Children's Tendency Research Articles

Parents’ Aggressive Influences and Children's Aggressive Problem Solutions With Peers

This study examined children's aggressive and assertive solutions to hypothetical peer scenarios in relation to parents’responses to similar hypothetical social scenarios and parents’actual marital aggression. The study included 118 children ages 9 to 10 years old and their mothers and fathers. Children's aggressive solutions correlated with same-sex parents’ actual marital aggression. For children with mothers who exhibited low actual marital aggression, mothers’ aggressive solutions to hypothetical situations corresponded with children's tendencies to propose aggressive but not assertive solutions. In a 3-way interaction, fathers’ aggressive solutions to peer scenarios and marital aggression, combined, exacerbated girls’ aggressive problem solving but had the opposite effect for boys. We address the complexity, particularly with respect to parent and child gender combinations, in understanding parents’ aggressive influences on children's peer relationships.

Bleeding Tendency as a First Symptom in Children with Congenital Biliary Dilatation

Although a bleeding tendency as a first symptom is a critical condition in congenital biliary dilatation (CBD), the clinical details of this symptom remain unclear. We assessed this condition in children with CBD in this paper. Sixty-five children with CBD were treated at our institute between 1983 and 2004. The children, initially presenting with bleeding manifestations such as intracranial hemorrhage and bloody stools, were defined as the bleeding group, and the remaining children with digestive symptoms such as abdominal pain and vomiting were defined as the digestive group. The clinical features were compared between these two groups. In 6 of the 65 cases, bleeding manifestations were noted (9.2 %). All six had cystic-type choledochal dilatation. The mean age of the bleeding group was significantly younger than that of the digestive group, and bleeding was more frequent, especially in infants less than 12 months of age. In a laboratory study, the bleeding group showed a more prolonged blood coagulation time than the digestive group did. Serum amylase and lipase levels in the bleeding group were almost normal, while those in the digestive group were significantly higher. The direct bilirubin level in the bleeding group was significantly higher than that in the digestive group. Disturbed blood coagulation due to vitamin K deficiency related to cholestasis results in a bleeding tendency in children with CBD. Therefore, pediatric surgeons should be aware of this rare but critical condition which can be prevented by rapid and precise treatment with vitamin K supplementation.

Brand meaning and children: A thematic categorisation task

This study uses a thematic categorisation task that has been especially designed and developed for use among child subjects to elicit and measure brand meaning. This is based on the hierarchical categorisation procedure suggested by Oakenfull, Blair, Gelb and Dacin. The method uses a pictorial sorting task to ensure that the categorisation of brands is more compatible with children's tendency to sort thematically rather than taxonomically. The method is offered as a tool that brand managers can use to identify ‘core brand attributes’ as well as to evaluate possible brand extensions.

The development of in-group favoritism: Between social reality and group identity.

This study examined how social reality restricts children's tendency for in-group favoritism in group evaluations. Children were faced with social reality considerations and with group identity concerns. Using short stories, in this experimental study, conducted among 3 age groups (6-, 8-, and 10-year-olds), the authors examined the trait attribution effects of reality constraints on eye-color differences and national group differences. The results show that the trait attributions of all age groups were restricted by the acceptance of socially defined reality. In addition, when the information about reality was not considered accurate, only the youngest children showed positive in-group favoritism. It is argued that these findings are useful in trying to reconcile some of the divergent and contrasting findings in the developmental literature on children's intergroup perceptions and evaluations.

The Role of Child Emotional Responsiveness and Maternal Negative Emotion Expression in Children's Coping Strategy Use

AbstractThis study examined the additive and interactive effects of children's trait vicarious emotional responsiveness and maternal negative emotion expression on children's use of coping strategies. Ninety‐five children (mean age = 5.87 years) and their mothers and teachers participated in the study. The mothers reported on their own negative emotion expression and the children's empathic concern and personal distress tendencies. The mothers and teachers reported on the children's use of avoidant, support‐seeking, and aggressive‐venting coping strategies. Empathic concern was positively associated with the children's use of support seeking and negatively associated with the children's use of aggressive venting, whereas personal distress showed the opposite pattern of associations. Maternal negative emotion expression moderated some associations between the children's emotional responsiveness and coping. These findings support the hypothesis that children's tendencies to experience empathic concern or personal distress indicate functionally distinct styles of emotional arousal that may have broader consequences for socially competent behavior in response to normative stressors.

