Children psychologically exclude Black women from their representations of women, but the mechanisms underlying this marginalization remain unclear. Across two studies (
= 129; 49 boys, 78 girls, two ...gender unreported; 79 White, 27 Black, six Latinx, five Asian, and 12 unreported), the present work tests hair texture as one possible perceptual mechanism by which this might occur. In both studies, children gender-categorized Black, White, and Asian men and women using MouseTracker. Children were slower and had more complex patterns in categorizing Black women when they had textured hair (Study 1A), but not when they had straight hair (Study 1B). Implications for the development of gender as a social category are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).
Critical consciousness refers to an individual's awareness of oppressive systemic forces in society, a sense of efficacy to work against oppression, and engagement in individual or collective action ...against oppression. In the past few decades, interest in critical consciousness as a resource that may promote thriving in marginalized people has grown tremendously. This article critically examines the results of a systematic review of 67 studies of critical consciousness in children and adolescents, published between 1998 and 2019. Across these studies, major themes included the role of socialization experiences, relationships, and context in the development of critical consciousness. In addition, critical consciousness was associated with a number of adaptive developmental outcomes, including career-related, civic, social-emotional, and academic outcomes-especially for marginalized youth. However, our analysis highlights several critical gaps in the literature. We highlight the need for further delineation of the impacts of parent and peer socialization on critical consciousness in specific developmental periods and for studying critical consciousness at multiple levels of the ecological system. We further note the dearth of rigorous experimental or quasi-experimental studies in the area of interventions to promote critical consciousness. In addition, we note that developmental questions-questions about the nature and function of critical consciousness over time-are largely unanswered in the literature, including questions about how critical consciousness manifests and develops during childhood. Leveraging the findings of our systematic review, we outline key next steps for this rapidly growing area of research.
Public Significance Statement
Critical consciousness is a person's awareness of oppressive social systems, their sense that they and their communities can work to resist oppression, and their engagement in antioppressive action. This systematic review indicates that critical consciousness may promote thriving among adolescents experiencing marginalization based on their race, social class, income, gender, or other aspects of their identities. Adults such as teachers, parents, and mentors can help to promote critical consciousness in children and youth.
Jerome Kagan was a psychologist and pioneer of developmental psychology, but he was intrigued by the natural sciences and read widely across history, biography, poetry, philosophy, cross-cultural ...anthropology, and the humanities. Drawing on unpublished archival and other primary source material, this essay describes two of Kagan's seminal studies in child development to demonstrate how their "contexts" facilitated scientific discovery and Kagan's own development as a researcher. A subset of Kagan's archival papers-including grant materials, correspondence, personal notes, and clipped articles-are also discussed to showcase the personal and scholastic material that Kagan read, wrote, and annotated, and which further advanced his scientific thinking. Collectively, these materials reveal the multiple contexts, both applied and private, in which Kagan "saw," thereby guiding his interdisciplinary approach to the scientific study of child development. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).
The ecology of human communication is face to face. In these contexts, speakers dynamically modify their communication across vocal (e.g., speaking rate) and gestural (e.g., cospeech gestures related ...in meaning to the content of speech) channels while speaking. What is the function of these adjustments? Here we ask whether speakers dynamically make these adjustments to increase communicative success, and decrease cognitive effort while speaking. We assess whether speakers modulate word durations and produce iconic (i.e., imagistically evoking properties of referents) gestures depending on the predictability of each word they utter. Predictability is operationalized as surprisal and computed from computational language models trained on corpora of child-directed, or adult-directed language. Using data from a novel corpus (Ecological Language Corpus) of naturalistic interactions between adult-child (aged 3-4), and adult-adult, we show that surprisal predicts speakers' multimodal adjustments and that some of these effects are modulated by whether the comprehender is a child or an adult. Thus, communicative efficiency applies generally across vocal and gestural communicative channels not being limited to structural properties of language or vocal modality.
