Early Social Cognitive Development Research Articles

Neural Processing of Eye Gaze and Threat‐Related Emotional Facial Expressions in Infancy

Combined with emotional expressions, eye gaze can provide essential information to indicate threat in the environment. The current study assessed the effects of eye gaze direction on infants' neural processing of fearful and angry faces. Event-related potentials were recorded from thirteen 7-month-old infants. Two face-sensitive posterior components, the N290 and P400, as well as a frontocentral negative component (Nc), indicating attentional arousal, were sensitive to eye gaze direction and emotion. A larger Nc was observed for angry faces with direct compared to averted eye gaze. Fearful faces elicited a larger N290 than angry faces, whereas angry faces elicited a more prominent P400 regardless of eye gaze direction. The findings are discussed in terms of early social cognitive and neural development.

On Privileging the Role of Gaze in Infant Social Cognition.

Theories of early social-cognitive development privilege infants' use of gaze as a cue to others' attention and intentions. Mutual gaze is assumed to indicate social engagement, gaze following is believed to index understanding of others' attention, and gaze alternation (between an object and a caregiver) is used to assess joint attention. This article discusses other cues (e.g., vocal and postural) on which children in other cultures and atypically developing children in Western cultures probably rely. It proposes that it is quite likely that typically developing children in Western cultures also use nongaze cues-in conjunction with gaze-in their everyday interactions with others.

Wittgenstein and the developmental psychopathology of autism

My aims in this paper are twofold: firstly, to explore the relevance of Wittgenstein's thinking for characterizing the early development of interpersonal understanding and social cognition among typically developing children; and secondly, to illustrate how his writings offer a conceptual framework within which we might fashion an account of the developmental psychopathology of autism. Wittgenstein gave prominence to the significance of perceiving emotion in people's bodily expressions, and stressed how our relations towards others contribute to (and reflect) our understanding of the nature of persons-with-minds. In addition, he made telling observations about the relation between first- and third-person aspects of social experience and mental state ascription. The developmental psychopathology of childhood autism attests to the importance of Wittgenstein's ideas. Through autism, we can trace some of the causes and consequences of a relative failure to participate in a ‘form of life’ that people hold in common with one another.

The Role of the Amygdala in Early Social-Cognitive Development

Which brain regions underlie the uniquely human capacity to think about other people's thoughts -- i.e., to employ a of mind (ToM)? And is there a developmentally sensitive period for these brain structures to be recruited for ToM functioning? In this first thorough test of the amygdala theory of ToM, researchers administered ToM tests to 15 people with amygdala damage from birth or very early childhood, 11 people who had a normal childhood and adolescence but sustained amygdala damage in adulthood (usually following anterior temporal lobectomy), 14 people who underwent epilepsy surgery without amygdala damage, and 38 healthy controls. The researchers also …

PERSONAL CONSTRUCT PSYCHOLOGY AND AUTISM

There has been no significant writing within personal construct psychology about autistic spectrum disorders, despite the fact that this approach provides promising models in a number of other specific areas of human difficulty. This article outlines a PCP model of autism, based on a wide variety of recent research findings and writings, including those of autism sufferers themselves. Autism is considered in the light of Kelly's fundamental postulate and 11 corollaries as well as Procter's (1978) group and family corollaries. It is argued that Kelly's theory provides an integrative framework for considering this complex set of disorders with implications for further research in autism and the early development of social cognition as well as for therapeutic and educational intervention in helping people struggling with autistic spectrum disorders.

Scripts and Gender: A New Approach for Examining Gender-Role Development

What are some major social cognitive and cognitive developmental mechanisms affecting young children′s early acquisition of gender-roles and their performance of gender-typed behaviors? Investigation of young children′s knowledge and understanding of gender scripts provides an innovative means for addressing such questions, as well as tying together distinct areas of early social cognitive development. The present paper examines relations between young children′s script, gender-role, and gender schema development and details current research on gender scripts. Tenets from the script model of event representations and gender schema models of early gender-role development are described and collectively applied to the study of children′s gender script understanding. New ways for conceptualizing and explaining aspects of early gender-role and gender schema development are presented.

Changes and differences in preschoolers' understanding of gender scripts

Accuracy in sequencing gender scripts, use of the gender-role and temporal components of gender scripts, and taxonomic gender-role knowledge were assessed in 3- to 6-year-old children. Older children exhibited significantly more accurate sequencing of masculine and feminine gender-scripts than younger children. Boys demonstrated significantly more accurate sequencing of own-sex than other-sex gender scripts. With the effect of gender-script understanding controlled for statistically, younger children based significantly more script follow-up judgments on the gender-role component of gender scripts than older children. Taxonomic gender-role knowledge by children was not significantly associated with their accuracy at sequencing gender scripts. Results substantiate and expand our understanding of early social cognitive development.

A longitudinal study of early social behavior and cognitive development.

Thirty boys who had been studied in a research nursery school when they were two and a half were re-evaluated when they were six and a half. Early social differences tended to correlate with later intellectual ones; children who were socially dependent in nursery school tended to show a less abstract cognitive style and lower nonverbal intellectual functioning when older. Four cases are presented.