Change in children's understanding of others’ intentional actions

The study investigated children's intention understanding using a longitudinal design. Thirty-two Italian children were tested on the 'Demonstration of Intention' in the Re-enactment paradigm devised by Meltzoff (1995a), at two ages. Mean age was 12 months at the first session and 15 months at the second session. Previous research by Meltzoff showed that 18-month-olds are able to re-enact what the adult intended to do, when an adult tried but failed to perform certain target acts. Bellagamba and Tomasello (1999) found that, compared to 18-month-olds, 12-month-olds are less able to imitate unsuccessful goal-directed actions. The current study had two main goals. The first was to replicate earlier findings on intention understanding in 12- and 15-month-olds longitudinally assessed. The second goal was to analyse which actions children perform when not producing the target act. A coding scheme was devised to evaluate these non-target actions. Results confirmed previous findings, i.e. children's tendency to produce the target act was higher at an older age. At a younger age the most frequent response was 'undifferentiated manipulation' of target objects, followed by 'approximation to the target action'. Since children differed in their intention understanding performance at the first session, we decided to check whether these individual differences remained stable at the second session. Individual children with high intention understanding performance at 12 months tended to remain high at 15 months of age.

Teaching perspective-taking skills to typically developing children through derived relational responding.

Abstract Perspective-taking is an ability that requires a child to emit a selection response of informational states in himself or herself and in others. This study used an extended version of the Barnes-Holmes protocol developed in a series of studies by McHugh, Barnes-Holmes, and Barnes-Holmes (2004) to teach typically developing children between the ages of 6-11 perspective-taking skills. The present demonstrational study used a multiple probe design to evaluate the participants' abilities to demonstrate a number of simple and complex relations, and examined both relation type and relational complexity. We also tested for generalization of perspective taking to new stimuli and real-world conversational topics. Results demonstrate that the capacity to alter perspectives can be established by means of a history of reinforced relational responding. Keywords: Perspective-taking, Relational Frame Theory, Theory of Mind, stimulus generalization, response generalization. ********** Perspective-taking is a phenomenon described in the developmental literature that requires a child to display knowledge of informational states in himself or herself and in others (Barnes-Holmes, Hayes, Dymond, & O'Hara, 2001). A simple example of a child taking another's perspective occurs when, for instance, a child discriminates that when sitting in a different chair from which he is sitting in now, an object will look different from that different viewpoint. Perspective-taking skills are said by developmental psychologists to benefit children in their complex reasoning abilities. In addition, having the ability to take another person's perspective is an important social skill that children need in order to make and sustain friendships. There have been a multitude of studies conducted concerning perspective-taking skills in children. The majority of these studies have focused on the age at which children develop these skills. For example, Newcombe and Huttenlocher (1992) discussed the developmental psychologist Piaget's view on perspective taking. Piaget did not believe that these skills are developed in children before the age of 9-10 because of children's tendency to be egocentric, meaning that children have problems realizing that other people see things in different ways than themselves. Specifically, Piaget believed that children couldn't develop perspective-taking skills because they code spatial location differently from adults. For example, Piaget thought that children use a topographical system of spatial representation. Children code relationships through touching or proximity, whereas adults use metric coding of distance, such as coding the position of objects as being in the vicinity of landmarks. Huttenlocher and Presson (1979), however, argued that this lack of perspective-taking in children is not due to the children's difficulty with coding spatial locations, but rather conflict between actual and imagined frames of reference. Instead of relying on these frames of reference as in Piaget's studies, these authors asked preschoolers what object occupied a specified location with respect to a hypothetical observer, and this led to improved performance. The Newcombe and Huttenlocher (1992) study extended the results of the Huttenlocher and Presson study. The results clearly showed that the preschool children in their study could indicate locations relative to another person. Surprisingly, although young children still made egocentric errors, it is still quite notable that 3-year old performance was considerably above chance. Other studies conducted on perspective taking focused on the different aspects of this skill. Dixon and Moore (1990) for example, examined the difference between the two situations in which perspective taking can be seen. The authors labeled these two situations as Information effect--when the subject and the other person have contrasting information, and the Weighting effect--when the subject and the other person have the same information but use that information differently when deciding their own separate judgments. …

