statements) and about 70% of the neutral information given by the perpetrator. However, the children were accurate in the information they did report. CONCLUSIONS: The fact that the children did remember more of the neutral information suggests that they actually remembered the sexual information as well, but that they chose not to report it. Results indicate that children who have been sexually abused may remember more than they report in an initial interview. One possible underlying reason is that children experience shame or embarrassment.     

Danish majority children's reasoning about exclusion based on gender and ethnicity

This study investigated 282 eight- to twelve-year-old Danish majority children's judgments and justifications of exclusion based on gender and ethnicity (i.e., Danish majority children and ethnic-minority children of a Muslim background). Children's judgments and reasoning varied with the perpetrator of the exclusion and the social identity of the target. Children assessed exclusion based on ethnicity as less acceptable than exclusion based on gender and used more moral reasoning for the former than the latter. Children judged it less acceptable for a teacher than a child to exclude a child protagonist. Children were sensitive to status, judging it less acceptable to exclude a less powerful group member. The findings are discussed in relation to intergroup relations in Denmark.     

The role of language in the development of false belief understanding: a training study

The current study used a training methodology to determine whether different kinds of linguistic interaction play a causal role in children's development of false belief understanding. After 3 training sessions, 3-year-old children improved their false belief understanding both in a training condition involving perspective-shifting discourse about deceptive objects (without mental state terms) and in a condition in which sentential complement syntax was used (without deceptive objects). Children did not improve in a condition in which they were exposed to deceptive objects without accompanying language. Children showed most improvement in a condition using both perspective-shifting discourse and sentential complement syntax, suggesting that each of these types of linguistic experience plays an independent role in the ontogeny of false belief understanding.     

Preschoolers’ Search for Explanatory Information Within Adult–Child Conversation

This research examined children’s questions and the reactions to the answers they receive in conversations with adults. If children actively seek explanatory knowledge, they should react differently depending on whether they receive a causal explanation. Study 1 examined conversations following 6 preschoolers’ (ages 2–4 years) causal questions in naturalistic situations (using the Child Language Data Exchange System [CHILDES] database). Children more often agreed and asked follow‐up questions following adult explanations and, conversely, more often reasked their original question and provided their own explanation following nonexplanations. Study 2 replicated these patterns within an experimental task in 42 children ages 3–5 years. Children’s reactions following explanatory versus nonexplanatory information confirm that young children are motivated to seek causal information actively and use specific conversational strategies to obtain it.     

Early Differentiation of Causal Mechanisms Appropriate to Biological and Nonbiological Kinds

Although Piaget characterized young children as precausal until about 7-8 years of age, recent work indicates that preschoolers do honor fundamental principles of causality. This literature has mainly focused on general principles invoked in reasoning about mechanical events. By contrast, the present study examined whether children differentiate between the causal mechanisms appropriate for different conceptual domains. The results of 3 preliminary investigations and 1 main experiment suggested that preschoolers prefer natural mechanisms for color inheritance in biological kinds, particularly when causal substrates resemble their consequences. By contrast, the same children recognized the importance of human intentions in producing the color of an artifact, and also judged that mechanical mechanisms serve to mediate between intentions and outcomes. The results are relevant to recent studies on the development of biological thought, and overall suggest that early causal reasoning reflects both domain-specific and domain-general principles.     

“Where's the fox? You've got to read the fox.”

An important reminder that young children know how stories work, and are therefore able to use bibliographic and literary knowledge as they set about the task of learning to read books with maturity and competence. Sue Smedley shows four and five year olds working in intellectually demanding ways to recreate stories for themselves and argues that young children have a right to the kinds of books and stories which call for intelligent and imaginative responses.     

Forces and Motion: How Young Children Understand Causal Events

How do children evaluate complex causal events? This study investigates preschoolers' representation of force dynamics in causal scenes, asking whether (a) children understand how single and dual forces impact an object's movement and (b) this understanding varies across cause types (Cause, Enable, Prevent). Three‐and‐a half‐ to 5.5‐year‐olds (n = 60) played a board game in which they were asked to predict the endpoint of a ball being acted upon by one or two forces. Children mostly understood the interactions of forces underlying each type of cause; only 5.5‐year‐olds could integrate two contradictory forces. Children perceive force interactions underlying causal events, but some concepts might not be fully understood until later in childhood. This study provides a new way of thinking about causal relations.     

民间故事对幼儿的永恒魅力

幼儿的心理活动与处于"童年时期"的人类的心理有某些相似之处。幼儿具有接受民间故事的心理基础;民间故事对幼儿的影响作用的发生机制——儿童敏感期的求知欲;民间故事对幼儿的影响作用以儿童发展的社会生态环境为依托。民间故事对幼儿影响的必要性:民间故事是幼儿重要的文化食粮;以民间故事塑造幼儿健康个性;以民间故事培植亲子感情。     

Development of children’s moral evaluations of modesty and self-promotion in diverse cultural settings

This cross-cultural study of the moral judgements of Mainland Han-Chinese, Chinese-Canadian, and Euro-Canadian children aged seven to 11 examined the evaluations of narrative protagonists’ modest lies and self-promoting truthful statements in situations where they had done a good deed. The story characters had thus either lied or told the truth about a prosocial act that they had committed. Chinese children judged modest lies more positively and boastful truths less positively than Euro-Canadian children. Chinese and Chinese-Canadian children rated immodest statements more negatively than did Euro-Canadian children. The cultural differences were greatest with the oldest children. Chinese children rated modest lies significantly more positively than either Canadian group who did not differ from each other but an interaction between age and culture revealed the three groups to be significantly different at age 11 with Chinese children most positive, followed by Chinese-Canadian children, and with Euro-Canadian children evaluating modest lies least positively. Cultural strictures and acculturation factors respecting modesty and self-enhancement are reflected in these differences.