Balance in Positive Emotional Expressivity Across School Contexts Relates to Kindergartners’ Adjustment

Positive emotional expressivity has been associated with increased social competence and decreased maladjustment in childhood. However, a few researchers have found null or even positive associations between positive emotional expressivity and maladjustment, which suggests that there may be nuanced associations of positive expressivity, perhaps as a function of the social context in which it is expressed. We examined whether observed positive emotional expressivity balance across peer-oriented/recreational and learning contexts predicted kindergarten children’s adjustment (N = 301). Research Findings: Higher positive expressivity during lunch/recess compared to positive expressivity in the classroom was associated with lower teacher–student conflict, externalizing behaviors, and depressive symptoms. In addition, overall positive emotional expressivity predicted lower externalizing behaviors as well as lower depressive and anxiety symptoms. Practice or Policy: The results suggest the importance of assessing observed positive emotional expressivity in context as a potential indicator of children’s maladjustment risk and the need for children to adapt their emotions to different contexts. Implications for assessing and supporting positive emotional expression balance and training emotional regulation in school are discussed.     

MultiMap: An Interactive Tool for Mathematical Experimentation

Abstract

This article describes a computer program, “Multi‐Map,” designed to introduce experimentation and exploration in the precollege mathematics curriculum. The central activity in MultiMap involves the creation of planar maps which may be applied interactively to graphical objects. The maps may be affine or nonlinear; and (among other activities) they can easily be edited, composed, or applied iteratively. We outline MultiMap's interface and basic functionality, describe a wide variety of exploratory mathematical activities that can be undertaken with the program, and present some observations on the use of MultiMap in the classroom.     

Relations of Children's Effortful Control and Teacher-Child Relationship Quality to School Attitudes in a Low-Income Sample

RESEARCH FINDINGS: The purpose of this study was to examine the relations of children's effortful control and quality of relationships with teachers to school attitudes longitudinally in an ethnically diverse and economically disadvantaged sample. Data were collected as part of a larger intervention project during mid-fall, winter, and late spring (ns = 823, 722, and 758, respectively) for 2 cohorts of 3- to 5-year-olds (collected during 2 different school years). Children's effortful control was assessed in the fall with parents' and teachers' reports and 2 behavioral measures. Teacher-child relationship quality was assessed mid-year with teachers' reports of closeness and conflict. Attitudes toward school were assessed in late spring using teachers' and students' reports of school avoidance and liking. Effortful control, in general, was positively correlated with teacher-child closeness and school liking and negatively correlated with conflict and school avoidance. Using structural equation modeling and controlling for sex and ethnicity, we found that effortful control was positively related to teacher-child relationship quality, which in turn was positively related to school attitudes. Furthermore, the relation of effortful control to school attitudes was mediated by teacher-child relationship quality. PRACTICE OR POLICY: Results provide evidence for the importance of relational processes that take place within the classroom context and have implications for teachers and clinicians working to increase school success in ethnic minority and low-income children.     

Perceptual Access Reasoning (PAR) in Developing a Representational Theory of Mind