Gender and Age Differences in Same-Sex Aggregation and Social Behavior

Children's tendencies to aggregate with same-sex others and to increase spatial experience with age are investigated among 3- to 9-year-olds in four non-Western communities. Also investigated are genderspecific social behaviors, labeled by Eleanor Maccoby as male-styleand female-styleplay. Analysis of naturalistic observations of daily activities indicate that during free time in all cultures, older children (7- and 9-year-olds) are much more involved in both same-sex aggregation and away-from-home spatial experience than are younger children (3- and 5-year-olds) and that older boys are more strongly involved in these events than are older girls. Older boys also display a marked degree of same-sex aggregation when enacting the male-style behaviors of physicality and attention seeking, but girls do not display a similar same-sex aggregation for any category of social behavior. Children's levels of gender understanding are unrelated to the outcomes.

Individual differences in young children's suggestibility: Relations to event memory, language abilities, working memory, and executive functioning

In this paper, two empirical studies are presented in which an attempt was made to explain individual differences in two different aspects of 4-year-olds’ suggestibility, that is, their ability to resist false suggestions and memory impairments due to prior misinformation. As sources of individual differences cognitive skills along the information processing pathways were chosen: executive functioning (Study 1) and working memory (Study 2). Additionally, memory for the observed event and language proficiency were included in the studies. The results revealed that overall individual differences in language skills made a significant and consistent contribution to individual differences in the included measures of children's susceptibility to suggestions. Executive function and working memory skills were not directly related to children's tendency to yield false suggestions and their memory impairments in a recognition test after being misled. However, both executive function and working memory were related to children's language proficiency pointing to a possible indirect effect and underlining the importance of language competencies in early childhood.

Threat, Group Identification, and Children's Ethnic Prejudice

AbstractThis experiment tested predictions from social identity development theory (SIDT, Nesdale, 1999), that children's tendency to show out‐group prejudice depends on the strength of their in‐group identification and/or their perception of threat from the out‐group. Anglo‐Australian children (N= 480) aged 6, 7, or 9 years were assigned to a high‐status team and their identification with the in‐group (high vs. low) was manipulated together with threat from the out‐group (present vs. absent). The members of the out‐group were revealed to be of the same (Anglo‐Australian) or different (Pacific Islander) ethnicity to the in‐group. Results supported the SIDT predictions. In addition, consistent with socio‐cognitive theory (ST, Aboud, 1988), dislike for the out‐group at 6 years gave way to increasingly neutral reactions by 9 years of age. Ethnic composition of the out‐group did not impact differentially on liking but it did affect the children's desire to change groups. Strongly identified children were reluctant to leave their group regardless of the ethnicity of the out‐group, whereas children with low in‐group identification were more willing to change into a same‐ than into a different‐ethnicity out‐group. It is concluded that both social identity and social cognitive processes are implicated in the development of prejudice in middle childhood.

Anger, shame and guilt in children with externalizing problems: An imbalance of affects?

In two studies, we examined the extent to which children with behaviour problems are characterized by a predominance of anger and a relative absence of the moral emotions of guilt and shame. In the first study, a community sample (N = 48) was used, in the second study a clinical sample (N = 20) was compared to a control group of non-problematic children (N = 20). The results of these studies partially supported the anger-dominance hypothesis. The non-clinical group reported higher frequencies of daily anger and also more anger in response to ambiguous hypothetical situations (Study 1). The clinical group also demonstrated an anger bias. However, they only did so by a more implicit procedure: they added anger elements to their free descriptions of events eliciting negative emotions like fear, sadness, jealousy and shame (Study 2). In both studies, there was a tendency for children with behaviour problems to react with less intense guilt and shame to ambiguous situations.

When to Cry Over Spilled Milk: Young Children's Use of Category Information to Guide Inferences About Ambiguous Behavior

Three studies (N = 171) examined preschool children's tendency to use category information to make inferences about ambiguous behavior. Children heard stories in which category information about story characters was manipulated and behavioral information was held constant. Participants were asked to evaluate, explain, and determine the significance of the behavior in question. Children tended to be harsher judges of the same ambiguous behaviors when performed by (a) humans as compared to animals, (b) boys compared to girls, and (c) older children compared to younger children. Results suggest that young children hold differentiated notions of the mental states and dispositions that underlie behavior and that these notions vary as a function of category membership. These findings support the conclusion that even young children can hold and use multiple folk psychologies.

