British Journal of Developmental Psychology最新文献

Help-seeking is a strategy by which children signal their need for social learning. In three experiments, we examined when and from whom 2-year-old (N = 146 children; mean age = 31.4 months) US children from diverse ethnoracial and economic backgrounds (62% White; 9% Latine; 24% low-income) seek help in problem-solving contexts. In Experiment 1, children sought more help when unfamiliar (and thus unable to solve) than when familiar with a problem. In Experiment 2, children selectively sought help from knowledgeable as opposed to ignorant helpers. Against our prediction, children in neither experiment preferred mature (adult) over immature (infant or peer) helpers. In Experiment 3, children again did not prefer mature over immature helpers when helpers were depicted with realistic photos instead of line drawings (as in Experiments 1 and 2). We discuss the findings in relation to children's knowledge of their status as social learners.

Gender nonconforming (GNC) boys often elicit negative reactions from peers and adults. However, it is unclear which aspects of nonconformity evoke negative social consequences. Are appearance characteristics, activity interests, or traits most impactful for peers' evaluations? Sixty-seven 6- to 11-year-old children and their parents interacted with a magnetic paper doll of a GNC boy who was displayed with feminine appearance characteristics, activity interests, and traits. Participants were allowed to physically remove feminine attributes and/or add masculine and neutral attributes to help the GNC boy make friends with boys. Participants were (1) more likely to change appearance and activities and less likely to change traits and (2) more likely to remove feminine attributes than add masculine and neutral attributes. Interactions between attribute type and gender differed across parents and children. Results suggest that interventions to reduce discrimination towards GNC boys should focus on reducing prejudice towards appearance- and activity-based nonconformity.

This study aimed to assess the relationship between menstruation-related attributes and mental distress in adolescent girls. A cross-sectional study was conducted in Rangeli Municipality, Nepal, among 270 adolescent girls. Data were collected using a self-administered questionnaire. Unadjusted and adjusted odds ratios (aOR) were calculated at a 5% level of significance to identify factors associated with depression, anxiety and stress. Of 270 adolescent girls, 28.9% (95% CI: 23.5%–35.2%) experienced anxiety, 14.4% (95% CI: 10.0%–18.5%) experienced stress and 32.2% (95% CI: 26.6%–37.4%) experienced depression. Low perceived family support during menstruation (aOR: 2.87, 95% CI: 1.03–7.97), low perceived support from friends during menstruation (aOR: 4.09, 95% CI: 1.66–10.07) and experiencing moderate/severe dysmenorrhea (aOR: 2.31, 95% CI: 1.105–5.08) were associated with anxiety. Those with moderate/severe dysmenorrhoea had higher odds (aOR: 5.60, 95% CI: 1.56–20.05) of experiencing stress. Low perceived family support (aOR: 3.07, 95% CI: 1.08–8.67), low perceived support from friends (aOR: 2.77, 95% CI: 1.11–6.89) and experiencing moderate to severe dysmenorrhoea (aOR: 3.56, 95% CI: 1.63–7.79) were associated with depression. The findings underscore the importance of proper management of dysmenorrhoea and need for social support from both family and friends during menstruation as these factors are associated with psychological distress among adolescent girls.

The present study aimed to develop two visual tasks to assess the emotion understanding of institutionalized preschool children in India. To enhance the psychometric qualities of both tasks, content validity and inter-rater reliability assessments, translation-back translation and a rigorous peer review process were undertaken. In addition, the tool's components were mapped with institutionalized children's everyday experiences to help them better relate to the task. The tool development phase was followed by the assessment phase. Eighteen participants (nine males, nine females) aged 3–6 years were purposefully selected from three childcare institutions. The emotion identification task required children to identify the correct emotions from the cartoon characters' facial expressions and gestures, whereas, in the emotion situation task, children were asked to infer others' emotions from a vignette depicted by a picture card. Children's responses were videotaped, analysed and coded for both tasks. The study's key findings revealed that institutionalized children responded more accurately to emotion situation tasks yet struggled to identify sadness, anger and fear emotions compared to happiness. Furthermore, qualitative insights provided a comprehensive understanding and interpretation of the findings.

