Children's Social-cognitive Development Research Articles

Media exposure and preschoolers' social-cognitive development.

Exposure to narratives may have beneficial effects on children's social-cognitive development because narratives provide information about the social world and often require social understanding for story comprehension. In the current study, we examined the influence of narratives presented via different media (books, audiobooks, TV/films) on theory-of-mind performance and mental verb comprehension in a sample of 114 three- to six-year-old preschool children. Parents' reports on the number of (children's) books at home, the overall duration of TV/film and audio media exposure, the frequency of shared book reading, watching children's TV/films and audiobook listening, and parent-child discussions about media content were collected. Children's theory-of-mind performance and mental verb comprehension were measured as dependent variables. When gender, age, language skills and parental education were controlled, only the number of children's books, shared book reading frequency, audio-media exposure and audiobook usage significantly predicted children's theory-of-mind scores. None of the media exposure or the parent-child discussion variables had significant incremental effects above the family and child characteristics on mental verb comprehension.

Role of bilingual experience in children's context-sensitive selective trust strategies

AbstractEarly bilingual language experience can enhance children's social-cognitive skills for effective communication. This study examined whether individual variability in bilingual language diversity, measured by language entropy, influenced 3- to 5-year-old children's engagement of contextual information in their selective trust strategies. One-hundred-and-forty Singaporean children (58 girls, Mage = 53.64 months, 97.1% Asian) were presented with an informant who provided either accurate or inaccurate information in a context with either adequate or limited information access. Bilingual children with greater language diversity, compared to those with less language diversity, were more likely to adapt their accuracy-based selective trust strategy to the informant's circumstances (i.e, information access). Results provide new insights into the role of diverse linguistic experiences in shaping children's social cognitive development.

Hubungan Antara Pola Asuh Ibu Bekerja dengan Kemampuan Penyesuaian Sosial dan Perkembangan Kognitif Anak Usia Prasekolah (4-5 Tahun)

Background: The parenting style is chosen to educate children so that they have a mindset and behavior that are in line with community standards. Mothers have an important role in educating and nurturing children according to their stage of development. Today, many mothers have dual roles as caregivers and workers. This will certainly affect development because of the limited interaction between mother and child. Objective: This study aims to prove whether the ability to socially adjust and the cognitive development of children have a relationship with the parenting style used by working mothers for children aged four to five years at Posyandu, Kaliboto Village. Method: A cross-sectional analytic study design was used in this study with a sample of 76 respondents using a total sampling technique. Result: Most of the parenting applied by working mothers is democratic (82.9%), children's social adjustment is in the high category, as much as 7.9%, and children's cognitive development shows results in the good category, as much as 73.7%. The Chi-square test results showed a relationship between the parenting style of working mothers with social adjustment and the child's cognitive development (p-value = 0.000). Conclusion: Parenting applied by working mothers determines children's social adjustment ability and cognitive development. Keywords: parenting style, social adjustment, cognitive development.

Pattern of acquisition of theory of mind in pre-schoolers: A cross-sectional study from South India.

Theory of Mind (ToM) is an important part of children's social cognitive development. The pattern of ToM acquisition depends on many factors including culture, the number of family members, and siblings. This study aimed to examine the pattern of ToM acquisition in Indian culture. We conducted a cross-sectional study among preschool children (three to six years) (N=118) from rural and urban backgrounds. ToM development was assessed using the Wellman and Liu Theory of Mind Scale and the Children's Social Understanding Scale (parent report). The order of acquisition of ToM in Indian children was as follows: diverse desire>diverse belief>knowledge access>explicit false belief>content false belief>hidden emotion. The number of siblings positively correlated with the total ToM task score, and the number of adults in the family did not show any positive correlation. Although India is a collectivistic country, the acquisition pattern of ToM in our population was like that of individualistic countries such as the United States.

Preschoolers' Social Cognitive Development in the Age of Screen Time Ubiquity.

