Infant and Child Development最新文献

Developmental research on ownership understanding has focused on preschool years, with only a limited number of studies with infants. The present study with 19-month-old infants showed that after given information about an agent's ownership of a toy (she claimed ‘It's mine!’ before grasping the toy), infants, as a group (N = 66, 54.5% female, 77.3% White), accepted that when a new toy was added, the agent could choose either her own toy or the new one. Within the group, however, infants with no siblings (d = 0.494) and those with attachment objects (to a lesser degree; d = 0.525) expected the agent to choose her own toy over the new one. These results highlight the role of these two experiential factors in how infants use ownership information to make predictions about others' choices and thus contribute to the theoretical accounts on the early development of ownership understandings.

Children articulate their emotions and experiences through drawings and the colours they incorporate into them. This study investigated the relationship between preschool children's colour preferences, the emotions those colours elicit, and how they convey their emotions and thoughts through drawings. The participants, comprising 30 children (19 girls and 11 boys) in Istanbul, were prompted to select a colour card that best represented their feelings and draw a visual representation of their current emotions. Most children linked a single emotion to a specific colour, whereas others demonstrated more intricate emotional representations by associating multiple emotions with one colour. Colour–emotion associations were highly individualised, although some general patterns were observed, and this showcased individual variability shaped by experiences, interactions, and environmental influences. Their drawings predominantly portrayed positive emotions related to family interactions, friendships, and pleasurable activities. Negative emotions were associated with loss, separation, or challenges. These results emphasise the importance of integrating art-based activities into early childhood education to support emotional literacy and communication.

The study was a cross-sectional online inquiry that utilised a convergent parallel design for data collection and analysis. A semi-structured questionnaire and a key informant interview guide were used to collect data from children under the age of 18. A total of 385 children, comprised of 188 boys and 197 girls aged 10–17, took part in the survey, whereas 59 children were involved in the personal interviews (PIs). Using the Six Stages of Play Theory, this paper examined the prevalence of children's participation in recreational activities during Ghana's COVID-19 lockdown, the types of recreational activities children participated in, the reasons for children not participating in recreational activities, and how the COVID-19 lockdown affected children's recreation. The results show that seven in ten children engaged in recreational activities, with participation being higher among females than males. The pandemic lockdown impacted children's capacity to enjoy unrestricted play. Even though the COVID-19 pandemic has been declared officially over, the paper recommends using the current study's findings as a foundation and a guide for future events involving children's participation in leisure and recreation under similar confinement conditions.

Child temperament is a predictor of non-verbal ability (i.e., thinking and problem-solving skills that do not fundamentally require verbal language production and comprehension). Given that temperament scores might vary depending on whether the reporter is a parent or a teacher, this study analyzes (a) whether those reports are different and (b) how each report predicts child non-verbal ability in a non-western, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic (non-WEIRD) sample. The Matrix subtest of KABC-II (a non-verbal ability task widely used in non-WEIRD contexts) was administered to 85 Argentinian children (47 girls, 38 boys) aged 4–5 years, from middle-to-low socioeconomic status homes. Also, the Child Behaviour Questionnaire-Very Short Form (CBQ-VSF) was administered to obtain temperament reports from parents and teachers. Factors from parents' and teachers' reports did not correlate. Only factors including items from the effortful control dimension from teachers' reports predicted Matrix total score with a small effect size (partial η² = 0.10). Instead, the parents' report did not predict non-verbal ability. Our results provide infrequent data from non-WEIRD low-SES populations and underscore the unique and predictive validity of teachers' perspectives in clarifying the connections between child temperament and nonverbal ability.

Previous research has demonstrated early-emerging gender associations with musical instruments. We investigated whether pitch, loudness and size affect gender-instrument associations in older (M_age = 9.37 years, N = 57) and younger (M_age = 7.73 years, N = 63) children (approximately even gender split, mostly North American), as well as American undergraduates (M_age = 19.57 years, N = 50). Participants selected whether a girl or boy character should play fictional instruments with different pitch (high/low), volume (loud/soft) and size (large/small). Children were more likely to select boy characters for low- than high-pitched instruments (60% vs. 44%), as were adult undergraduates (79% vs. 54%). Older boys were also more likely to select boy characters for loud than soft instruments (68% vs. 52%). Size had no effect for any group. Results suggest pitch and loudness impact gender-instrument associations, and that gender associations are not restricted to gender-instrument pairings children have former experience with.

Children develop cooperative behaviours within culturally specific social environments from an early age. This exploratory study analysed cooperation between siblings in two different cultural contexts: Yurakaré Indigenous community in Bolivia (N = 22; M_age = 5.31 years; 59.1% female) and urban Poland (N = 24; M_age = 4.86 years; 45.8% female). Mixed-age sibling dyads participated in a tower-building task designed to evaluate cooperative behaviours, focusing on verbal communication, attention management, and cooperation dynamics. Yurakaré siblings more often engaged in complementary actions and jointly built tower levels, whereas Polish siblings tended to construct levels individually and used approximately three times more verbal communication. The groups also differed in their attention management characteristics. Across both groups, fewer attentional shifts during the task were associated with older age. Although the sample size is small, this study provides novel insights into culture-specific cooperation and proposes new research procedures and hypotheses for future investigation.