Advances in Child Development and Behavior最新文献

Children's future-oriented cognition has become a well-established area of research over the last decade. Future-oriented cognition encompasses a range of processes, including those involved in conceiving the future, imagining and preparing for future events, and making decisions that will affect how the future unfolds. We consider recent empirical advances in the study of such processes by outlining key findings that have yielded a clearer picture of how future thinking emerges and changes over childhood. Our interest in future thinking stems from a broader interest in temporal cognition, and we argue that a consideration of developmental changes in how children understand and represent time itself provides a valuable framework in which to study future-oriented cognition.

Given current global migration patterns, understanding of children's intuitions about nationality and national categories is an important and emerging focus for developmental psychologists. We review theoretical and empirical work on three different types of intuition: (1) that nationality is primarily determined by ancestry (an ethnic intuition); (2) that nationality is determined by commitment to national institutions (a civic intuition); and (3) that membership in a national category is determined by possession of an invisible essence which explains the similarities between members of that category. We examine assumptions about the relations which hold between all three intuitions and derive a series of questions about how these intuitions develop, how they relate to each other, and how they might be affected by children's experience. We describe a study (N=196) suggesting that (1) most children, regardless of experience, possess elements of both ethnic and civic intuitions, and (2) essentialist intuitions about national categories decrease with age and are not associated with ethnic intuitions. We conclude by outlining the implications of these results and a number of important questions which they raise.

Given the critical role that psychological essentialism is theorized to play in the development of stereotyping and prejudice, researchers have increasingly examined the extent to which and when children essentialize different social categories. We review and integrate the types of contextual and cultural variation that have emerged in the literature on social essentialism. We review variability in the development of social essentialism depending on experimental tasks, participant social group membership, language use, psychological salience of category kinds, exposure to diversity, and cultural norms. We also discuss future directions for research that would help to identify the contexts in which social essentialism is less likely to develop in order to inform interventions that could reduce social essentialism and possible negative consequences for intergroup relations.

The interactive, give and take "dance" that highlights the synchrony between parents and young infants during social interaction occurs at the behavioral as well as the physiological level. These dyadic processes seen across infancy and early childhood appear to contribute to children's development of self-regulation and general socio-emotional outcomes. The focus of this chapter is on dyadic synchrony, the temporal coordination of social behaviors and the associated physiology. Research on behavioral, brain, and cardiac synchrony is reviewed within a bio-behavioral synchrony model. Tutorials for analyzing these types of complex social interaction data are noted.

A body of research is reviewed that has investigated how infants respond to social category information in faces based on differential experience. Whereas some aspects of behavioral performance (visual preference, discrimination, and scanning) are consistent with traditional models of perceptual development (induction, maintenance, and attunement), other aspects (category formation, association with valence, and selective learning) suggest the need for an account that links perceptual with social-emotional processing. We also consider how responding to social categories in infancy may anticipate subsequent responding to these categories in childhood and adulthood.

In this chapter we present the perspective that social groups serve as moral boundaries. Social groups establish the bounds within which people hold moral obligations toward one another. The belief that people are morally obligated toward fellow social group members, but not toward members of other groups, is an early-emerging feature of human cognition, arising out of domain-general processes in conceptual development. We review evidence that supports this account from the adult and child moral cognition literature, and we describe the developmental processes by which people come to view social groups as shaping moral obligation. We conclude with suggestions about how this account can inform the study of social cognitive development more broadly, as well as how it can be used to promote positive moral socialization.