Child Psychology

The study of socioeconomic status (SES) and the brain finds itself in a circumstance unusual for Cognitive Neuroscience: large numbers of questions with both practical and scientific importance exist, but they are currently under-researched and ripe for investigation. This review aims to highlight these questions, to outline their potential significance, and to suggest routes by which they might be approached. Although remarkably few neural studies have been carried out so far, there exists a large literature of previous behavioural work. This behavioural research provides an invaluable guide for future neuroimaging work, but also poses an important challenge for it: how can we ensure that the neural data contributes predictive or diagnostic power over and above what can be derived from behaviour alone? We discuss some of the open mechanistic questions which Cognitive Neuroscience may have the power to illuminate, spanning areas including language, numerical cognition, stress, memory, and social influences on learning. These questions have obvious practical and societal significance, but they also bear directly on a set of longstanding questions in basic science: what are the environmental and neural factors which affect the acquisition and retention of declarative and nondeclarative skills? Perhaps the best opportunity for practical and theoretical interests to converge is in the study of interventions. Many interventions aimed at improving the cognitive development of low SES children are currently underway, but almost all are operating without either input from, or study by, the Cognitive Neuroscience community. Given that longitudinal intervention studies are very hard to set up, but can, with proper designs, be ideal tests of causal mechanisms, this area promises exciting opportunities for future research.

At the end of the 19th century most psychologists conceptualized psychology as a natural science. However, a few philosopher- psychologists, including Wilhelm Dilthey, envisioned psychology as a Geisteswissenschaft with understanding as its core method. It is less known that Dilthey also promoted ideas for developmental psychology. This paper addresses the views of Wilhelm Dilthey and his student Eduard Spranger on the human mind and developmental psychology. While Dilthey provided general guidelines for studying mental life, Spranger promoted a holistic characterization of adolescence gained through the method of understanding. It is suggested that a geisteswissenschaftliche psychology may offer relevant, yet, neglected insights for contemporary developmental psychology.

Although much has been written about the utility of applying Sameroff and Chandler's transactional perspective to the study of child psychopathology, relatively few researchers have used such an approach to trace the emergence of child problem behavior from infancy to adolescence. Using a sample of 289 male toddlers from predominantly low-income families, the current study examined associations between various forms of early child disruptive behavior, subsequent trajectories of maternal depressive symptoms over the course of 8 years, and adolescent problem behavior. Results indicated that early child noncompliance was the most robust predictor of more chronic and elevated trajectories of maternal depression, which in turn discriminated teacher and youth reports of adolescent antisocial behavior but not internalizing symptoms. The findings were consistent with transactional perspectives of developmental psychopathology that have emphasized the dynamic interplay between child and parent characteristics.

How and when do children develop an understanding of extraordinary mental capacities? The current study tested 56 preschoolers on false-belief and knowledge-ignorance tasks about the mental states of contrasting agents--some agents were ordinary humans, some had exceptional perceptual capacities, and others possessed extraordinary mental capacities. Results indicated that, in contrast to younger and older peers, children within a specific age range reliably attributed fallible, human-like capacities to ordinary humans and to several special agents (including God) for both tasks. These data lend critical support to an anthropomorphism hypothesis--which holds that children's understanding of extraordinary minds is derived from their everyday intuitive psychology--and reconcile disparities between the findings of other studies on children’s understanding of extraordinary minds.

The Evolutionary Origins and Archaeology of Music: An Investigation into the Prehistory of Human Musical Capacities and Behaviours

This research examines the evidence for the emergence of the capacities underlying musical behaviours, their interrelationship, development and ultimate manifestation in the Palaeolithic. A multidisciplinary approach is taken, and the dissertation falls into four main sections.

Section I reviews and analyses ethnographic evidence regarding the use of music in four hunter-gatherer societies. It highlights a number of fundamental similarities between their musics, suggesting shared heritage or convergent development. In these traditions melody is predominantly vocal; instruments are primarily percussive, made of organic materials, and thus unlikely to leave an archaeological trace.

Section II comprises a comprehensive synthesis of the archaeological evidence for use of musical instruments in the Palaeolithic. The earliest currently known instruments date to c. 36,000 years ago; the evidence suggests that when modern humans arrived in Europe they were already carrying out developed instrumental behaviours. The diversity of evidence occurring after 30,000 years ago suggests that musical performance, or at least appreciation, was a group activity, rather than one involving a select few.

Section III examines the physiological and neurological apparatus involved in the production and processing of musical functions, and their evolution. From Homo ergaster there was co-evolution of various physiological and neurological capacities necessary to carry out vocalizations of increasing tonal range and duration. “Higher” analytical musical and linguistic functions emerged out of shared substrates concerned with vocal emotional expression and comprehension.

Section IV analyses the evolutionary bases for musical capacities and their integration. It shows that music, emotional expression and social behaviours, rhythmic and melodic abilities are fundamentally connected and share a heritage with linguistic prosody and corporeal control. Developed skills in these areas have potential selective benefits.

