British Journal of Developmental Psychology最新文献

Previous studies have failed to show an effect of episodic future thinking (EFT) on children's delay of gratification (DoG), contrasting strikingly with adult findings. Recent findings from a sample of 8–11-year-old children by Canning et al. (J. Exp. Child Psychol., 228, 2023, 105618) indicate that EFT cueing is not effective compared to a no-cue control even when it is reward related. Canning et al. suggest children's DoG performance, unlike that of adults, may be negatively affected by the cognitive load of cueing, but this leaves unexplained why EFT reward-related cueing produced significantly better performance than cueing that did not involve EFT in their study. The current study attempted to further delineate the importance of linking future thinking cues to rewards. A reward-related EFT condition was compared to a reward-unrelated EFT condition and a no-cue control on a delay choice task. No significant differences were observed between the three conditions. This suggests that even reward-related future thinking is ineffective at improving children's delayed gratification. Further research is needed to determine why children struggle to benefit from EFT cues.

Current methods used to investigate emotional inference and conflict resolution knowledge are limited in their suitability for use with children with language disorders due to a reliance on language processing. This is problematic, as nearly 8% of the population are estimated to have developmental language disorder (DLD). In this paper, we present ‘Zoti's Social Toolkit’, a set of animated scenarios that can be used to assess emotion inferencing and conflict resolution knowledge. All animated scenarios contain interpersonal situations centred around a gender-neutral alien named Zoti. Four studies investigated the face and construct validity of the stimuli. The final stimulus set can be used with children, who may or may not have language difficulties and is openly available for use in research.

Older adults have even greater difficulty learning name–face associations than young adults, although many variables reflecting properties of the names have been shown to affect young and older adults' name learning similarly. Older adults' name–face association learning was compared for names with high-frequency (HF) first syllables versus names with low-frequency (LF) first syllables. Twenty-eight adults ages 65 to 80 learned five names with HF first syllables and five names with LF first syllables in association with 10 new faces over repeated testing rounds with feedback. Participants learned more name–face associations when the names had HF first syllables than LF first syllables. Findings indicate that older adults benefit from increased frequency of phonological segments within a word on a task other than word retrieval and are consistent with a theoretical framework that accounts for learning new name–face associations, the effects of linguistic properties of the names, and ageing.

Young children are biased to treat new information communicated to them as conventional, shareable, and known by others in their community. However, some information is privileged in the sense that is not intended to be shared with or known by all. The current study compared judgements regarding sharing conventional versus privileged information. Seventy-four 3- to 5-year-olds and adults responded to vignettes in which a protagonist had to decide whether to share conventional (an object name) or privileged information (surprise). Consistent with our hypothesis, there was no developmental change in sharing judgements for conventional information but a clear decrease with age for sharing privileged information. Nonetheless, even 3-year-olds were more likely to judge that conventional information should be shared more than privileged information, though this difference increased with age. While children overall treat information as shareable, there is an emerging ability to distinguish how conventional versus privileged information should be shared.

Prior research provided evidence for retrospective and prospective judgements of immanent justice in adults, but the developmental origins of judgements of immanent justice remain unknown. Both retrospective and prospective judgements were investigated in preschool age, using explicit and implicit measures. In Experiment 1, 2.5- and 4-year-olds were first shown events in which one agent distributed resources fairly or unfairly, and then they saw test events in which both distributors were damaged by a misfortune. Later, they were presented with a verbal task, in which they had to respond to two questions on evaluation of the deservingness, by using explicit measures. All children were likely to approve of deserved outcomes when deeds and outcomes were congruent (i.e., unfair distributor—misfortune), and only older ones were likely to disapprove when they were incongruent (i.e., fair distributor—misfortune). In Experiment 2, 4-year-olds after seeing familiarization events of Experiment 1, were presented with two verbal questions to explore prospective judgements of immanent justice, by using explicit measures. In Experiment 3, 4-year-olds were first shown familiarization events of Experiment 1 and listened to respective narratives, then before the outcome was revealed they were assessed with a reaching task to investigate prospective judgements of immanent justice, by using implicit measures. Children reached the image depicting a bad outcome for the unfair distributor, and that illustrated a good outcome for the fair distributor. The results of the last two experiments demonstrated a fine ability to make prospective judgements at 4 years of life, and found that they were to be more prone to apply immanent justice reasoning to positive outcomes following good actions. Taken together, these results provide new evidence for preschoolers' retrospective and prospective judgements of immanent justice.

