OBJECTIVEThis study examines the implications of grandparental death for cognitive skills in middle childhood.METHODThis study uses data from the Future of Families and Child Wellbeing Study (N = ...2479) to estimate ordinary least squares regression models of the associations between grandparental death and subsequent cognitive skills among children in middle childhood.RESULTSExperiencing a grandparental death between ages 5 and 9 is associated with boys' lower reading, verbal, and math scores at age 9, with associations most notable for Black and Hispanic boys; grandparental death before age 5 has minimal influence on boys' cognitive skills at age 9. There is little indication that grandparental death adversely affects girls' cognitive skills.CONCLUSIONThe numerous and persistent implications of grandparental death for boys' cognitive skills merit greater recognition of grandparental death as a source of family instability, stress, and ultimately inequality in child development.
•Chinese children's educational expectations gradually increase in middle childhood.•Individual differences exist in the development of educational expectations.•Adaptation is more dominant than ...adoption in the development of educational expectations.
This longitudinal study examined the overall and heterogeneous developmental trajectories of children's educational expectations and the effects of children’'s previous academic achievements and maternal educational expectations on these trajectories. The educational expectations of 3868 Chinese children (1839 girls; Mage = 9.42 ± 0.52) were investigated six times from the 4th to 6th grades. Children's previous academic achievement and maternal educational expectations were also collected during the first wave. The results showed that Chinese children's educational expectations generally increased in middle childhood and could be categorized into four classes: high stable-increasing, low stable-increasing, low quickly-increasing, and high quickly-decreasing. Furthermore, maternal educational expectations have the greatest influence on the initial level of children's educational expectations, whereas previous academic achievement has the greatest impact on the increasing rate of children's expectations. In addition, both factors contribute to classifying children into a high-stable increasing class in comparison to the other three classes. The findings indicate that Chinese children increase their educational expectations in middle childhood and continually adapt their expectations mainly based on their previous achievements. These findings could advance our understanding of the development of children’s educational expectations in the middle childhood period and provide educational practitioners with prospective factors to increase children’s educational expectations.
ObjectivesChildren who are new to Canada have unique circumstances that can be associated with their emotional health. Using linked immigration and child self-report data, we examined associations ...between changes in children’s social support and emotional health from ages 9 to 12, for immigrant, refugee, and non-immigrant children.
ApproachA population sample of N = 4664 immigrant, refugee, and non-immigrant children reported on their peer support and school belonging, as well as their emotional health (life satisfaction, self-esteem, sadness), in Grades 4 and 7. Social support and emotional health were measured using the Middle Years Development Instrument (MDI). Migration background including age at arrival, migration class, generation status, and source region, was obtained from the Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship Canada database, individually linked to MDI records using children’s Personal Education Number and child date of birth. Multi-level modelling assessed associations adjusting for confounders.
ResultsIn the linked sample, 19% of children were first- or second-generation economic immigrants (themselves or their parents were born outside of Canada), 8% were family immigrants, and 5% were refugees. Children with refugee backgrounds reported lower life satisfaction and self-esteem and higher sadness in Grade 4 compared to all other groups. Children with immigration backgrounds reported lower life satisfaction and self-esteem and higher sadness compared to non-immigrants. Refugee children had significantly more positive changes in emotional health from Grades 4 to 7 compared to non-immigrants, and significantly more positive changes in social supports. Positive changes in social supports were associated with positive changes in emotional health of similar magnitude for all children, regardless of migration background. Children with refugee backgrounds on average experienced improved emotional health during middle childhood, and changes in peer support partially accounted for these changes.
ConclusionResults suggest that children with migration backgrounds enter school with lower emotional health and are likely to benefit from increased social supports. Likewise, incorporating opportunities to build peer relationships and school belonging is likely to benefit all children, regardless of migration background.
•Theories propose that the moral self-concept and positive emotions promote prosocial behavior.•Changes in both consequential and anticipated emotions explained age differences of sharing.•Reflecting ...on the affective consequences of (not-)sharing increased subsequent sharing behavior.•Anticipation of negative emotions tended to mediate a relation between self-concept and behavior.
The moral self-concept reflects the view of oneself in terms of moral behavior and has been proposed to predict actual behavior. Theories also suggest emotions and emotion knowledge to predict prosocial behavior, but the interplay between the moral self-concept and emotions is largely unknown. This interplay is especially important to study in middle childhood, a relevant period for the ontogeny of the moral self-concept and when emotions regarding prosocial behavior are suggested to change. The current study explored the nature of the relation between the moral self-concept, prosocial behavior, and consequential emotions (Experiment 1) or anticipated emotions (Experiment 2) regarding prosocial behavior in 5- to 9-year-olds (together N = 169). Moreover, we investigated whether emotions mediate the relation between the moral self-concept and prosocial behavior. Overall, the moral self-concept was positively related to prosocial behavior. In addition, emotional consequences as well as anticipated emotions explained age differences in sharing behavior. Moreover, the results hint to an indirect effect of the moral self-concept on sharing behavior through the anticipation of negative feelings when not-sharing. Interestingly, children who first reflected about the affective consequences of prosocial behavior seemed to share more. In line with theories, the results demonstrate that both the moral self-concept and emotions are relevant motivators of prosocial behavior in middle childhood.