Is screen time exposure a double-edged sword for children's social cognitive development among today's children? We conducted a short-term prospective longitudinal study of 57 typically developing children (Mage = 54.7 months, standard deviation = 2.5 months; 27 female) to examine the association between quantity of screen time exposure during the preschool years (Time 1; age 4) and social cognitive outcomes 1 year later (Time 2; age 5), coinciding with the time of formal school entry. We found that, in boys, watch time and gaming time at Time 1 were associated with relatively lower scores on an academic task at Time 2, and Time 1 gaming time was associated with relatively lower theory of mind at Time 2. For girls, Time 1 watch time was associated with relatively higher prosocial behavior at Time 2. We speculate that these contrasting gender findings may be accounted for by the specific gender-targeted programming currently available to young boys and girls.

Exploração das Relações entre Teoria da Mente e Linguagem em Alunos de Escolas Públicas

Resumo A pesquisa avaliou e também explorou algumas das possíveis relações entre a teoria da mente e a linguagem. Participaram deste estudo 85 alunos do primeiro ano do ensino fundamental de duas escolas públicas mineiras com média de idade de 6,8 anos (DP= 3,0). Utilizou-se uma escala de tarefas de teoria da mente e um livro com narrativa por imagem. Os resultados mostraram uma associação positiva entre a teoria da mente e linguagem, que mesmo sendo discreta, é um achado convergente com pesquisas anteriores. Além disso, possíveis variáveis que podem motivar diferenças no desenvolvimento sociocognitivo infantil foram discutidas.

A Three-factor Structure of Emotion Understanding in Third-grade Children.

Theoretical conceptualizations of emotion understanding generally imply a two-factor structure comprised of recognition of emotional expressions and understanding emotion-eliciting situations. We tested this structure in middle childhood and then explored the unique predictive value of various facets of emotion understanding in explaining children's socioemotional competence. Participants were 201 third-grade children and their mothers. Children completed five different measures, which provided eight distinct indices of emotion understanding. Mothers completed two questionnaires assessing children's socioemotional skills and problems. Results indicated that: (a) emotion understanding in third-grade children was differentiated into three unique factors: Prototypical Emotion Recognition, Prototypical Emotion Knowledge, and Advanced Emotion Understanding, (b) skills within factors were modestly related, (c) factors varied in complexity, supporting theoretical and empirical models detailing developmental sequencing of skills, and (d) skills in Prototypical Emotion Knowledge were uniquely related to mothers' reports of third-grade children's socioemotional competence. Implications regarding elementary-school-age children's social cognitive development are discussed.

Young Children's Understanding of Ownership

AbstractOwnership influences the permissibility of people's use of objects. Understanding ownership is therefore necessary for socially appropriate behavior and is an important part of children's social‐cognitive development. Children are sophisticated in their reasoning about ownership early in development. They make a variety of judgments about ownership, including judgments about how ownership is acquired, who owns what, and ownership rights. Understanding how children reason about ownership can also inform broader questions about the nature and origins of ownership.

Social understanding and social lives: from toddlerhood through to the transition to school. By Claire Hughes. Psychology Press, Hove, East Sussex, 2011.

Social understanding and social lives: from toddlerhood through to the transition to school. By Claire Hughes. Psychology Press, Hove, East Sussex, 2011.

Trajectories of Aggressive Behavior and Children's Social-Cognitive Development

The current study investigated developmental trajectories of teacher-reported aggressive behavior and whether these trajectories are associated with social-cognitive development (i.e., aggressive problem-solving) across the first three elementary grades in a large sample from Switzerland (N= 1,146). Semiparametric group-based analyses were employed to identify distinct pathways of aggressive behavior across grades. Five distinct trajectory classes were identified: low-stable, medium-stable, decreasing, increasing, and high-stable. Children’s aggressive problem-solving strategies differentiated the high-stable from the other aggressive behavior trajectories. The findings are discussed within a social-cognitive developmental framework.

Relations between Mother-child Talk and 3- to 5 Year-Old Children's Understanding of Belief: Beyond Mental State Terms to Talk about the Mind

In relating parent-child conversation to children's social cognitive development, we examined how mother-child dyads talked about the psychological world. Seventy mothers and their 3- to 5-year-old children made up a story about a series of pictures depicting a sequence of events involving a false belief. Mother-child talk was coded for the use of mental state terms as well as talk about important aspects of the depicted events. The children were given 2 false belief tasks. When age was controlled, mental state term use was associated with children's false-belief understanding. However, when mental state terms and talk about the aspects of the false-belief component of the story were both taken into account, only talk about the false-belief section of the story accounted for significant additional variance in children's false-belief understanding. We suggest that these results encourage a broader view of talk about the psychological world beyond an exclusive focus on the use of mental state terms.