A synthesis of the findings from these various disciplines and sources of evidence concludes the thesis, proposing that musical capacities have their foundations in inter-specific tonal emotional vocal expression, and rhythmic-motor coordination of corporeal musculature in the execution of such vocalisations. These increased in complexity throughout the Homo lineage, and diverged from linguistic capacities with the development of lexicon and syntax; symbolic associations and diversity occurred with Homo sapiens, who were carrying out sophisticated instrumental musical behaviours upon their arrival in Europe.

Performance on working memory span tasks by children with intellectual disabilities ages 11 to 12 was compared to that of CA- and MA-matched controls. Limited evidence was available to support a ‘‘difference’’ position, whereby the intellectual disabilities group obtained lower scores than both the CA and MA groups. Some evidence was found for the ‘‘developmental’’ position, whereby the intellectual disabilities group performed at the same level as the MA group but more poorly than the CA-matched group. Finally, some evidence supported an unconventional ‘‘difference’’ account; children in the intellectual disabilities group performed better than the MA group, although still not as well as the CA-matched group. Results were interpreted with reference to the role of strategies in working memory performance.

People’s fear and anxiety about doing math—over and above
actual math ability—can be an impediment to their math achievement.
We show that when the math-anxious individuals are
female elementary school teachers, their math anxiety carries negative consequences for the math achievement of their female students.
Early elementary school teachers in the United States are
almost exclusively female (>90%), and we provide evidence that
these female teachers’ anxieties relate to girls’ math achievement
via girls’ beliefs about who is good at math. First- and second grade female teachers completed measures of math anxiety. The
math achievement of the students in these teachers’ classrooms
was also assessed. There was no relation between a teacher’s
math anxiety and her students’ math achievement at the beginning of the school year. By the school year’s end, however, the more anxious teachers were about math, the more likely girls (but not boys) were to endorse the commonly held stereotype that “boys are good at math, and girls are good at reading” and the lower these girls’ math achievement. Indeed, by the end of the school year, girls who endorsed this stereotype had significantly worse math achievement than girls who did not and than boys overall. In early elementary school, where the teachers are almost all female, teachers’ math anxiety carries consequences for girls’math achievement by influencing girls’ beliefs about who is good at math.

BACKGROUND: Serotonin transporter promoter (5-HTTLPR) genotype appears to increase risk for depression in the context of stressful life events. However, the effects of this genotype on measures of stress sensitivity are poorly understood. Therefore, this study examined whether 5-HTTLPR genotype was associated with negative information processing biases in early childhood.

METHOD: Thirty-nine unselected seven-year-old children completed a negative mood induction procedure and a Self-Referent Encoding Task designed to measure positive and negative schematic processing. Children were also genotyped for the 5-HTTLPR gene.

RESULTS: Children who were homozygous for the short allele of the 5-HTTLPR gene showed greater negative schematic processing following a negative mood prime than those with other genotypes. 5-HTTLPR genotype was not significantly associated with positive schematic processing.

LIMITATIONS: The sample size for this study was small. We did not analyze more recently reported variants of the 5-HTTLPR long alleles.

CONCLUSIONS: 5-HTTLPR genotype is associated with negative information processing styles following a negative mood prime in a non-clinical sample of young children. Such cognitive styles are thought to be activated in response to stressful life events, leading to depressive symptoms; thus, cognitive styles may index the "stress-sensitivity" conferred by this genotype.

Empathy and sympathy play crucial roles in much of human social interaction and are necessary components for healthy coexistence. Sympathy is thought to be a proxy for motivating prosocial behavior and providing the affective and motivational base for moral development. The purpose of the present study was to use functional MRI to characterize developmental changes in brain activation in the neural circuits underpinning empathy and sympathy. Fifty-seven individuals, whose age ranged from 7 to 40 years old, were presented with short animated visual stimuli depicting painful and non-painful situations. These situations involved either a person whose pain was accidentally caused or a person whose pain was intentionally inflicted by another individual to elicit empathic (feeling as the other) or sympathetic (feeling concern for the other) emotions, respectively. Results demonstrate monotonic age-related changes in the amygdala, supplementary motor area, and posterior insula when participants were exposed to painful situations that were accidentally caused. When participants observed painful situations intentionally inflicted by another individual, age-related changes were detected in the dorsolateral prefrontal and ventromedial prefrontal cortex, with a gradual shift in that latter region from its medial to its lateral portion. This pattern of activation reflects a change from a visceral emotional response critical for the analysis of the affective significance of stimuli to a more evaluative function. Further, these data provide evidence for partially distinct neural mechanisms subserving empathy and sympathy, and demonstrate the usefulness of a developmental neurobiological approach to the new emerging area of moral neuroscience.