There is ongoing debate on the relationship between intra-individual variability (IIV) of cognitive processes and task performance. While psychological research has traditionally assumed that lower ...intra-individual variability (IIV) aids consistent task performance, some studies suggest that greater IIV can also be adaptive, especially when flexible responding is required. Here we selectively manipulate inhibitory control (Stopping) and response speed (Going) by means of a training paradigm to 1) assess how this manipulation impacts Stopping IIV and its relationship to task performance, and 2) replicate previous findings showing that reductions in Going IIV are adaptive. A group of 208 6–13-year-old children were randomly allocated to an 8-week training targeting Stopping (experimental group) or Going (control group). The stop signal task was administered before and after training. Training Stopping led to adaptive increases in Stopping IIV, where greater flexibility in cognitive processing may be required to meet higher task demands. In line with previous studies, training Going led to adaptive reductions in Going IIV, which allows more consistent and efficient Going performance. These findings provide systematic and causal evidence of the process-dependent relationship of IIV and task performance in the context of Stopping and Going, suggesting a more nuanced perspective on IIV with implications for developmental, ageing and intervention studies.
•Training improved school-aged children’s advanced theory of mind and prosocial lie-telling;•The training effects faded away at the six-month follow-up test;•Evidence supports the causal role of ...advanced theory of mind in prosocial lie-telling.
Children’s advanced theory of mind (AToM) is concurrently associated with their prosocial lie-telling. However, the causal link between AToM and prosocial lie-telling has not yet been demonstrated. To address this gap, the current study adopted a training paradigm and investigated the role of AToM in children’s prosocial lie-telling in middle childhood. A total of 66 9- and 10-year-old children who did not demonstrate any prosocial lie-telling in a disappointment gift paradigm at the baseline were recruited and randomly assigned to either the experimental group (n = 32) or an active control group (n = 34). The experimental group underwent a conversation-based training program of four sessions. The results showed significantly greater gains in AToM at the posttest for the experimental group children compared with the control group children, controlling for family socioeconomic status, children’s literacy score, working memory, and inhibition. More important, the experimental group children were more likely to tell prosocial lies than the control group, even after controlling for the pretest AToM and other covariates. However, the training effects faded at the 6-month follow-up test after the training’s completion. These findings provide the first evidence for the causal role of AToM in the development of prosocial lie-telling in middle childhood. The fade-out effect is discussed in the context of educational interventions.
•We administered diverse ToM tasks to preschoolers, school-aged children, and adults.•For all age groups, tasks showed minimal correlations with each other.•Results suggest ToM to be ...multi-dimensional and not reducible to a single construct.•Future research should continue to examine component processes of ToM.
Theory of mind—or the understanding that others have mental states that can differ from one’s own and reality—is currently measured across the lifespan by a wide array of tasks. These tasks vary across dimensions including modality, complexity, affective content, and whether responses are explicit or implicit. As a result, theoretical and meta-analytic work has begun to question whether such varied approaches to theory of mind should be categorized as capturing a single construct. To directly address the coherence of theory of mind, and to determine whether that coherence changes across development, we administered a diverse set of theory of mind measures to three different samples: preschoolers, school-aged children, and adults. All tasks showed wide variability in performance, indicating that children and adults often have inconsistent and partial mastery of theory of mind concepts. Further, for all ages studied, the selected theory of mind tasks showed minimal correlations with each other. That is, having high levels of theory of mind on one task did not predict performance on another task designed to measure the same underlying ability. In addition to showing the importance of more carefully designing and selecting theory of mind measures, these findings also suggest that understanding others’ internal states may be a multidimensional process that interacts with other abilities, a process which may not occur in a single conceptual framework. Future research should systematically investigate task coherence via large-scale and longitudinal efforts to determine how we come to understand the minds of others.
Abstract
Objective
We aimed to investigate value change and stability longitudinally in middle childhood.
Background
Values are the aspect of personality defining one's aspirations. Research ...identifies meaningful values in middle childhood, yet we know little about the process of their development within individual.
Method
Children (
N
= 298; 53.7% girls,
M
age
= 7 years and 3 months,
SD
= 7.70 months, at the first time point) four times, annually.
Results
Rank‐order stability increased with age and decreased with time‐span. We found value hierarchy consistency, with value hierarchy similar to adolescents in the priority given to openness to change versus conservation values, and to adults in the priority given to self‐transcendence values. Latent growth curve analyses indicated linear increase in openness to change, and curvilinear increase in self‐transcendence values, and linear decrease in conservation and self‐enhancement values, with some differences across ages. Value structure was better differentiated with age. Compatible values changed in similar, and conflicting values in opposite directions.
Conclusions
This paper suggests that in middle childhood, children can already report stable values. Moreover, middle childhood is characterized by coherent change patterns, of increase in the importance of growth, and decrease in the focus on conflicting protection values.
Previous studies on the development of executive functions (EFs) in middle childhood have traditionally focused on cognitive, or "cool," EFs: working memory, inhibitory control and cognitive ...flexibility. However, knowledge of the development of socio-emotional, or "hot," EFs, such as delay of gratification, decision-making and theory of mind, is more limited. The main aims of this systematic review were to characterize the typical development of both the primary cool and hot EFs in middle childhood, and to identify the main tools for evaluating EFs as a whole. We conducted a systematic search on studies of cognitive and socio-emotional EFs published in the last 5 years in Pubmed, PsycInfo, and WoS databases. Of 44 studies selected, we found a variety of tasks measuring cool EFs, while measures of hot EFs were limited. Nevertheless, the available data suggest that cool and hot components follow distinct, but related, developmental trajectories during middle childhood.
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