Infant and Child Development最新文献

The parasympathetic nervous system (PNS) is highly responsive to changes in environmental conditions and serves an essential role in mobilising the metabolic resources required for young children to regulate their thoughts, emotions and behaviours. According to polyvagal theory, the PNS evolved to play a leading role in the neurophysiological response to situations that range from modestly challenging to engaging, and many situations in which young children must exercise volitional processes of self-regulation conform to this description. Children's phasic parasympathetic activity during measures of volitional self-regulation is often associated with their performance on those measures or with their performance on other assessments of self-regulation, but the nature of the associations between PNS activity and performance on measures of volitional self-regulation is highly variable. This heterogeneity complicates the interpretation of results obtained across different studies and inhibits our ability to formulate directional hypotheses about what patterns of phasic parasympathetic activity we would expect to observe as young children exercise volitional processes of self-regulation in different situations. This special issue presents a set of papers that addressed these challenges by administering multiple measures of volitional self-regulation to the same sample of children or by examining how children's characteristics and experience in their developmental environments may account for observed differences in their phasic PNS activity.

Parasympathetic nervous system (PNS) activity has widespread research applications but poses measurement challenges due to its high sensitivity to environmental conditions and immediate demands. While standardised methods exist for measuring PNS reactivity and recovery in response to stressors, the selection of appropriate baseline and resting states is often overlooked. This commentary argues that a clearer conceptual distinction between baseline, a research construct for comparing values, and rest, a psychophysiological state of low arousal and cognitive engagement, is crucial for data interpretation. This includes a need for explicitly justifying baseline conditions in relation to research goals and validating rest conditions. By improving the clarity and rigour of baseline and rest, researchers can enhance the interpretability of PNS reactivity and recovery measures, supporting integration of research findings across studies.

Adopted youth often have contact with or at least information about birth family members—but such relationships or knowledge rarely extend to birth fathers. The current study explores ideas, feelings, and questions about birth fathers among youth raised by two mothers, including whether or not they desire contact. Interviews were conducted with 25 adolescents, ages 13–19 years. Thematic analysis of narratives revealed seven groups of respondents who displayed a range of interests, feelings, and contact desires in relation to birth fathers. Some adolescents had limited information about or interest in their birth fathers, others showed ambivalence and uncertainty, and still others voiced curiosity and strong interest. A few articulated a sense of a fathers ‘absence’ and a longing for a fatherly presence. The data are interpreted in the context of ambiguous loss, uncertainty management, and gender perspectives. Implications for future research, adoption practice, and adoptive parenting are considered.

Cross-sectional research employing the mirror mark test of self-recognition has dominated research focused on the development of self-reflection in children. However, the mirror mark test may fail to capture the complexity of self as a social object, and the developmental antecedents and consequences of self-reflection remain largely uncharted. Here, we provide an overview of the extant longitudinal data on mirror self-recognition and present our own longitudinal findings based on a multidimensional parent-report measure of children's self-development. Offering a snapshot of development over 3 months for 74 children aged between 14 and 36 months, and mirroring extant longitudinal data for mirror self-recognition, our results suggest that increases in self-reflection are longitudinally related to developments in pretend play, prosocial behaviour, imitation and declarative pointing. However, although baseline self-reflection was statistically predictive of children's prosocial behaviour at follow-up, no strong developmental predictor of self-reflection emerged. We conclude that more longitudinal research, moving beyond or supplementing mirror self-recognition, is needed to identify the cognitive and social precursors of self-reflection. Nevertheless, growth in ‘moral’ behaviour emerges as a significant developmental consequence of this capacity in a western sample. Further research is needed to explore cultural variability in developmental pathways to and from self-reflection.

Past research has demonstrated that children prefer to learn from confident rather than hesitant informants. It is frequently assumed that they do so because they believe confidence to predict a person's knowledge and future accuracy; however, this assumption has not previously been tested. The present investigation therefore explored how 3- to 8-year-old children interpret informant confidence. Study 1 (N = 84) aimed to address whether informant confidence is interpreted as an indicator of knowledge. Study 2 (N = 87) explored how children's interpretation changes with conflicting informant credibility cues. Findings demonstrate that school-aged children, but not preschoolers, expect correct statements from confident individuals and incorrect statements from hesitant informants. Additionally, school-age children attribute word knowledge to a previously confident informant. When accuracy conflicts with confidence, accuracy drives 3- to 8-year-old children's knowledge attributions. This investigation builds on previous research and suggests that, by age 5 or 6, children do make individual epistemic inferences based on informant confidence.

Measures of parasympathetic regulation, such as respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA), predict executive function outcomes, including inhibitory control, across childhood. Respiratory sinus arrhythmia augmentation tends to be associated with more maladaptive outcomes, compared to RSA suppression, but the literature regarding RSA profiles and inhibitory control development across infancy and early childhood is contradictory. The goal of our current study was to examine the longitudinal and interactive effects of infant RSA during a frustrating task with negative maternal characteristics on inhibitory control during early childhood. Participants included 410 children (209 girls, 77.6% White, 92.9% non-Hispanic) and their mothers. With small to moderate effect sizes (r ² range from 0.124 to 0.143), we demonstrated that maternal negative affect when children were 36 months old moderated the association between 10-month-old RSA during a frustrating task and 48-month-old inhibitory control, such that RSA suppression predicted higher levels of inhibitory control, but only when mothers exhibited high levels of negative affect. Our results highlight the biosocial framework under which child inhibitory control develops.