Public Significance StatementIn everyday language use, whether speakers are addressing a child or an adult, they modulate their speech and use gestures. The function of these multimodal, nonlinguistic behaviors has been investigated separately in different subfields (linguistics, gesture studies, language acquisition, and language processing). Here we bring these fields together in asking whether communicative efficiency accounts for multimodal (vocal and gestural) adjustments across different audiences (adult-child and adult-adult). Using computational methods and analyses of child-directed and adult-directed language from a new conversational corpus, we found that adult speakers, talking to young children or adults, increase communicative efficiency by modulating word durations and producing gestures depending upon the predictability of to-be uttered words. These findings have implications for our understanding of language showing that behaviors, traditionally considered as nonlinguistic, are dynamically modulated by linguistic content. They have implications for education as they provide further evidence of how caregivers shape the learning environment.
Across early childhood development, sleep behavior transitions from a biphasic pattern (a daytime nap and nighttime sleep) to a monophasic pattern (only nighttime sleep). The transition to ...consolidated nighttime sleep, which occurs in most children between 2- and 5-years-old, is a major developmental milestone and reflects interactions between the developing homeostatic sleep drive and circadian system. Using a physiologically-based mathematical model of the sleep-wake regulatory network constrained by observational and experimental data from preschool-aged participants, we analyze how developmentally-mediated changes in the homeostatic sleep drive may contribute to the transition from napping to non-napping sleep patterns. We establish baseline behavior by identifying parameter sets that model typical 2-year-old napping behavior and 5-year-old non-napping behavior. Then we vary six model parameters associated with the dynamics of and sensitivity to the homeostatic sleep drive between the 2-year-old and 5-year-old parameter values to induce the transition from biphasic to monophasic sleep. We analyze the individual contributions of these parameters to sleep patterning by independently varying their age-dependent developmental trajectories. Parameters vary according to distinct evolution curves and produce bifurcation sequences representing various ages of transition onset, transition durations, and transitional sleep patterns. Finally, we consider the ability of napping and non-napping light schedules to reinforce napping or promote a transition to consolidated sleep, respectively. These modeling results provide insight into the role of the homeostatic sleep drive in promoting interindividual variability in developmentally-mediated transitions in sleep behavior and lay foundations for the identification of light- or behavior-based interventions that promote healthy sleep consolidation in early childhood.
•A physiologically-based model generates sleep-wake behavior in early childhood.•Homeostatic parameters are set to values estimated in preschool-aged children.•Homeostatic parameter variation drives transitions from biphasic to monophasic sleep.•Homeostatic parameters are varied to predict diversity of sleep pattern transitions.•Parameters affect transition onset/duration to represent interindividual differences.
How and why do internalizing and externalizing problems, psychopathological problems from different diagnostic classes representing separate forms of psychopathology, co-occur in children? We ...investigated the development of pure and co-occurring internalizing and externalizing problems from ages 2 to 12 with the use of latent class growth analysis. Furthermore, we examined how early childhood factors (temperament, cognitive functioning, maternal depression, and home environment) and early adolescent social and behavioral adjustment variables were related to differential trajectories of pure and co-occurring internalizing and externalizing problems. The sample (National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Study of Early Child Care) consisted of 1,232 children (52% male). Mother reports on the Child Behavior Checklist (
Achenbach, 1991
,
1992
) were used to construct the trajectories of externalizing and internalizing problems. Analyses identified groups of children exhibiting pure and co-occurring internalizing and externalizing problems. Children exhibiting continuous externalizing or continuous co-occurring internalizing and externalizing problems across the 10-year period under investigation were more likely to (a) engage in risky behaviors, (b) be associated with deviant peers, (c) be rejected by peers, and (d) be asocial with peers at early adolescence. However, children exhibiting pure internalizing problems over time were only at higher risk for being asocial with peers as early adolescents. Moreover, the additive effects of individual and environmental early childhood risk factors influenced the development of chronic externalizing problems, although pure internalizing problems were uniquely influenced by maternal depression. Results also provided evidence for the concepts of equifinality and multifinality.