‘Undesirable’ and ‘desirable’ shifts in children's responses to repeated questions: age differences in the effect of providing a rationale for repetition

AbstractThis study examined factors influencing children's tendency to shift responses when questions are repeated within an interview. Forty nine 4–5‐year‐olds and 40 7–8‐year‐olds were questioned about a video they had seen, with questions repeated by the same or a different interviewer. Half the children were given a rationale for question repetition, and half were not. Overall, the older children shifted less than the younger children, and, unlike the younger children, more to misleading than unbiased questions. The rationale did not affect overall shifting, but reduced the probability of ‘undesirable’ shifts (towards inaccuracy) in the younger children, and increased ‘desirable’ shifts (towards accuracy) at both ages. In the younger children, the rationale reduced total number of shifts, but only with the same interviewer, while in the older children the reverse applied. The results suggest developmental progression in the relative contributions of memorial and social/motivational factors to shifting. Implications for investigative interviewing with children are discussed. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Unchangeable and changeable tendency in children's inner development with the times

Unchangeable and changeable tendency in children's inner development with the times

Antisocial and Prosocial Teasing Among Children: Perceptions and Individual Differences

AbstractTwo studies examined fifth‐ and sixth‐grade students’ perceptions of antisocial and prosocial teasing among peers and potential correlates of individual differences in their tendencies to engage in both forms of teasing. The children were rated as showing a greater tendency to be prosocial teasers than antisocial teasers by both teachers and peers. In addition, the children indicated that they generally experienced and observed prosocial teasing more frequently than antisocial teasing at home and in school. Although boys were perceived to tease in a hostile, antisocial manner to a greater extent than were girls, the evidence for a gender difference in affiliative, prosocial teasing among these children was relatively weak. Additionally, systematic relations were found among ratings of the children's tendencies to engage in antisocial and prosocial teasing with peers, teachers’ ratings of their general level of antisocial and prosocial behavior with peers, ratings of the frequency with which they experienced antisocial and prosocial teasing at home and at school, and their attitudes toward antisocial and prosocial teasing.

The Presence of the Social Father in Inhibiting Young Men's Violence

The suggestion is offered that the prior presence of a residential and biological father reduces the likelihood of violent behavior by his sons grown to adulthood. Data analyzed across the U.S. indicate that father absence, rather than poverty, was the stronger predictor of young men's violent behavior. The pattern was also found in predictions of violent crime rates based on the level of out of wedlock births from the prior generation. A consonant pattern was also found in cross-national surveys. Accordingly, developmental theories that would explain these patterns need to be constructed and policies that are designed to reduce the incidence of violent crimes and their sequelae may wish to take into account (i) how the presence of social fathers may tamp down violent behavior by their sons and (ii) how to maximize the opportunities for younger children to have an on-going social father. Key Words: Father-child relations; Violent behavior; Violent crime; Illegitimacy; Father-absence; Unemployment; Poverty. The tendency for children from fatherless homes to be overrepresented in categories of unwanted behavior has been known for decades (Adams, Milner & Schrepf, 1984; Anderson, 1968; Bereczkei & Csanaky, 1996; Blau & Blau, 1982; Chilton & Merkle, 1972; Monahan, 1972; Mosher, 1969; Robins & Hill 1966; Stevenson & Black, 1988). see Mischel (1961a, 196Ib) and Mackey (1985, 1996) for theoretical orientations on the suggested linkages. see Wilson & Herrnstein (1985), Draper & Harpending (1982), Blankenhorn (1995), Parke & Brott (1999), and Popenoe (1996) for reviews of the literature. However, the absence of a father also commonly implies the loss of the father's income and there is always a potential confounding between the child's lack of a father and the child's environment of poverty (Adams, Milner & Schrepf, 1984; Freeman, 1975; Gillespie, 1975; Smith & Krohn, 1995). Two hypotheses are generally offered to explain violent behavior. One portrays violent behavior as the consequence of fatherlessness; and the other views violent crime as a consequence of poverty. The two hypotheses are not mutually exclusive, and it is important to consider what causal relationship, if any, may be behind the statistics. Five tiers of data are presented to examine the potential relationships. Tier 1 is an examination of the relationships in the U.S. (by state plus the District of Columbia) between violent crime and (i) levels of out-of-wedlock births and (ii) indices of privation. Tier 2 consists of the examination of U.S. relationships (by state plus D.C.) between violent crime in one generation, and (i) levels of out-of-wedlock birth and (ii) indices of privation in a prior generation. Tier 3 is an examination of the relationships in the U.S., as an aggregate, across time. Tier 4 is a limited cross-cultural examination of the relationships between violent crime and out-of-wedlock births. Tier 5 is a larger cross-cultural survey of the potential relationship between levels of violent crime and a predictive marker for multiple sexual partnerships, which - in turn - can be argued to reflect a diminution of the availability of a father-figure to a young child. Definitions and Method: U.S. Patterns Out-of-wedlock births were used to index fatherlessness. It is important to note that divorce, as a variable, is not to be equated with out-of-wedlock births, as a variable, and is not predictive of violent crime rates (see Appendix I). Fathers sometimes cohabit with the mothers of their children, but such arrangements often convert into marriage or else are short-lived, and, on the other hand, the biological parents of a child sometimes marry after the birth of the child. The two dynamics - Out-of-Wedlock Births and Divorce - are diagnostically separable. (See Mackey & Coney [2000] for a discussion of the separation.). see Appendix I for a more extended explanation of the putative distinction. …