An important part of children's social and cognitive development is their understanding that people are psychological beings with internal, mental states including desire, intention, perception, and belief. A full understanding of people as psychological beings requires a representational theory of mind (ToM), which is an understanding that mental states can faithfully represent reality, or misrepresent reality. For the last 35 years, researchers have relied on false-belief tasks as the gold standard to test children's understanding that beliefs can misrepresent reality. In false-belief tasks, children are asked to reason about the behavior of agents who have false beliefs about situations. Although a large body of evidence indicates that most children pass false-belief tasks by the end of the preschool years, the evidence we present in this monograph suggests that most children do not understand false beliefs or, surprisingly, even true beliefs until middle childhood. We argue that young children pass false-belief tasks without understanding false beliefs by using perceptual access reasoning (PAR). With PAR, children understand that seeing leads to knowing in the moment, but not that knowing also arises from thinking or persists as memory and belief after the situation changes. By the same token, PAR leads children to fail true-belief tasks. PAR theory can account for performance on other traditional tests of representational ToM and related tasks, and can account for the factors that have been found to correlate with or affect both true- and false-belief performance. The theory provides a new laboratory measure which we label the belief understanding scale (BUS). This scale can distinguish between a child who is operating with PAR versus a child who is understanding beliefs. This scale provides a method needed to allow the study of the development of representational ToM. In this monograph, we report the outcome of the tests that we have conducted of predictions generated by PAR theory. The findings demonstrated signature PAR limitations in reasoning about the mind during the ages when children are hypothesized to be using PAR. In Chapter II, secondary analyses of the published true-belief literature revealed that children failed several types of true-belief tasks. Chapters III through IX describe new empirical data collected across multiple studies between 2003 and 2014 from 580 children aged 4–7 years, as well as from a small sample of 14 adults. Participants were recruited from the Phoenix, Arizona metropolitan area. All participants were native English-speakers. Children were recruited from university-sponsored and community preschools and daycare centers, and from hospital maternity wards. Adults were university students who participated to partially fulfill course requirements for research participation. Sociometric data were collected only in Chapter IX, and are fully reported there. In Chapter III, minor alterations in task procedures produced wide variations in children's performance in 3-option false-belief tasks. In Chapter IV, we report findings which show that the developmental lag between children's understanding ignorance and understanding false belief is longer than the lag reported in previous studies. In Chapter V, children did not distinguish between agents who have false beliefs versus agents who have no beliefs. In Chapter VI, findings showed that children found it no easier to reason about true beliefs than to reason about false beliefs. In Chapter VII, when children were asked to justify their correct answers in false-belief tasks, they did not reference agents’ false beliefs. Similarly, in Chapter VIII, when children were asked to explain agents’ actions in false-belief tasks, they did not reference agents’ false beliefs. In Chapter IX, children who were identified as using PAR differed from children who understood beliefs along three dimensions—in levels of social development, inhibitory control, and kindergarten adjustment. Although the findings need replication and additional studies of alternative interpretations, the collection of results reported in this monograph challenges the prevailing view that representational ToM is in place by the end of the preschool years. Furthermore, the pattern of findings is consistent with the proposal that PAR is the developmental precursor of representational ToM. The current findings also raise questions about claims that infants and toddlers demonstrate ToM-related abilities, and that representational ToM is innate.     

Proceedings of the Eighth Annual Conference of the National Council for Jewish Education

Research about Jewish choral singers provides insight to a previously unstudied population of adult Jewish learners. Drawing on over 2,000 responses to the First-Ever Survey of Jewish Choral Activity, this article describes how Jewish choral experiences enable adults to deepen their involvement in Jewish life and learning. Survey results suggest that participants in Jewish choral groups resemble secular singers in terms of social, identity, and skill development, but derive additional benefits in terms of Jewish Peoplehood, Jewish Competence, Spirituality, and Jewish Community. Jewish choral activities particularly benefit singers under 45 by providing them opportunities to integrate their Jewish and musical lives.     

Brazilian adolescents' prosocial moral judgment and behavior: relations to sympathy, perspective taking, gender-role orientation, and demographic characteristics

The goal of this study was to examine demographic and individual difference variables that predict level of prosocial moral judgment and self-reported prosocial behavior and to test mediating or moderating relations among predictors. The relations of prosocial moral reasoning and self-reported prosocial behavior to perspective taking, sympathy, age, sociometric status, and gender-role orientation were examined with a sample of 149 Brazilian adolescents who completed a series of questionnaire measures. Prosocial moral judgment was expected to be predicted by both sympathy and perspective taking, whereas sympathy or prosocial moral judgment was expected to mediate the relations of femininity and perspective taking to prosocial behavior. Self-reported perspective taking and sympathy interacted when predicting prosocial moral judgment; adolescents who were high in either sympathy or perspective taking (or both) scored high in prosocial moral reasoning. A feminine orientation predicted sympathy and perspective taking, perspective taking predicted prosocial moral reasoning and sympathy, and sympathy had both direct and indirect paths (through moral judgment) to prosocial behavior. The findings generally were consistent with the contention that both the tendency to take others' perspectives and to sympathize are related to level of prosocial moral reasoning, which in turn motivates prosocial behavior. Moreover, patterns of correlations among variables were similar to those found in the United States.