Identity development is a key task during emerging adulthood. The goals of the present study are to validate the Spanish version of the Dimensions of Identity Development Scale (DIDS) and to explore the relationship between identity dimensions and adjustment (flourishing and distress), from a gender perspective. The sample comprised 1502 Spanish university students (60.1% women). The results reveal that the DIDS is valid in the Spanish context and that significant gender differences were observed in some dimensions of identity development, with men scoring higher for identification with commitment and women scoring higher for exploration in depth and ruminative exploration. Finally, both dimensions of commitment and ruminative exploration had a stronger effect on men's than on women's adjustment, suggesting that the integration of the self has more impact on men's outcomes than on women's. These findings highlight the need to include the gender perspective in all future research in order to gain deeper insight into the relationship between the identity development process and adjustment during emerging adulthood.

There is evidence of weak self-processing in autism spectrum disorder (ASD), including diminished self-reference effects (SREs) in memory. Because smaller SREs in older ASD children and adults are sometimes associated with worse social functioning, we examined this relation for the first time in ASD preschoolers (n = 21). Following a self-performed task, children completed tests of self/other source memory, verbal ability, imitation and mentalizing. Although the ASD children were outperformed on the socio-cognitive measures by non-autistic preschoolers (n = 20), they still showed a significant SRE. Moreover, the SRE, but not the socio-cognitive variables, was a significant predictor of children's social functioning as rated by parents. Larger SREs were linked with better social functioning, while children with stronger autism traits showed no memory advantage for information encoded self-referentially. These findings support previous research showing that self-processing impairments in ASD are mainly apparent for individuals with greater social difficulties.

Family history (FH) of autism and ADHD is not often considered during the recruitment process of developmental studies, despite high recurrence rates. We looked at the rate of autism or ADHD amongst family members of young children (9 to 46 months) in three UK-based samples (N = 1055) recruited using different methods. The rate of FH-autism or FH-ADHD was 3%–9% for diagnosed cases. The rate was highest in the sample recruited through an online participant pool, which also consisted of the most socio-economically diverse families. Lower parental education and family income were associated with higher rates of FH-ADHD and lower parental education with increased FH-autism. Thus, recruitment strategies have a meaningful impact on neurodiversity and the conclusions and generalizations that can be drawn. Specifically, recruitment using crowdsourcing websites could create a sample that is more representative of the wider population, compared to those recruited through university-related volunteer databases and social media.

Competition usually exists in groups in everyday interactions, but how children allocate according to competition outcomes (e.g., merit-based allocation) after intergroup competition and the difference in children's allocations of rewards between interpersonal and intergroup competition remain unclear. Children aged 3–8 years were asked to complete interpersonal or intergroup competitive games and were further asked to allocate rewards between themselves and their partners (Study 1) or between their group and the other group (Studies 2 and 3) and to reason about their decisions. We found that after interpersonal competition, children tended to conduct merit-based allocations when they won but were more inclined to conduct equal allocations when they lost; after intergroup competition, children were more inclined to make equal allocations regardless of whether they won or lost, only less than half of children followed meritorious principles. However, children conducted more merit-based allocations with age after both interpersonal and intergroup competitions. In addition, children showed less bias towards their own side after intergroup competition than after interpersonal competition. Finally, they demonstrated an earlier proclivity towards being influenced by winning outcomes than by losing outcomes after interpersonal competition, whereas a converse tendency was found after intergroup competition.