Developmental Review最新文献

If children are socialized less by their parents than their peer group, psychology may fruitfully adapt social psychology’s exploration of group processes for understanding how children develop. Concerns with self-presentation, reputation, and learning subtle norms may emerge earlier and more strongly than would be the case if children were primarily interacting with their parents. The peer group culture of childhood may be a self-perpetuating culture that is somewhat independent of and possibly in opposition to the adult culture and parents’ attempts to prepare children for adulthood. Modern trends such as increasing age segregation and play-dates with adult supervision may hamper the transmission of children’s and adolescents’ peer culture.

The Nurture Assumption by Judith Rich Harris was a revolutionary book that called into question the family socialization literature and the conventional ways in which parenting is typically studied by social scientists. In the 25 years since it was first published, the key arguments set forth in The Nurture Assumption still remain on the margins of most fields of study and not fully integrated into individual research agendas. In this paper, I focus on how Judith Rich Harris has impacted my scholarly thinking and my academic career as a criminologist. In doing so, I discuss the ways in which Judith Rich Harris’ views can guide criminological thinking and the reasons why the field of criminology has been and continues to be resistant to her and The Nurture Assumption.

We review existing research on intertemporal choice in children that has used delay choice tasks, a type of delay gratification task that typically involves choosing between a smaller reward now and a larger reward later. We align developmental research with some of the large body of empirical and theoretical work in this area that has been conducted with adults, with a focus on methodological appropriateness, the effectiveness of experimental manipulations, and role of future thinking processes in intertemporal choice. We conclude that, with care, it is possible to use delay discounting tasks with children from around 8 years that are similar to those that have been used with adults; simpler delay choice tasks are likely to yield robust data from around 3 years. Experimental manipulations to enhance performance have generally been less successful with child populations than adults, but there is some evidence that learning-based and framing approaches can increase the likelihood that children delay gratification. We outline a detailed theoretical framework, based on existing research with adults, that describes the various ways in which future thinking processes may contribute to intertemporal choice, and argue that some of these processes may develop relatively late. This means that the nature of the relation between future thinking and intertemporal choice may change substantially with development.

Judith Harris’ theory of child socialization spans developmental periods and has interdisciplinary implications. Though broad and adaptable, her theory has not been readily adopted by criminologists, and its discussion is often limited to its biosocial implications. The purpose of this essay is to discuss how Harris’ theory can help to explain the relationship between exposure to adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and negative outcomes in childhood and adolescence. Using Harris’ framework, I discuss how ACEs may reflect adversity in the home and community environment, how this exposure to adversity may impact child behavioral development and lead to school-based consequences, and how these consequences may ultimately shape child outcomes. I conclude by discussing the policy implications of Harris’ work, as well as directions for future research testing and/or informed by Harris’ arguments.

Parental postpartum depression may be a risk factor for children’s early language development. However, previous empirical findings have been inconclusive regarding these relations. Moreover, previous reviews of this topic have summarized across measures of language. The purpose of the present systematic review was to summarize and synthesize the relations between parental postpartum depression and children’s language development while treating language as a multidimensional construct and while considering the nature of parental depression. We identified empirical articles in the PsycInfo®/ProQuest database (8/15/2023) and through additional strategies. Articles were screened and considered eligible for inclusion based on several criteria. Twenty-six studies were included in the present systematic review. Included articles were evaluated for risk bias using a tool produced by Glod and colleagues (2015) and adapted for the present study. Findings were organized by the aspect of language (i.e., receptive, expressive) and the nature of parents’ depression (timing, status, chronicity). Varying levels of support were found for the assertion that parental depression is related to children’s receptive and expressive language. Significant relations are more likely to be found later in early childhood indicating a delayed effect of parental postpartum depression. Further, there was inconclusive support concerning the role of depression status and depression chronicity in relation to children’s language development. Additional work is needed to clarify these relations. Directions for future work are recommended that would explore mediating mechanisms, the role of fathers’ depression and how other aspects of parental mental health play a role in these relations. As a limitation, the scope of the present systematic review excluded studies of older children and studies of more general language development that are relevant to informing future work.

