Infant and Child Development最新文献

This study examined verbal and non-verbal features of mother–infant shared book reading in Australia during the first year of life and explored the relationship between these features and infant cognition. Mother–infant dyads were observed in this cross-sectional study reading an unfamiliar book in a laboratory setting when infants were aged 6 months (n = 17), 9 months (n = 14), or 12 months (n = 17). High frequency maternal behaviours coded from video were the production of attention attracting behaviours, immediate talk, and verbal encouragement to maintain infant book engagement. Few significant relationships were found for infant problem-solving scores. Infant communication scores were however associated with non-immediate talk at 6 months, maternal questions at 9 months, and non-book related talk at 12 months. Shared book reading provides opportunities for verbal responsiveness and literacy engagement which likely serve as an important vehicle for facilitating early cognitive development.

The current study investigated the link between social competence with peers (SCWP) and theory of mind (ToM) skills among Chinese preschool children. Using a sample of 363 Chinese children aged 3–5 (Mage = 4.54 years, SD = 0.84, 183 boys), this cross-sectional study demonstrates that children's SCWP, as reported by teachers, was significantly related to their ToM. Notably, this link was found to be significant even after controlling for children's age, sex, sibling presence or absence, parental education level, family possessions, family size and language skills. The current research provides empirical evidence for the association between SCWP and social understanding. Furthermore, beyond links with scores on the false-belief tests used in most past studies, the current result showed a clear independent link between teachers' ratings of social competence and the total score on a reliable developmentally sequenced ToM scale.

Parental psychological control has previously been related to negative developmental outcomes. However, fewer studies examined the cultural factors associated with parental psychological control. Several studies suggested that psychological control is used more by mothers in collectivistic (as compared to individualistic) cultures yet did not examine the mother's personal endorsement of the cultural values. This approach ignores the widely reported findings showing within country heterogeneity. In this study, we examined maternal adherence to collectivistic values and their psychologically controlling behaviour directed towards their preschool children. We also examined the indirect role of perceived normativeness of the psychologically controlling behaviour in the association between adherence to collectivistic values and using psychologically controlling behaviours. We hypothesized that mothers who endorsed collectivistic values more would perceive psychologically controlling parenting as more normative and in turn would display more psychological control. To test our research question, we collected data from 318 Turkish mothers, who had at least one preschool-aged child (child M_age = 59.46 months, SD = 9.23; range = 34–80 months; 160 males). The descriptive analyses are planned to be run in SPSS and path analyses in MPlus are planned for examining the hypothesized mediational model.

Interethnic prejudice in children has been studied mostly among White and Black populations in the United States, but less among East Asian populations and Europe. Given that interethnic prejudice is sensitive to populations and contexts, research on previously neglected groups is needed. In the current study, interethnic prejudice is examined among Chinese-Dutch children aged 7–11 years (N = 80, 42 girls and 38 boys), focusing on their preference for and rejection of East Asian, White, Southwest Asian and North African, and Black peers. In addition, interethnic prejudice is examined in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic, a global crisis that has led to anti-Asian racism. The results revealed that Chinese-Dutch children evaluated their ethnic ingroup and the White outgroup most positively, and the Black outgroup least positively. Moreover, stronger ingroup affinity (in terms of lower ingroup rejection) among Chinese-Dutch children was found during than before the COVID-19 pandemic, highlighting the importance of situational influences on children's interethnic prejudice.

Addressing the debate on whether there are reliable individual differences in toddler's prosociality, this study employed a person-centred approach to investigate (1) profiles of instrumental helping, sharing and empathic helping at 22, 28 and 34 months, and (2) the predictive role of toddler's temperament (anger/frustration, impulsivity and inhibitory control) to these profiles. Variable-centred analyses examined cross-task and over time associations. Participants were 93 Dutch toddlers observed in standardised behavioural assessments at each wave. Parents rated their toddler's temperament at wave 1. Results revealed small but significant across-task and over time associations of the prosocial behaviours and children were distinguished into three profile groups at 22 months (high prosocial, instrumental helper and low prosocial), three at 28 months (high, moderate and low) and two profiles at 34 months (high prosocial and instrumental and empathic helpers), with low to moderate membership stability across waves. For 34-month-olds, those in the high prosocial group were rated as being less impulsive compared to their peers in the helper group. These findings indicate reliable individual differences of prosociality exist at early ages with impulsivity as a potential precursor to these individual differences.

