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The current study examined to what extent face and speech processing interact with each other and whether they enhance or impair the processing of the other in 5-year-olds (n = 51) and adults (n = 34). Using a computer-based speeded sorting task allowed to directly test the influence of auditory speech on face processing and the influence of face identity on auditory speech processing within one experiment. Participants were asked to either sort faces while ignoring auditory speech information (face task) or to sort auditory speech while ignoring face information (speech task). The tasks comprised three conditions: control (irrelevant dimension constant), correlational (congruent pairing of relevant and irrelevant dimension), and orthogonal (random pairing). For the 5-year-olds, reaction times did not differ in the face task, but differed in the speech task. They were the fastest in the control and the slowest in the orthogonal compared with the constant conditions. Adults' reaction times were similar across conditions and tasks indicating an independent processing of faces and speech. Hence, we found an asymmetrical processing pattern between face and auditory speech processing in children, in which face identity is processed independent of auditory speech; however, auditory speech processing is affected by face identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gender differences in early childhood development are under-researched in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) where almost 90% of the world's young children live. This study examines the direction, magnitude, and variation of gender similarities and differences in 3- and 4-year-olds' early childhood development in 71 low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Moreover, we explore whether country-level gender inequality correlates with gender differences in early development. We analyzed Early Childhood Development Index (ECDI) data from UNICEF's Multiple Indicators Cluster Surveys and the Demographic and Health Surveys between 2010 and 2019 (n = 226,980). Using logistic regression, we estimated children's odds of being developmentally on track in literacy-numeracy, approaches to learning, social-emotional, and physical domains. We also used meta-analytic regression to examine associations between early childhood development and country-level indicators of gender inequality. In approximately one-half of LMICs, odds of being developmentally on track did not significantly differ for girls and boys; in countries with significant differences, girls were more likely to be on track than boys (odds ratio [OR] = 1.21, 95% confidence interval [CI] = [1.18–1.24], p <.001). Differences favoring girls were largest in the social-emotional domain (OR = 1.27, 95% CI = [1.24–1.30], p <.001). Country-level gender development index explained a substantial amount of variation in gender differences across countries. Overall, findings suggest that when gender differences exist, girls are more likely than boys to be developmentally on track, particularly in the social-emotional domain and in countries with greater gender equality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Moral emotions are experienced in daily life and are crucial for mediating appropriate social behaviors, as they prevent individuals from committing transgressions. In this study, caregivers of 377 children aged between 2.5 and 6.5 years old completed the Moral Emotions Questionnaire (MEQ), a parent report aimed to separately identify the presence of shame, guilt, and pride behaviors in early childhood. To validate this newly developed questionnaire, a confirmatory factor analysis and measurement invariance were conducted, and internal consistency, and concurrent validity were tested. Outcomes confirmed that the three moral emotions can be individually identified through the MEQ, even at such an early age. The MEQ scales showed acceptable internal consistencies and the associations between the three moral emotions and externalizing behaviors, internalizing behaviors, and social competence were in accordance with previous research, therefore confirming concurrent validity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the functionalist perspective on emotional development posits that emotions serve adaptive functions, empirical tests of the role of anger mostly focus on how anger contributes to dysfunction. Developmentally, as children gain agency and skill at emotion regulation between the ages of 36 months and 48 months, their modulation of anger may facilitate its functional role for behavior. We examined this possibility through study of how 120 children's anger and sadness were related to persistence during the transparent locked box task at ages 36 and 48 months. Using survival analyses, we examined how children's anger and sadness were related to their giving up during the challenging task, and whether those relations were moderated by age. Using hidden Markov models (HMMs), we examined how children transitioned among anger, sadness, and on-task behavior states and whether those dynamics differed with age. Survival analysis revealed that age moderated the relation between anger and giving up. Greater anger was associated with greater likelihood of giving up earlier in the task at 36 months but with lower likelihood of giving up at 48 months. HMM analyses revealed that children were more likely to transition from a Calm/On-task to Calm/Off-task state at 36 months than at 48 months; that children were more likely to remain in an Anger/On-task state at 36 months than at 48 months; and that children were more likely to transition from Calm/On-task to Anger/On-task, and from Anger/On-task back to Calm/On-task at 48 months than at 36 months. Taken together, the findings suggest that anger appraisals may facilitate children in maintaining persistence, but that this functionality may develop with age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is well known that the first 1,000 days of life have