Developmental Review最新文献

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.

Theory of mind (ToM) is a developmental and multidimensional ability to impute mental states to oneself and others. This systematic review aimed to identify and appraise the current ToM measures for children in terms of their constructs, modes of presentation and response, the test theories adopted to develop them, and psychometric properties. Among the 588 articles retrieved, 127 ToM measures were identified. Twelve measures covered the full spectrum of ToM development in childhood. Only four measures had items in all construct dimensions (i.e., cognitive–interpersonal, cognitive–intrapersonal, affective–interpersonal, and affective–intrapersonal ToM), but they were not designed with specific items on developmental components in every dimension. As regards modes of presentation and response, twenty-one measures designed with visual aids are recommended for children with poor verbal comprehension and expression abilities. Only six measures were constructed or examined with Rasch modeling to better quantify ToM ability. To sum up, currently, no single ToM measure constructed with Rasch modeling and featuring visual aids can assess children’s ToM ability simultaneously and specifically with the multidimensional construct. A thorough ToM measurement for children with the above-mentioned characteristics is warranted for clinicians and researchers to better understand children’s ToM ability and examine the mechanisms governing the developmental and multidimensional constructs.

Delinquency shows an increase in adolescence and is hence often cited as a behaviour explainable in terms of adolescent risk-taking models. In this review we summarise contemporary developmental models of adolescent risk-taking as they apply to delinquency and evaluate the extent to which they are supported by empirical evidence. Dual Systems theory, Fuzzy Trace Theory, the Lifespan Wisdom Model (LWM), and the Developmental Neuro-Ecological Risk-taking Model (DNERM) are all discussed. We highlight that there have been very few direct empirical evaluations of developmental risk-taking models as applied to delinquency; however, indirect evidence supports the core Dual Systems theory claim that a developmental imbalance between sensation-seeking and self-regulation contributes to an adolescent peak in offending. However, this appears to apply particularly to a sub-group of vulnerable youth, as implied by the LWM. Further, risk-taking propensity likely interacts with age-related changes in exposure to risk-conducive situations, as implied by DNERM. There is little evidence to suggest that Fuzzy Trace Theory alone explains developmental changes in risk-taking, though it may help explain how young people learn about risk, as outlined in LWM, Better integration of risk-taking models with criminological perspectives as well as further longitudinal research using appropriate operationalisations of developmental imbalance, modelling individual differences in trajectories, and incorporating measures of exposure to risk-conducive situations will be essential for advancing knowledge of the drivers of engagement in delinquency in adolescence.

Comprehensive meta-analyses of risky decision making in children, adolescents, and adults have revealed that age trends in disambiguated laboratory tasks confirmed fuzzy-trace theory’s prediction that preference for risk decreases monotonically from childhood to adulthood. These findings are contrary to predictions of dual systems or neurobiological imbalance models. Assumptions about increasing developmental reliance on mental representations of the gist of risky options are essential to account for this developmental trend. However, dual systems theory appropriately emphasizes how cultural context changes behavioral manifestation of risk preferences across age and neurobiological imbalance models appropriately emphasize developmental changes in reward sensitivity. All of the major theories include the assumption of increasing behavioral inhibition. Here, we integrate these theoretical constructs—representation, cultural context, reward sensitivity, and behavioral inhibition—to provide a novel framework for understanding and improving risky decision making in youth. We also discuss the roles of critical tests, scientific falsification, disambiguating assessments of psychological and neurological processes, and the misuse of such concepts as ecological validity and reverse inference. We illustrate these concepts by extending fuzzy-trace theory to explain why youth are a major conduit of viral infections, including the virus that causes COVID-19. We conclude by encouraging behavioral scientists to embrace new ways of thinking about risky decision making that go beyond traditional stereotypes about adolescents and that go beyond conceptualizing ideal decision making as trading off degrees of risk and reward.

This paper poses a novel theoretical framework for a developmentally-informed mechanism explaining how adolescents who are highly sensitive and reactive to rejection may respond to interpersonal stress in ways that ultimately perpetuate relational difficulties. Specifically, heightened distress from rejection is proposed to activate impulsive reactions that immediately modulate the negative emotions from rejection, but which are socially aversive and thus often come at the expense of long-term relational harmony. We start by exploring the overlap of two dispositions: a hyper-sensitivity to rejection and an escalated reactivity to negative affect. We then trace distal factors underlying the development of both dispositions, the mechanisms through which the convergent effects of these dispositions produce socially aversive responses, and the individual and contextual differences that influence this process and explain the continuum of rash responses to rejection. The developmental and clinical importance of considering sensitivity and reactivity to rejection concurrently is emphasized, with directions for future research.

In this review, we describe multiple pathways that may lead to risk-taking in adolescence. We review behavioral and neuroimaging studies showing heightened risk-taking tendencies and associated neural reward activity in mid to late adolescence, but evidence points to risk taking as highly context and sample dependent. Here, we suggest that individual differences, specifically reward drive, may be a differential susceptibility factor that shows heightened sensitivity in adolescents and that makes some adolescents more sensitive to their environment. Furthermore, we review evidence that an elevated reward drive in mid-adolescence in interaction with prosocial and cognitive development can lead to various trajectories of risk taking. In this review we propose to extend existing models with individual-difference factors, specifically reward drive, and accompanying developmental processes, including cognitive control and prosocial development, that drive the development of multiple pathways of risk taking.

Empathy reflects the ability to perceive and be sensitive to the emotional states of others, often eliciting a motivation to care for their well-being. It plays a central role in prosocial behavior and inhibition of aggression. While the development of empathy has traditionally been examined with behavioral and observational methods, a growing body of work in neuroscience using eye-tracking, functional MRI, electroencephalography, electromyography and near-infrared spectroscopy, casts new light on the neurobiological mechanisms involved in the capacity to connect with one another and share their subjective states. This article selectively reviews and critically examines the current knowledge on the developmental neuroscience of empathy in early childhood. Deconstructing empathy into functional components such as sensitivity to signals of distress, emotion sharing, perspective taking, and caring for others within the framework of natural sciences, in conjunction with examining their developmental trajectory in early childhood is beneficial to research and theory with implication for psychopathology. This developmental neuroscience perspective advances our understanding of empathy, its underlying mechanisms, and functions.