Infants’ early words tend to be phonologically similar. This may reflect a systematic approach to early production, as they adapt newly acquired forms to fit familiar structures in the output. This ...“rich-get-richer” approach to phonological acquisition, known as preferential attachment in network science, proposes that new words cluster together with existing phonologically similar words in the lexicon (or network). This contrasts with recent work (e.g., Fourtassi et al., 2020) showing that the learning environment is the key predictor of learning (preferential acquisition). This study expands on previous analyses of vocabulary norm data to analyze naturalistic data, namely phonetic transcriptions of nine infants’ word productions, from word onset to age 2;6. Network growth models test whether (a) acquisition is best modeled through preferential attachment or preferential acquisition, (b) the trajectory of network growth changes over time, and (c) there are any differences in network growth of adult target forms versus infants’ actual productions. Results show that preferential attachment predicts acquisition of new words more convincingly than preferential acquisition: newly acquired words are phonologically similar to existing words in the network. Furthermore, systematicity becomes increasingly apparent over the course of acquisition, and infants produce their early words more systematically than we would expect from looking at target forms alone. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved) (Source: journal abstract)
The current study examined early grammatical marking in a relatively understudied language, Mandarin, by using the Mandarin version of MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory. Two waves ...of data collection included 338 monolingual children (17-36 months; 143 female) at Time 1 and 308 children (32-55 months; 139 female) at Time 2 and their caregivers, whose education ranged from third grade (elementary school) or below to postgraduate with a median of high school. Our data showed a clear order of grammatical marking acquisition among these children and supported findings on the linguistic specificity of morphological development such that early- and late-acquired markers in Mandarin are not acquired in the same order as English or other languages. Negative "mei2," "bu4," possessive "-de," classifiers, and the aspect marker "le" were the earliest-acquired markers, followed by modals, negative "bie2," adverbs, sentence final particles, resultative verb compounds, and aspect markers "guo4" and "yao4." Complex clauses and the aspect marker "zheng4" were acquired the latest. Furthermore, consistent with previous cross-linguistic studies, the development patterns of a wide range of Mandarin grammatical markers indicate that markers that are more perceptually salient and obligatory, have clear form-meaning mappings, and often appear in isolation or utterance-final position were acquired earlier than others.
Children's educational outcomes are strongly correlated with their parents' educational attainment. This finding is often attributed to the family environment-assuming, for instance, that parents' ...behavior and resources affect their children's educational outcomes. However, such inferences of a causal role of the family environment depend on the largely untested assumption that such relationships do not simply reflect genes shared between parent and child. We examine this assumption with an adoptee design in full-population cohorts from Danish administrative data. We test whether parental education predicts children's educational outcomes in both biological and adopted children, looking at four components of the child's educational development: (I) the child's conscientiousness during compulsory schooling, (II) academic performance in those same years, (III) enrollment in academically challenging high schools, and (IV) graduation success. Parental education was a substantial predictor of each of these child outcomes in the full population. However, little intergenerational correlation in education was observed in the absence of genetic similarity between parent and child-that is, among adoptees. Further analysis showed that what links adoptive parents' education did have with later-occurring components such as educational attainment (IV) and enrollment (III) appeared to be largely attributable to effects identifiable earlier in development, namely early academic performance (II). The primary nongenetic mechanisms by which education is transmitted across generations may thus have their effects on children early in their educational development, even as the consequences of those early effects persist throughout the child's educational development.
Developmental Science and Executive Function Blair, Clancy
Current directions in psychological science : a journal of the American Psychological Society,
02/2016, Letnik:
25, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Executive function abilities, including working memory, inhibitory control, and the flexible volitional shifting of the focus of attention, provide a foundation for reflection on experience, ...reasoning, and the purposeful regulation of behavior. These abilities and their underlying neurobiology, however, are inherently malleable and influenced by characteristics of individuals and contexts. Implications of this malleability for research on the development of executive function in early childhood, for the prospect that these abilities can be fostered and promoted by specific types of activities, and for issues relating to the reliable and valid measurement of executive function are considered.
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