long-lasting impact on a child's cognitive, language, socio-emotional, and physical development, but there is little evidence from Rwanda about how to maximize parent–child interactions during these critical early years. Save the Children piloted the First Steps "Intera za Mbere" early childhood parenting education program in one district of Rwanda to promote healthy development through holistic parenting education. Using a cluster randomized control trial, we assessed outcomes of a 17-week parenting education on parenting skills and child development for families with children aged 6–36 months. Families were randomly allocated into three study groups: light touch (n = 482), full intervention (n = 482), and control (n = 483) groups. We used a Kinyarwanda-adaptation of the validated Ages & Stages Questionnaires (ASQ), a Home Observation Measurement of the Environment-Short Form. Multivariate linear and logistic regression analyses were used for both the intention-to-treat analyses and more robust models controlling for ASQ form received, child gender, maternal education, number of children in the home, and baseline ASQ scores. Findings indicate that children in the light touch and full intervention groups were significantly more likely to meet the ASQ benchmarks than the control group in all developmental domains. The strong positive results from the light touch group are especially relevant to efforts to bring beneficial early childhood stimulation programs to scale in low-income contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper reports on a study which tested whether infants high in negative affectivity are differentially susceptible to observed coparenting behavior in relation to their subsequent social–emotional development. Data came from a longitudinal study of 182 US dual-earner, primiparous couples and their infant children. At nine-months postpartum, child negative affectivity was reported by mothers and fathers and supportive and undermining coparenting behavior were assessed from mother-father-infant observations. At 27-months mothers reported on toddlers’ externalizing behavior and dysregulation using a clinical assessment tool designed to identify competencies and areas of concern in toddlers’ social–emotional development. Hierarchical regression analyses revealed partial support for the differential susceptibility hypothesis. Specifically, infants high in negative affectivity had lower levels of dysregulation when embedded in a more supportive coparenting context, and higher levels of dysregulation when embedded in a less supportive coparenting context. In contrast, supportive coparenting behavior was not relevant for the dysregulation of infants initially low in negative affectivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conditional cash transfer programs (CCTs) have shown mixed effects on child development outcomes in the context of poverty. Direct parenting support integrated with CCTs may improve the effectiveness of CCTs for children’s development, and benefits could occur via improvements in parenting practices or the home environment. Here, we use data from a randomized effectiveness trial to examine the pathways connecting parenting support and child development. The parenting program (EI: Educación Inicial) was implemented at scale among beneficiaries of Prospera (a CCT, previously Oportunidades and Progresa). Participants included children between the ages of 3 and 5 years old (n = 1,362) from 91 rural communities in three Mexican states. Communities were stratified by indigenous classification and randomized to one of three arms: (T0) Comparison group (CCT benefits only); (T1) CCT benefits plus availability of EI in the community; or (T2) CCT benefits plus promotion and encouragement by the CCT program to participate in EI. Findings were that participation in the T2 arm of the study was associated with a 13% increase in the number of play activities that parents engaged in with their children, particularly shared storybook reading and singing. Parents in T2 showed nearly two times greater odds of reading daily to their children. In mediation analyses, the amount of play activities and shared book reading explained up to 32% of the effects of the EI parenting program on child development outcomes. In this study, collaboration and integration of two social programs was critical for program impact, which occurred through pathways relating to parental engagement in reading and play. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study examined Japanese children’s and adults’ awareness of the effects of psychological taste experiences on biological processes such as growth and illness. Studies 1 and 2 showed the following: (1) preschoolers tended to assume that good-tasting experiences would make one grow taller and gain more weight, while adults seldom accepted such ideas. Concerning illness, participants in all age groups were reluctant to accept the effects of taste experiences. (2) Process-dependent awareness (i.e., effects of psychological factors were assumed to depend on biological processes) was observed not only among young children, but also in older children and adults. Compared with younger children, adults’ responses were more process sensitive. (3) When adults explained why they assumed that different taste experiences would lead to different bodily states, they often relied on vitalistic causality. The use of vitalistic concepts was uncommon among children. Finally, (4) Japanese participants seem to be more likely than Americans to assume that bad-tasting experiences would make them non-resistant to a cold. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Art is a unique feature of human experience. It involves the complex interplay among stimuli, persons and contexts. Little is known of how the various features deemed important in art appreciation depend on development, thus are already present at a young age. Similarly to our previous approach with adults of differing levels of expertise, the present study uses structural equation modeling to explore this complex interplay by analyzing differences in the appreciation of classical, abstract and modern artworks by children of two age groups. We measured evaluations of perceived beauty, elicited emotions, arousal and understanding. Structural equation solutions for children not only revealed significant effects of emotion in all conditions, but also confirmed that the dependencies between emotion and liking were consistently higher for younger children, while the interactions of arousal and liking, as well as understanding, were higher for older children. These results are in accordance with a transition from an affective towards an increasingly cognitive knowledge based sense of aesthetics, but underline the importance of emotional processing as fundamental. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two main theoretical constructs seek to describe the elaborated sense of time that may be a uniquely human attribute: diachronic thinking (the ability to think about the past and use that information to predict future events) and event ordering (the ability to sequence events in temporal order). Researchers utilize various tasks to measure the emergence and refinement of diachronic thinking and event ordering in children and to document significant development in these skills during middle childhood. The current study investigated the relationship between performance on tasks of diachronic thinking and event ordering in 90 children (5;0–10;10) to determine whether these tasks tap overlapping cognitive processes. Specifically, we examined the extent to which the various measures were inter-correlated and related to measures of language and intelligence. A principal-components analysis yielded two factors. Factor 1 was positively associated with all measures, including age, language, and intelligence. Factor 2 (uncorrelated with age, language, and intelligence) distinguished the synthesis task from spatial and labeling tasks. Overall, results suggest that diachronic thinking and event ordering are not unified constructs. Rather, the multiple measures designed to assess these constructs tap into somewhat different ways of keeping track of time, and are distinguished by the extent to which they rely on knowledge of conventional time patterns and require flexibility in manipulating and synthesizing temporal sequences. Implications for how researchers conceptualize and assess time concepts are discussed and directions for future research are outlined. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Two hundred and twenty two children (104 females), 1–8 years of age and young adults, were tested for up to 25 days on five versions of a non-verbal, non-navigational landmark task that had previously been used for monkeys. In monkeys, performance on this task is severely impaired following damage to the parietal cortex. For the basic task, the positive of two identical stimuli concealed a food reward and was designated by spatial proximity of a salient landmark. None of the 1- and 2-year-old children learned the task, i.e., they failed to consistently reach for and displace the positive stimulus in 25 test days. Of the 3-, 4-, and 5- year-old groups, 56%, 70%, and 77% of the children, respectively, mastered the task within 25 days. Children older than 5 and adults rapidly mastered the task. In Experiment #2, all subjects, 1–6 years of age, rapidly mastered a non-relational task when the choice stimulus was attached to the landmark, but the youngest children failed to transfer performance when the landmark was subsequently detached. Children under the age of 5 did not tolerate relational ambiguity as well as adults did. Replications of the first two experiments produced virtually identical results and indicated that the tests have a high degree of reliability. In Experiment #5, there were two distinct proximal landmarks, one of which always designated the positive stimulus. This manipulation did not improve performance of younger children. As compared to results from navigational landmark tasks, results obtained in the Wisconsin General Testing Apparatus (WGTA) indicate a very narrow focus of attention on the response site. Thus, small separations between discriminative cue and response site significantly affect performance, especially in younger children. By comparing the present results with those from monkeys, we speculate that components of the parietal pathways involved with attention and reaching mature between 1 and 5 years of age in children. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Appetitive aggression – a rewarding perception of the perpetration of violence – seems to be an adaptation common to adverse conditions. Children raised within armed groups may develop attitudes and values that favour harming others when socialized within a combat force. Combatants who joined an armed force early in their lives should, therefore, perceive aggression in a more appetitive way than those who were recruited later. We interviewed 95 former members of armed groups operating in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Those combatants that were having higher levels of appetitive aggression were those who joined a rebel force earlier in life. Surprisingly, neither the amount of military training nor the amount of time spent in the forces had a significant effect on the level of appetitive aggression. Our results show that when civil socialization is replaced by socialization within an armed group early in life, self-regulation of appetitive aggression may become deficient, leading to a higher propensity towards cruelty. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study demonstrates the unique contributions of perinatal risk and genetic and environmental influences on child behavior using data from 561 domestic US adoption triads (birth mothers, adopted child, and adoptive parents). Findings show distinct patterns of associations among genetic (birth mother psychopathology), prenatal (six maternal reported aggregate scores characterizing total obstetric complications, perinatal internalizing symptoms, pregnancy complications, exposure to toxins, substance use, and neonatal complications), and postnatal influences (adoptive parent 18-month internalizing symptoms and over-reactive parenting) and toddler behavior problems (CBCL subscales at 27 months). Findings highlight multiple pathways for toddler’s behavioral development, including genetic, pregnancy, and postnatal main effects. Findings suggest distinct types of pregnancy risk may transmit genetic influences for specific behavior problems rather than broadband problems. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Using a questionnaire, the present study examined parents’ beliefs regarding the development of children’s beliefs about science, religion, and the paranormal. The study also investigated parental encouragement of children’s beliefs, as well as parents’ own beliefs within these domains. Results revealed that parents make distinctions between domains in terms of (a) the importance and timing of beliefs in children’s lives, (b) their own beliefs, and (c) what they encourage their children to believe. The results also indicated that parents’ beliefs were often consistent with the beliefs, they encouraged in their children. These findings suggest that parental beliefs provide an important contextual background for children’s development. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The development of a diachronic conception of biology has rarely been explored during childhood, except by Maurice-Naville and Montangero (1992). The aim of the present study was to further explore this issue. In the course of an interview, 163 children aged between 6 and 11 expressed their diachronic conceptions of the growth and death of several living things. Results confirmed previous data and extended them to humans and animals, highlighting some diachronic dimensions previously identified by Maurice-Naville and Montangero regarding trees: past and future, seriation and identity appear before 10 years of age, while time span and rhythm, as well as irreversibility, were only mastered at 11 years. Our results confirm that the mastery of biological properties during childhood is partly contingent upon diachronic thinking. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Infants' responses to typical and scrambled human body shapes were assessed in relation to the realism of the human body stimuli presented. In four separate experiments, infants were familiarized to typical human bodies and then shown a series of scrambled human bodies on the test. Looking behaviour was assessed in response to a range of different human body stimulus types including real people, mannequins, dolls and large human body photographs. Results were compared with previous experiments showing that when presented with small drawings, photographs or dolls, infants demonstrate knowledge about the whole human body shape only after their first birthday (Slaughter & Heron, 2004). In the current study, recognition of the typical human body shape was evident as early as 9 months of age when the stimuli were real humans, and infants' responses to the various types of representations were linked to the realism of the portrayal. This pattern of findings indicates that even simple visual responses are not independent of the nature of the stimuli used to elicit them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous studies show that preschool children view negative emotions as susceptible to intentional control. However, the extent of this understanding and links with child social-emotional adjustment are poorly understood. To examine this, 62 3- and 4-year-olds were presented with puppet scenarios in which characters experienced anger, sadness, and fear. Forty-seven adults were presented with a parallel questionnaire. Participants rated the degree to which six emotion-regulation strategies were effective in decreasing negative emotions. Results showed that even the youngest preschoolers viewed cognitive and behavioral distraction and repairing the situation as relatively effective; compared to adults, however, preschoolers favored relatively "ineffective" strategies such as venting and rumination. Children also showed a functional view of emotion regulation; that effective strategies depend on the emotion being regulated. All participants favored repairing a negative situation to reduce anger and behavioral distraction to reduce sadness and fear. Finally, the more children indicated that venting would reduce negative emotions, the lower their maternal report of social skills. Findings are discussed in terms of functional emotion theory and implications of emotion-regulation understanding for child adjustment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been recent emphasis on the importance of investigating prosocial and antisocial behavior simultaneously owing to doubts about whether examining one automatically gives information about the other. However, there has been little empirical research into this question. The present study (based on a large population sample of preadolescents, N = 2,230) simultaneously examines prosocial and antisocial behavior, explicitly including the possibility that children might show prosocial behavior according to one informant and antisocial behavior according to another. When parents and teachers agreed in their judgments, children were distinctly profiled and differed clearly in effortful control, intelligence, academic performance, and several peer nominations and family characteristics. The correlates were more rater-specific for children that were prosocial according to one informant and antisocial according to the other informant. Teachers and parents used different context-dependent criteria for judging children to be prosocial or antisocial. Academic performance and peer relations were related to the teacher's judgment of prosocial and antisocial behavior. By contrast, children's being problematic at home (and thus causing stress for the parents) was related to the parents' judgment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]