Research focusing on the home mathematics environment has shown mixed results across age groups. Using data from a large online survey, we explored parents' perceptions of the age appropriateness of home mathematics activities for their children. Children's ages ranged from one to 6 years old (N = 958). Activities spanned multiple domains of early mathematics including numeracy, geometry, patterning, spatial, and measurement domains. Descriptive statistics show there are clear developmental shifts in the appropriateness ratings for activities within and across these domains. Findings provide insight for future implications on the measurement of the home mathematics environment, as well as future research on age differences in the home mathematics environment.

Several existing instruments measure development in the content and complexity of young children's self-knowledge, but few measure development in the process of self-reflection. This study aimed to provide a cross-sectional replication and longitudinal extension of the self-concept questionnaire (SCQ), exploring the factor structure and developmental onset patterns proposed in the original paper. We collected parental reports and conceptually replicated the factor structure of the SCQ for 199 participants aged between 14 and 54 months using confirmatory factor analysis. Our data suggest that autonomy first develops at ~14–17 months, followed by self-recognition at ~18–21 months, and self-description/evaluation and emotional response to wrongdoing at ~26–30 months. Contrary to the original scale, we did not find a clear developmental distinction between the onsets of cognitive and emotional self-evaluation. We can conclude that the SCQ factor structure is conceptually replicable and sensitive to developments in the self-system across infancy to early childhood. The SCQ may, therefore, offer a useful alternative or addition to the widely used mirror mark test of self-recognition when measuring the development of self-reflective abilities in young children.

The study of Executive Function skills, like most research in the developmental sciences, has been heavily focused on the experiences of children from Western, industrialized, highly schooled and middle-class communities, often ignoring the experiences of the majority of children in the world. When research does include diverse populations, the approach is often from a deficit perspective, looking for ways to “fix” these children's lack of Executive Function skills. In this commentary, I argue for a contextual definition of Executive Function skills to reflect children's lived experiences, including the daily experiences of Indigenous children. I provide examples to illustrate how cultural values such as respect for children's autonomy and being acomedida/o can support the development of Executive Function skills. I then propose how the field of executive function research can move forward by (1) recognizing the broader ways in which children's daily activities can contribute to their Executive Function skills and (2) creating culturally relevant methods to measure Executive Function skills.

Children recognise the praiseworthiness of others' moral actions from quite a young age. The work we propose here focuses on whether and how children's judgements of moral praiseworthiness may be affected by cost incurred by the agents. Recent work has revealed developmental changes in how children consider physical and psychological costs in their judgements of moral praiseworthiness. However, this question has only been examined among US children, and little is known about how much the findings can be generalised across cultures. In this article, we examine the consideration of different types of costs (psychological, physical) in moral evaluation by children in China, and compare to the US data. We choose to study children in China not only because it is a non-WEIRD culture, but also because recent work has suggested that there are cultural differences between the US and China in terms of how children conceptualise desire inhibition and self-control. This research will have implications for research on children's moral cognition across cultures.

A 3-year follow-up test (from grades 7 to 9) was administered to 807 junior high school students from two regions in Hunan Province, China, using multilevel analysis to examine trends in junior high school students' life satisfaction, differences by gender and location of life and the effects of father–child/mother–child communication on the development of life satisfaction. The results showed that (1) Chinese junior high school students' life satisfaction showed a decreasing trend from the seventh grade to the ninth grade, and there was a significant decreasing process in the eighth grade; (2) father–child communication and mother–child communication had a significant positive predictive effect on Chinese junior high school students' life satisfaction and (3) father–child communication and mother–child communication had a significant negative predictive effect on the decreasing trend of life satisfaction, in which the effect of mother–child communication was particularly significant.