Review of How children develop social understanding.

JEREMY CARPENDALE and CHARLIE LEWIS (Eds.) How Children Develop Social Understanding Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing, 2006, 311 pages (ISBN 1-4051-0549-1, C$29.95 Hardcover) Reviewed by JACK MARTIN Toward end of this recently published volume, Carpendale and Lewis mention several criticisms of an earlier, article-lengdi presentation of their theoretical work on development of children's social understanding. One of criticisms they cite is that their social-constructivist, relational account is nothing new - the does not make a new contribution to literature on social understanding (p. 249) . If this is interpreted to mean that Carpendale and Lewis do not give us an entirely original grand narrative that explains everything we want to know about development of children's social understanding, criticism is correct. However, to have such a concern is to miss significance of what these authors have accomplished in this book that Michael Tomasello, on back jacket, correcdy announces as the best book there is on children's social-cognitive development - full stop. How can this be if there is no brave new in offing? In my opinion, what Carpendale and Lewis have accomplished is a more modest and ultimately more valuable triune of theoretical contributions. Carpendale and Lewis' first theoretical contribution is to have provided a marvellously coherent description of a vast amount of extant research and concerning children's and adolescents' social interaction and social understanding. Through their capable guidance, we are taken on a highly informative, intellectually satisfying tour of assumptions, perspectives, research programs and methods, controversies, and debates that have defined theory of mind and related areas of inquiry over past 15 to 20 years. When necessary, they have supplemented this intensive examination of recent past with more chronologically distant sources and background discussions to ensure that reader is able to position recent work within more longstanding psychological and philosophical traditions. So successful is this tour that it is possible to visualize children participating in various studies that are discussed, researchers pouring over their data and statistical analyses, and conference participants passionately debating their differing interpretations and perspectives. Both focal phenomena and ways they have been studied are vividly portrayed and illustrated in ways that are simultaneously informative and revealing. Experimental tasks, research strategies, and logics of interpretation are rendered easily accessible even to those previously unfamiliar with research of this kind, but in a way that still captures critical attention of researchers fully engaged in this area of inquiry. As a second theoretical contribution, Carpendale and Lewis provide an important synthesis of all that they describe so comprehensively and clearly. This synthesis is a social constructivist, relational account that combines key insights from Vygotsky and Wittgenstein with their interpersonal, contextualist reading (following Chapman, 1988, 1991, 1999) of Piaget. Carpendale and Lewis make it clear that genetic and epigenetic contributions to human biology and neurophysiology are absolutely essential requisites for human social and psychological development. However, just as most exquisitely wrought musical instruments cannot be equated with musical performance per se, they resist equating social development with its bodily and cerebral requisites, steadfastly maintaining that meaning, knowledge, and significance that define psychological life of persons are constituted gradually during ontogenesis within social interactivity with others. Through developmentally early forms of dyadic social interaction and joint attention with caregivers (e.g., touching and being touched, pointing, gaze following, social referencing, and turn taking), young children progress to more complex, triadic engagement with others and world that provide social, relational bases on which language is constructed. …

Conversations with siblings and with friends: Links between relationship quality and social understanding

This study investigates features of interaction between children that are linked to the development of understanding of mind, and asks whether these associations are evident across different relationships. Comparisons are made of the naturally occurring conversations in a sample of 43 4‐year‐old children, each observed with a sibling and with a friend. Links between features of these conversational interactions and the children's social cognitive development (theory of mind, emotion understanding), language ability and relationship quality are examined. Social cognitive skills were related to successful communication with siblings and with friends, and (marginally) to joint pretend play in both relationships; the relative significance of language for the development of social understanding differed in the two relationships. Language skills and socio‐economic background were important only for conversations and pretend play with friends, not siblings.

Supporting Children's Social Cognitive Development: Literature Choices That Make a Difference

Supporting Children's Social Cognitive Development: Literature Choices That Make a Difference

Children's developmental understanding of ethnicity and race

Research on children's development of ethnic cognition from preschool through adolescence was reviewed. This review was based on research conducted on (a) children's ethnic cognition, (b) children's social-cognitive development, (c) children's understanding of a variety of social status, and (d) Quintana's model of children's understanding of ethnicity. Four developmental levels were described: Integration of affective and perceptual understanding of ethnicity (level 0), literal understanding of ethnicity (level 1), social and nonliteral perspective of ethnicity (level 2), and ethnic-group consciousness and ethnic identity (level 3). For each developmental level, applied implications were discussed.