Highlights of the 2003 Institute on Psychiatric Services

Numerous cross-sectional analyses have shown that individuals with mental illness are less likely to be employed, and many psychological studies have demonstrated that the loss of employment is a risk factor for developing depression. It remains less clear, however, whether depression affects job retention among the employed.

“If you think of the world as a piece of custard…”: gifted children's use of metaphor as a tool for conceptual reasoning

This small-scale qualitative study examines the transcript of a group enquiry conducted according to the practice of philosophical enquiry with children (e.g. Lipman, 1993; Cam, 1995; Fisher, 1998). The enquiry was one of several held fortnightly and out of school hours — as an optional extension activity — with a group of verbally able pre-adolescent children aged eight to twelve years. The transcript was subjected to an interpretive structural analysis, and a central metaphor was explored for its usefulness to the children as a tool for reasoning. Two competing repertoires of discourse (Sherrard, 1997) were identified, reflecting the children's tendency either to hold ideas or constructs as being essentially separate (the analysis repertoire) or as being susceptible to reconciliation (the synthesis repertoire). The central metaphor was seen to play the role of a ‘conceptual playground,’ permitting the children to exercise both their imaginations and their reasoning abilities as they struggled to reconcile the competing repertoires.

The Role of Joint Attention in Later Development Among Preterm Children: Linkages Between Early and Middle Childhood

AbstractJoint attention is a hallmark of human cognition. It refers to the capacity to coordinate attention to objects and events with attention to other people. Infants display considerable individual differences in this capacity. This longitudinal study of 13‐month‐old preterms was conducted to examine the hypothesis that two different types of joint‐attention skills assessed in an infant–tester paradigm are related to verbal and nonverbal IQ measures through middle childhood. Data are reported separately for the children's tendency to initiate such skills and to respond to an experimenter's offers to share in such behaviours. The results provide support for the hypothesis that the initiation of joint attention makes a unique contribution to later nonverbal IQ apart from variance associated with biomedical risk status and infant development. The results of this study have implications for the conceptualisation of joint‐attention skills, as well as for understanding the relation between joint attention and later cognition.

Self-construing in children with primary mono-symptomatic nocturnal enuresis--an investigation of three measures.

This study aims to measure different aspects of self-construing in children with primary mono-symptomatic nocturnal enuresis. 25 children aged 7-14 years, with nocturnal enuresis were recruited from a paediatric outpatient's unit specialising in enuresis [mean age 10.6 [males], 9.39 [females]] and 25 children acting as controls, were recruited from one primary and one secondary school [mean age 10.08 [males], 9.39 [females]]. The Butler Self Image Profile [SIP], Coopersmith Self Esteem Inventory, Ouvinen-Birgerstam "I think I am" Self Perception Scale were administered. This study was a matched controlled group comparison. The only significant difference was the tendency for children with enuresis to construe themselves more negatively on the SIP. There were no significant differences between children with enuresis and the matched controls on all the other measures. Children with nocturnal enuresis generally perceive themselves similar to children without nocturnal enuresis, and are not "psychologically or emotionally disturbed." It is important to assess a child's self-construing in order to identify those children who are more vulnerable to a lower self-esteem. Future research needs to take into account self-construing in different clinical populations, i.e. those children who have non-mono symptomatic nocturnal enuresis.