Developmental Review最新文献

Moral disengagement enables individuals to enact behavior contrary to their moral standards without remorse. Although associations between moral disengagement and transgressions are widely studied, the process occurs in the context of personal and environmental factors that may increase or suppress its enlistment. Understanding potential moderators provide insight into how moral disengagement enables transgressions, and offers possible areas of intervention to decrease its enlistment. This review integrates research examining moral disengagement within a social cognitive theory framework from which it is part. Within the 157 eligible studies (N = 118,501) investigating moral disengagement and a related construct, 35 distinct correlates of moral disengagement were identified. Random-effects meta-analyses identified significant associations between moral disengagement and transgressive behavior, and additionally identified personal (e.g., self-efficacy; empathy) and environmental factors (e.g., parental monitoring; peer rejection) that may moderate its enlistment. Findings highlight the importance of considering intrapsychic and societal influences associated with moral disengagement when enacting transgressions. Theoretical considerations and suggestions for future research are also proposed.

A programmatic set of meta-analyses by Groh et al. (e.g., Groh et al., 2017a) and Madigan et al. (e.g., Madigan et al., 2023) demonstrated that secure child-caregiver attachments are positively associated with children’s social and emotional development, with somewhat stronger associations identified in relation to social competence and (lower) externalizing behaviors than for (lower) internalizing symptoms (Groh et al., 2017a). The association of attachment security with children’s cognitive and language outcomes, however, is relatively less well established. Moreover, it is unknown whether attachment is associated with these outcomes through direct links, indirect links (i.e., as a mediator of the association between caregiver sensitivity and child cognition and language processes), or both. Empirical tests of these hypotheses have not yet been conducted. The current study had two main objectives: 1) provide a meta-analytic update for the association between attachment security and cognition and language (k = 125 studies [107 samples]; N = 9,213 children; 52.5% boys; 100% mothers; 93% from North America/Europe), and 2) test this association within a larger mediation model that accounts for the roles of sensitivity and attachment through a meta-analytic structural equation model (sensitivity → attachment → cognitive and language outcomes). Results showed that child-mother attachment security was significantly associated with child cognition (r = 0.17, 95% CI [0.14, 0.20]) and language outcomes (r = 0.16, 95% CI [0.12, 0.20]). The MASEM model revealed a small, but significant, indirect effect of sensitivity on cognitive and language outcomes through attachment security. The discussion considers the theoretical and practical implications of these findings.

The first gestures that children produce intentionally to communicate with others, make sense of the world around them, and control their behavior are ostensive gestures of showing and giving; these are also the first gestures that parents and teachers use to communicate with children and to regulate their behavior in their first months of life. Ostensive gestures are proximal gestures in which the child’s hand is occupied by an object. In this sense, objects have a role in shaping children’s first communicative acts: They are the first referents children communicate about and the first means they use to share references with others.

Despite their relevance to communicative development, a literature review highlights that there have been few studies investigating ostensive gestures in the first three years of life, while the study of distal gestures, especially pointing gestures, has prevailed. Some authors relate the relative absence of ostensive gestures in the literature to methodological issues that hinder their identification. Others question their nature as “true gestures” because they involve children’s contact with objects and therefore there can be doubt about their underlying intentionality.

Increasing evidence has shown that ostensive gestures fulfill early communicative and self-regulatory functions from the end of the first year of life. These functions are very similar to the ones that are later observed in more complex gestures, such as pointing and symbolic gestures. This similarity provides a clear idea of progression in gesture development.

Based on these ideas, this article has two main purposes: to describe ostensive gestures and reaffirm their important part in gesture development, and to explore the hypothesis that ostensive gestures not only precede pointing in development, but that they are one of pointing’s precursors, providing clues to the understanding of intentional communication’s origin.

There is a long-standing debate on the goals that underlie adolescent socially coercive behaviors, such as bullying, relational aggression, and instrumental aggression. Knowledge about these goals is critical for the development of effective interventions. Bridging evolutionary and social-cognitive perspectives, we propose and substantiate a Social Goals and Gains Model of Adolescent Bullying and Aggression. The model holds that adolescents who hold agentic goals (i.e., getting ahead of others), rather than communal goals (i.e., getting along with others), engage in more bullying and aggression. Engaging in bullying and aggression, in turn, may lead adolescents to gain popularity but lose likeability. To substantiate this model, we meta-analyzed data of 164,143 adolescents (age range: 8–20 years), from 148 independent samples, with Meta-Analytic Structural Equation Modeling (MASEM). Our results both support and refine our model. As hypothesized, adolescents’ agentic goals were associated with higher levels of bullying and aggression. Bullying and aggression, in turn, were associated with higher popularity but lower likeability. However, there was no significant association between adolescents’ communal goals and bullying or aggression. These findings suggest that socially coercive behaviors, such as bullying and aggression, can be fueled by agentic goals and potentially lead to gains in popularity but losses in likeability. This suggests that intervention programs could reduce bullying and aggression by changing the means through which adolescents pursue agentic goals.