Children's Knowledge About Medicines

A model explaining children's knowledge about medicines and the perceived benefit of medicines was constructed and estimated. The children's health belief model, cognitive development and social cognitive development theories, combined with previous multimethod study results form the basis of the path analytic model analyzed. Children, aged 7 and 10 years, and their primary caregivers were interviewed during 1992 and 1993. Recruiting was done at summer camps in Chapel Hill, North Carolina and environs, resulting in a convenience sample of 101 children, all white and middle class. Oridnary least squares regression was carried out in steps for the two model equations. Knowledge of medicines was most adequately explained, having age, educational environment and the degree of internal locus of control as significant positive predictors. The only significant predictor of the perceived benefit of medicines was the negative effect of the internal locus of control, supporting results from former studies. Children's retention of drug advertising had no significant effects in the model. The results from this moderately sized study suggest promising directions for further development of explanations of why children believe in the benefit of medicines.

Continuities in Emotion Understanding from Three to Six Years

As part of a longitudinal study, 47 children who were tested on their understanding of basic emotions when they were 3 years old were tested again at 6 on their understanding of conflicting emotions. Significant stability in individual differences was found over this 3-year period. Antecedents to emotion understanding at 3 continued to be significantly related to children's understanding at 6, including participation in discourse about causality, positive interaction with older siblings, and language ability. Girls outperformed boys, and there was a suggestion that the girls' understanding of emotions was more closely associated than the boys' with the quality of their sibling relationships. Children's concurrent reports of negative experiences at home and at school were related to their sensitivity to the experience of ambivalent emotions. The results are discussed with respect to the social origins and implications of this core aspect of children's social-cognitive development.

Parenting style and developmental status among children with nonorganic failure to thrive.

Examined differences in several developmental indices of competence among 102 low-income, inner-city, predominantly African American children with non-organic failure to thrive (NOFTT) and a comparison group of 67 children with adequate growth matched on age, gender, race, and socioeconomic status. Parents were categorized into one of three groups (nurturant, authoritarian, and neglecting) based on observations during feeding. Parents of children with NOFTT were less nurturant and more neglecting than parents of comparison children. Associations between parenting style and children's social-cognitive development were similar across groups. Children of nurturant parents consistently demonstrated better social-cognitive development. Results support the importance of considering heterogeneity among high-risk families and the need to examine the relationships linking parenting style and child development.

Rough-and-Tumble Play: Developmental and Educational Significance

The developmental and educational roles of rough-and-tumble play (R&T) are reviewed. R&T is defined and theories explaining R&T are critiqued. Factors affecting its occurrence (i.e., gender and ecological variables) are reviewed, and the functional significance of R&T is explored. Methodological problems are discussed, such as the confounding of R&T with aggression, in the recent work on R&T. Generally, it is concluded that R&T serves as a positive function in children's social cognitive development.

Abused, Neglected, and Nonmaltreated Children's Conceptions of Moral and Social-Conventional Transgressions

The effect of child maltreatment on children's social-cognitive development was examined by investigating abused, neglected, and nonmaltreated children's judgments regarding the permissibility of social-conventional and moral transgressions pertaining to physical harm, psychological distress, and the unfair distribution of resources. Abused and neglected children and a control group of nonmaltreated children matched on IQ, age, and social class judged the seriousness, deserved punishment, generalizability, and rule contingency of familiar transgressions for themselves and others. Abused subjects were more likely than neglected subjects to consider psychological distress to be universally wrong for others; neglected subjects were more likely than abused subjects to judge the unfair distribution of resources to be universally wrong for themselves. Abused and control children, but not neglected children, judged all transgressions to deserve more punishment when committed by others than when committed by the self. All children distinguished between morality and social convention and between different types of moral transgressions on all 4 criteria. Furthermore, all children were more egocentric in their judgments for the self than for others. These findings are discussed in relation to research on the effects of child maltreatment and on moral judgment.