Human perceptual development evolves in a stereotyped fashion, with initially limited perceptual capabilities maturing over the months or years following the commencement of sensory experience into robust proficiencies. This review focuses on the functional significance of these developmental progressions. Specifically, we review findings from studies of children who have experienced alterations of early development, as well as results from corresponding computational models, which have recently provided compelling evidence that specific attributes of early sensory experience are likely to be important prerequisites for later developing skills in several perceptual domains such as vision and audition. Notably, the limitations of early sensory experience have therein emerged as scaffolds, rather than hurdles, being causally responsible for the acquisition of later perceptual proficiencies, while dispensing with these limitations has the perhaps counter-intuitive consequence of compromising later development. These results have implications for understanding why normal trajectories of perceptual development are sequenced in the way that they are, help account for the perceptual deficits observed in individuals with atypical histories of sensory development, and serve as guidelines for the creation of more robust and effective training procedures for computational learning systems.

The significance of self-control for essential life outcomes necessitates the study of its developmental pathways. In other words, other than discussions of the factors associated with self-control in different developmental periods, investigating the processes that lead to self-control development is also essential. To address this need, in this article, we present a conceptualization of trait self-control and its development using dynamic systems concepts and explore the aspects of this conceptualization by systematic simulation experiments of an agent-based model. Moreover, our focus in this article is on the adolescence period, which despite being a period of lasting changes, has received less attention on the subject of self-control development. Using an agent-based model of the parent-adolescent dyad, we show how moderate rule-setting can enhance self-control development. By simulating the processes that shape the adolescent’s trait self-control in the context of family, we provide a framework that could guide future theoretical and empirical studies of this critical ability.

An emerging body of research suggests that later-life cognitive functioning may be partly the result of influences across the life course. Low socioeconomic position in childhood is associated with disparities in cognitive functioning in older adulthood. Framed by the life course perspective, several explanations for this association exist: the latency model, positing that the conditions of low early-life socioeconomic position are directly linked to later-life cognitive functioning; the pathway hypothesis, suggesting that the association is mediated through adult socioeconomic position; and the accumulation of (dis)advantage hypothesis, proposing that the combined conditions of the childhood and adulthood contexts are more impactful than either socioeconomic context alone. The purpose of this critical review was to assess the empirical evidence supporting each hypothesis through a synthesis of the extant literature on the association between childhood socioeconomic position and later-life cognitive functioning. We reviewed 29 studies with U.S. samples and found the strongest evidence for the pathway hypothesis, followed by the accumulation hypothesis. Support for the latency model is present but weaker than the other explanations. The influence of childhood socioeconomic position on cognitive functioning is stronger when cognitive functioning is assessed at a single time point rather than as change over time, suggesting that childhood socioeconomic position might not affect the rate at which cognition declines in later life but does impact performance measured at any designated testing occasion. We conclude with a discussion of the limitations of the state of the literature, directions for future research, and implications for policy.

The provocative hypotheses put forth in Harris (1998) spawned a great deal of criticism within the field of child development but far less in the field of behavior genetics, which generally found her arguments quite persuasive. I considered whether 21st century behavioral genetic literature and understandings continued to support her hypotheses, and generally concluded that they did not, at least in regards to child and adolescent psychopathology. Early interpretations of behavioral genetic findings were more limited in scope than they realized at the time, applied only to WEIRD populations, and may have overlooked key etiologic information contained in the mean. What’s more, even when restricting to standard behavioral genetic designs and interpretations in WEIRD data, there is good evidence that parenting behaviors do “causally” shape adolescent mental health outcomes to some degree, and relatively little evidence that peers socialize adolescents via non-shared environmental pathways. Put another way, although group socialization theory remains interesting and worthy of additional study, other key elements of Harris (1998) may have been overstated or have not stood the test of time.

The current article outlines a framework for a developmental hierarchy and the underlying interactions between variant lower-level elements that converge toward invariant higher-level attractors as defined by dynamical systems theory. More specifically, it explores human development in the context of environmental demands by highlighting the bidirectional influence between visual information and cognitive structures integrating these signals. Furthermore, it investigates the organizational structure of a developmental hierarchy and the integration of environmental information at specific stages by employing William Powers's Perceptual Control Theory (PCT) levels as the conceptual foundation. PCT asserts that the nervous system controls increasingly complex aspects of the environment by integrating its patterns into a control system hierarchy through negative feedback mechanisms. In this context, the article follows the progression of objective visual information from light intensity signals in the retina, leading to facial perceptions in the fusiform face area. It further tracks objective perceptual signals transforming into subjective social contingencies, such as parent–child relationships and group affiliation, before reaching areas of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex responsible for processing information about cultural norms at the highest cognitive stages. Thus, by integrating Powers's PCT levels of control into a developmental model, this article establishes a theoretical framework for systematically examining the organism-environment interactions that drive development through variant and invariant control mechanisms at each stage of the developmental hierarchy.