Child Development Perspectives最新文献

Counterfactual reasoning is the ability to reason about how the world might have been if past events or states had been different. It is helpful for making sense of past experiences to create future blueprints. Languages like English apply subjunctive forms to directly mark counterfactual premises. In contrast, Chinese does not apply subjunctive forms and conveys counterfactuality by contextual and semantic cues. These differences in expressing counterfactual premises may influence how children interpret and reason from counterfactual premises, affecting their performance on counterfactual reasoning tasks. In this article, I review both studies of children speaking Chinese, which does not apply subjunctive forms, and studies of children speaking languages that do apply subjunctive forms (e.g., English). In doing so, I suggest how and why the development of counterfactual reasoning may differ across languages. I also make suggestions for studying cross-linguistic variations.

Unlike adults, young children think that many weird and unlikely events are impossible. Existing theories have argued that this developmental shift is driven primarily by age-related changes in knowledge as well as an increasing ability to reflect on one's modal intuitions. However, this intuition + reflection model fails to explain when and why children and adults engage in reflection. In this article, we review research on the development of modal intuitions, and we present a framework for thinking about development that connects intuition and reflection by positing that confidence in one's intuitions plays a key role in explaining age-related and individual differences in children's judgments of possibility.

Maternal mind-mindedness, which examines mothers' representational capacity to treat their children as individuals with their own minds, has traditionally been operationalized by coding mothers' mental state comments to or about their children. Mind-mindedness has been studied predominantly in Western cultures, where it predicts children's social-cognitive developments. However, in many non-Western cultures, mothers do not readily talk about their children's mental states; they may use nonverbal behaviors to manifest their mind-mindedness. Nonverbal behaviors may also be the way mind-mindedness is conveyed to young infants. Theorists have been puzzled by the fact that mind-mindedness in mothers' speech prior to when infants understand language predicts infants' later social-cognitive developments. In this article, I call for mind-mindedness measures to include nonverbal behaviors. Such measures may reveal behaviors involved in communicating mind-mindedness to infants and provide an avenue to equitable investigations of mind-mindedness in diverse cultures, thus advancing the theory and scope of the field.

Understanding childhood socialization across multiple world cultures is important for developing comprehensive and generalizable theories of developmental psychology. Studies suggest that Latin American children show markedly high levels of prosocial behavior. In this article, we theorize that this hyper-prosociality is supported by a particular cluster of “other-oriented” values that are fundamental to Latin American culture—including the values of simpatía, respeto, acomedirse, familismo, and cariño. Based on our review of 60 papers describing studies with more than 12,000 participants, we discuss these values in adult caregivers and examine socialization processes that facilitate the intergenerational transfer of Latin American prosocial values from caregivers to children. The study of Latin American children yields new and important insights into cultural influences on prosocial behavior, while at the same time promoting inclusion and scientific generalizability. Social experiences, which vary by culture, undergird the development of human prosociality.

Recent empirical investigations have concentrated primarily on studying imitation as a social tool that satisfies social motivations, while other potential reasons for and forms of imitation have attracted less attention. These investigations have also focused on studying the role of pedagogy in imitative learning and set up most experiments in a pedagogical framework. In this article, we present two gaps in studying high-fidelity imitation. First, social motivation may not be the only motivation, especially in less socially stratified communities. Second, imitative learning in observational contexts is understudied. We discuss these gaps by providing examples of alternative imitative learning scenarios and aspects that may have been overlooked and thus underexplored. Moving forward, cross-cultural investigations targeting other aspects and forms of imitative learning can provide insights into how observational and pedagogical learning together foster effective learning across diverse childhood ecologies.

Ageism against older adults has been well studied, yet adolescents also experience ageism in pervasive and harmful ways. In this article, we describe anti-youth ageism as a system of oppression that encompasses negative stereotypes, prejudices, and discrimination against adolescents that uphold power hierarchies and marginalize young people based on their age. Drawing from interdisciplinary theory and research, we examine adolescents' experiences of anti-youth ageism at interpersonal, cultural, and institutional levels, and consider the ways anti-youth ageism is internalized. Across many levels, anti-youth ageism is understood in concert with other systems of oppression such as racism and cis-heterosexism. The field needs a new wave of anti-oppressive developmental science to understand the multilayered, intersectional manifestations of anti-youth ageism and the impacts of anti-youth ageism on various domains of development. Research can help foster the creation of intervention strategies to reduce harm to adolescents and their development.

Comorbidity, the simultaneous or successive co-occurrence of two or more disorders in one individual, is common among individuals with learning disabilities (LDs). The topic has garnered much attention in the field of LD, with advances over the past three decades in describing, predicting, and explaining comorbid LDs. However, efforts to design, evaluate, and implement interventions for individuals with comorbid LDs have received far less attention. In this article, we focus on these critical matters. After discussing how comorbidity and LDs have been conceptualized, defined, and explained, we consider what the field has learned about how individuals with comorbid LDs respond to academic interventions and what approaches may be effective for supporting their educational development.