Perceptual narrowing—characterized as broad perception from birth which narrows as a function of experience—has previously been tested with primate faces. In the first six months of life, infants can discriminate individual human and monkey faces. Though the ability to discriminate monkey faces declines by about nine months, infants retain human face discrimination, presumably due to their experience with human faces. The current study demonstrates that 4- to 6-month-old infants are able to discriminate non-primate faces as well. In a visual paired comparison test, 4- to 6-month-old infants (N = 26) looked significantly longer at novel sheep (Ovis aries) faces, compared to a familiar sheep face (p = .017), whereas 9- to 11-month-olds (N = 26) showed no visual preference, and adults (N = 27) showed a familiarity preference (p < .001). Infants’ face recognition systems are broadly tuned at birth—not just for primate faces, but for non-primate faces as well—allowing infants to become specialists in recognizing the types of faces encountered in their first year of life.

In this study, a phenomenological method was used to investigate the impact of long-term psychological child maltreatment by one’s maternal figure.  The objective of the present study was to explicate victims’ perspectives on their psychological maltreatment as a coherent whole.  Five adults (ages 18-25) reporting a history of childhood psychological maltreatment provided descriptions of their maltreatment in written and verbal form.  The descriptions were analyzed in such a way as to elucidate the quality and significance of having been psychologically abused as experienced by these victims.  Themes revolving around feelings of worthlessness, inadequacy, self-dissatisfaction, and disempowerment were found to determine the ways in which low self-esteem, aggression, self-directed anger, and pessimism about one’s future arose within the victims’ perceptions of abuse.

Child psychology textbooks rarely include material on humanism that can be used as a guide for students. Freudian and Eriksonian psychoanalysis, behaviorism and social learning theory, genetic perspectives, the cognitive approaches of Piaget and Vygotsky, and ecological theories all regularly appear in child psychology textbooks. While there are humanistic currents in Eriksonian psychoanalysis, Vygotsky’s theory, and ecological approaches due to their holism (e.g., their emphases on the child’s social context and enculturation), these approaches are not specifically dedicated to a systematic and rigorous humanization of psychology per se. Hence, they are generally not referred to as humanistic theories, nor are they presented in textbooks as belonging to the tradition of humanistic psychology. To be sure, there are works pertaining to child development that allow one to view child development in a more humanistic fashion. I have found these works within two related currents in developmental psychology: humanistic-developmental self-theory and phenomenological child psychology. However, these works have not been brought together into an organized form that would allow them to attract more attention in child psychology on the whole. To this end, this book explores humanistic-developmental self-theory and phenomenological child psychology as options for instructors who wish to expose students of child psychology to humanism at the college or graduate level.

The first chapter discusses the need for the text, its theoretical orientation, and the structure of the book. In the next three chapters, theories of self development are derived from the works of Carl Rogers, Karen Horney, D. W. Winnicott, Heinz Kohut, and Charlotte Bühler. Chapters Five and Six introduce the reader to existing self-development theories created by Richard Knowles and Daniel Stern. Chapters Seven, Eight, and Nine explore major aspects of childhood experience (i.e., perception, affect, time, space, and maternal relations) from a phenomenological perspective. The final chapter provides an overarching theoretical viewpoint that can be used to put developmental issues into perspective. The perspective offered there is holistic and open to dialogue between various schools of thought, such as American humanism, postmodern psychology, existential-phenomenology, psychoanalysis, Gestalt psychology, neo-analytic and psychodynamic theories, Vygotskian theory, and ecological psychology.

When we attend to other people in pain, the neural circuits underpinning the processing of first-hand experience of pain are activated in the observer. This basic somatic sensorimotor resonance plays a critical role in the primitive building block of empathy and moral reasoning that relies on the sharing of others' distress. However, the full-blown capacity of human empathy is more sophisticated than the mere simulation of the target's affective state. Indeed, empathy is about both sharing and understanding the emotional state of others in relation to oneself. In this functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study, 17 typically developing children (range 7-12 yr) were scanned while presented with short animated visual stimuli depicting painful and non-painful situations. These situations involved either a person whose pain was accidentally caused or a person whose pain was intentionally inflicted by another individual. After scanning, children rated how painful these situations appeared. Consistent with previous fMRI studies of pain empathy with adults, the perception of other people in pain in children was associated with increased hemodynamic activity in the neural circuits involved in the processing of first-hand experience of pain, including the insula, somatosensory cortex, anterior midcingulate cortex, periaqueductal gray, and supplementary motor area. Interestingly, when watching another person inflicting pain onto another, regions that are consistently engaged in representing social interaction and moral behavior (the temporo-parietal junction, the paracingulate, orbital medial frontal cortices, amygdala) were additionally recruited, and increased their connectivity with the fronto-parietal attention network. These results are important to set the standard for future studies with children who exhibit social cognitive disorders (e.g., antisocial personality disorder, conduct disorder) and are often deficient in experiencing empathy or guilt.