Predominant psychological theories of number acquisition posit that children acquire natural number concepts as they acquire the successor principle, or the knowledge that every natural number is succeeded by another natural number that is exactly-one more than it. However, exactly how children acquire the successor principle remains largely unexplained. Recently developed ideas within this family of theories posit that an abstract recursive successor function is acquired from the recursive structure of number words; however, the types of recursion underlying the successor function and number words are distinctively different (one is a self-referential function and the other is a self-embedded structure), making it difficult to theorize how one type triggers the acquisition of another. Moreover, our analysis of the literature questions if the knowledge about the successor principle is even empirically measurable. Here, we argue that number acquisition is a process of understanding a generative rule that governs the system of natural numbers and point out that the successor principle is not the only generative rule that governs the natural number system. We propose an alternative hypothesis that generative number concepts emerge from children's realization about how the combinatorial rules of numerals allow arithmetic (specifically additive and multiplicative) representations of quantity. Importantly, under addition and multiplication—which are historically rooted in concatenation and grouping of physical objects—natural numbers are mathematically closed. As a corollary, the system of infinitely generative natural numbers is conceptualized. This new theoretical framework allows the construction of novel empirical questions and testable hypotheses based on the formalized rules of numerical syntax and numeration systems, and therefore opens a new avenue for studying later stages of children's acquisition of number concepts.

The aim of the current systematic review is (1) to examine theoretical frameworks and mechanisms explaining the association between parental and teacher behaviors and child executive function (EF) development, and (2) to compare and combine empirical findings for the relationship between parental and teacher behaviors and child EF development in early and middle childhood. Results revealed that theoretical frameworks have been established more strongly in the parent literature and parental behaviors have been more extensively studied with more diverse terms compared to studies in teacher literature. Overall, patterns of findings suggest that positive (e.g., emotional support) and cognitive parental/teacher behaviors (e.g., cognitive stimulation) were positively linked to child EF performance while negative behaviors (e.g., intrusiveness) were adversely related. Considering the similar roles of parents and teachers in child EF development, insights from parent literature could enable a better understanding of the impact of teacher behaviors on child EF (and vice versa), and opens new venues for future teacher research. Moreover, these findings suggest that, in addition to genetic transmission, social factors such as parent/teacher-child interactions play a significant role in EF development. Future research should investigate the joint influence of parent and teacher behaviors on child EF.

Around the world, children play. Does play support development? If so, how? One popular idea is that play fosters the development of higher-order cognitive abilities, such as executive functions. A contrasting view is that play fosters the development of cultural knowledge and skills rather than general capacities. We describe a third proposal: that play helps children acquire culture-specific executive function skills. We articulate three ideas of how this might work, synthesizing diverse literatures. We also discuss other activities children voluntarily engage in that overlap with play and may similarly help them acquire culture-specific executive function skills. We end by considering implications of these ideas and questions for future research. We suggest that play and related activities are most likely to support the development of culture-specific executive function skills if they are informed by cultural knowledge, values and practices.

Children, much like adults, rely heavily on information from other people in the domains of word learning, science and religion (Harris, Koenig, Corriveau & Jaswal, 2018). However, we know much less about how testimony affects children’s moral thinking. In fact, many psychologists argue that morality is relatively impervious to direct testimonial influence, and emphasize children’s early emerging moral abilities and intuitions (Haidt, 2001; Hamlin, 2013; Smetana, 1981). These accounts are consistent with recent philosophical work holding that while testimony is an acceptable source for non-moral beliefs, it is problematic to acquire moral understanding via testimony (the asymmetry thesis, Hopkins, 2007). Is testimony really insufficient to transmit moral understanding?

In order to address this question, we first draw attention to recent philosophical work on skepticism towards moral testimony. We then review the literature on children’s moral development and testimonial learning and make the argument that testimony plays an indispensable role in children’s acquisition of moral understanding. Lastly, we discuss how the study of moral testimony could be supported by appreciating a set of important distinctions (e.g., different levels of dependence, different types of testimony, different costs and benefits) to aid our theorizing and empirical work on testimonial learning in the moral domain.