Infant research often struggles with selective samples, especially when focusing on behavioural measures, such as those drawn from habituation tasks. However, selectivity may threaten the generalizability and interpretation of results, which is why the current study investigates attrition in a habituation task administered in a household setting in 7-month-old infants. We used a large-scale German dataset, focusing on the children's socioeconomic background, and investigated two aspects of attrition, namely, participation and task completion. The findings suggest significant effects of the children's socioeconomic background on attrition: Maternal education, parental occupation, household income and household language (German vs. other) were positively related to participation and task completion. The analyses indicate that multiple barriers may prevent parents from lower socioeconomic backgrounds from letting their children participate. The study concludes with a critical discussion of possible mechanisms of selectivity in behavioural measures as well as the household setting, in which the data were collected.

Given that children do not always trust gossip, do they spontaneously check what they are told? We provided 5- (N = 32) and 6-year olds (N = 32) with gossip concerning characters in a cartoon they were watching, and examined whether they verified the gossip by actively re-watching the relevant episodes. Six-year olds were more likely to verify gossip than 5-year olds. When gossip targeted their favourite characters, children were more likely to verify negative when compared with positive gossip. However, when gossip targeted children's disliked characters, they showed no such valence bias. These results indicate that children's verification of gossip increases with age, and they evaluate claims selectively.

The digital media landscape is rapidly shifting, and some children begin using digital media in infancy. As with book reading, young children need adult guidance to learn from digital media. Joint media engagement (JME) occurs when preschool children and their parents actively use digital media together. JME during early childhood is associated with increased learning from media. However, there are no validated scales of JME. In the present study, parents of 353 1-to-5-year olds answered a series of questions about their media use and behaviours. Exploratory factor analysis yielded two scales, one for viewing video content together and one for playing digital games together. Convergent validity was established by comparison to the widely used Television Mediation Scale. Together, these findings establish the JME instrument as a valid and reliable tool for measuring joint media engagement during early childhood.

An individual's social adaptation, which is influenced by both internalizing and externalizing factors, depends on social anxiety. We proposed that the connection between parental psychological control and social anxiety among middle school students was mediated by negative emotion response-focused strategies and moderated by socioeconomic status (SES). We collected data from 1343 Chinese students from 12 to 16 years old (M = 13.3, SD = 0.96) by applying the questionnaire of parental psychological control scale, social anxiety scale and negative emotion response-focused strategies scale. The findings demonstrated that parental psychological control, including father and mother psychological control, was positively associated with social anxiety and that the relationship between parental psychological control and children's social anxiety was mediated by negative emotion response-focused strategies. Meanwhile, SES played a moderating role in the relationship between children's negative emotion response-focused strategies and social anxiety. The findings also suggest that we should pay more attention to the psychological status and social interaction of children with lower SES.

Understanding transgender youth coping mechanisms may help create strategies that reduce the influence of stress on quality of life. Our study aims to measure the quality of life of Brazilian transgender youth and analyse the association with their coping strategies used for dealing with general and gender-related stress. The sample consisted of 185 participants (μ = 18.49 years; SD 2.42); of which 95 (46.34%) transgender boys, 45 (21.95%) transgender girls, 65 (31.71%) non-binary. Better quality of life was related to social support, whereas lower quality of life was related to the use of avoidance coping style in the context of general stress. The study found no association between coping strategies for gender-related stress and quality of life. Thus, the increase in quality of life in the context of gender distress among transgender youth should involve other mechanisms than promoting coping skills.

Source monitoring (SM) refers to attributing sources of information. There are various methods for measuring SM in children. We searched the PubMed, PsycINFO, Embase, Web of Science and Cochrane Library databases from their inception to February 24, 2023, to summarize the methods and measures of SM in children, identifying 141 studies. The procedure for the SM tasks encompassed encoding, interval and testing. The encoding tasks were classified into ground-based activities (n = 67), computer-based experiments (n = 42) and mixed methods (n = 34). The testing approaches were categorized into old/new recognition and source discrimination, n-alternative forced-choice, yes/no questions and recall/direct questions. Among 10 commonly used indicators, source-correct, source-incorrect, discrimination score and source accuracy were recommended to present the SM function. We also discussed the advantages and disadvantages of different SM methods in children, providing a reference for researchers to design and select SM measurements that meet their research objectives.