Aggressive and non-aggressive preschoolers\u27 problem-solving: The role of maternal scaffolding.

Aggressive children suffer from deficits with respect to their ability to self-regulate. One way caregivers foster their children\u27s self-regulatory development is through the teaching of problem-solving skills. This study examined the role of maternal scaffolding in terms of its relationship to children\u27s aggression and social competence. Sixty mother-child dyads (30 aggressive, 30 non-aggressive) engaged in a 10-minute structured task (ERA; Clarke, Musick, Stott, Klehr, & Cohler, 1984). Utilizing the Parental Scaffolding Coding Manual (Neitzel & Stright, 2003), mothers were assessed with respect to 7 scaffolding behaviours encompassing cognitive, emotional, and autonomy support. The results revealed that compared to mothers of aggressive preschoolers, mothers of non-aggressive preschoolers were significantly more effective scaffolders across 6 of the 7 behaviours including: regulation of task difficulty, review, emotional support, rejection, control, and encouragement. Only mothers\u27 use of metacognitive information failed to reach a statistically significant difference. In addition, maternal scaffolding was significantly related to children\u27s cooperation, responsibility, and self-control. The pattern of relationships between maternal scaffolding and children\u27s social competence was different by group. For the non-aggressive pairs, mothers\u27 regulation of task difficulty, review, and control were significantly related to children\u27s cooperation, assertion, responsibility, and self-control. With respect to the aggressive pairs, mothers scaffolding was significantly related to children\u27s responsibility. The results of the study are interpreted in terms of their importance for children\u27s development of self-regulation and treatment models for childhood aggression.Dept. of Psychology. Paper copy at Leddy Library: Theses & Major Papers - Basement, West Bldg. / Call Number: Thesis2005 .C53. Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 44-03, page: 1512. Thesis (M.A.)--University of Windsor (Canada), 2005

I’ll Share With You But Only If… The influence of context, communication, and perspective taking on preschoolers’ social behaviours

A key aspect of children’s development is learning how to navigate the social world. To do so successfully, children must be able to adapt their social behaviours to the diverse social contexts and demands that they encounter (Bierman & Welsh, 2000). The current study explored preschool-aged children’s sensitivity to cooperative and competitive social contexts, as well as their ability to flexibly adapt their sharing behaviour across the two social contexts. Furthermore, the current study examined how preschoolers modify their sharing behaviour based on social cues they receive as per communicative messages from their social partner within both contexts. Children (aged 4-6 years) completed a resource allocation task in which they determined who, between themselves and a (fictional) social partner would receive items that were important to winning a game. Participants also “interacted” with their social partners, as they were provided audio messages that conveyed whether or not their partner was willing to collaborate. The task was a 2X2 repeated measures design in which children’s sharing behaviours were evaluated as a function of the social context (cooperative vs. competitive) and the type (team-oriented vs. self-oriented). Verbal responses to social partners’ messages were also examined. Socio-cognitive skills (i.e., theory of mind and executive functioning), which are thought to facilitate children’s sharing behaviours, were also examined. Children were found to shift their behaviour according to the context (i.e., more items were shared in the cooperative context), and the extent to which they were able to do so was predicted by their theory of mind ability. Theory of mind was also a predictor of children’s sharing behaviours in cooperative contexts. Only the youngest age group (4-year-olds), were found to shift their behaviour according to message, although all participants’ verbal responses conveyed a sensitivity to message-type. Finally, executive functioning played a role in children’s sharing behaviours in response to collaborative messages from their social partners

The prosocial roots of children's developing morality

According to many scholars, prosociality, in particular altruism and empathic concern, is considered an important motivational factor both in adulthood and in the development of morality (Batson & Shaw, 1991; Jensen et al., 2014; Nichols, 2004; Roughley & Bayertz, 2019). So far, a large number of studies have addressed the development of children’s first-party prosociality and their third-party understanding of moral norms separately. In particular, there is much evidence that during the second year of life, young children develop empathic concern and sympathy for others in need in prosocial situations (Hepach, 2017; Hepach et al., 2012). Moreover, recent findings suggest that 18-month-old infants already show some rudimentary forms of norm understanding in at least dyadic conventional situations. This rudimentary norm understanding is interpreted as second-personal normative expectations (Schmidt et al., 2019). Finally, 3-year-old children not only have descriptive expectations about morality, but also normative ones as suggested by their enforcement of moral norms as unaffected bystanders (Rakoczy et al., 2016; Rossano et al., 2011; Vaish et al., 2011). However, the interrelation between prosociality and morality, in particular the prosocial motivational source of the early sense of morality remains unclear. This thesis aimed to investigate the developmental origins of morality in young children. In particular, it examines the relation between the two main aspects of uniquely human cooperation – prosociality and morality – from a developmental perspective. These two aspects are of particular importance, not only because they each play a key role in maintaining the unique human capacity for large-scale cooperation (Tomasello, 2016, 2018) but also because of their close relation to each other (Batson, 2010; Batson & Shaw, 1991; Nichols, 2004). The present thesis therefore focused on three guiding questions that are essential for the ontogeny of morality and its relation to young children’s prosocial (altruistic) motivation to understand, adhere to, and enforce moral norms: (1) What are the developmental origins of morality? (2) What is the underlying prosocial motivation for children's normative appreciation of morality? (3) What is the scope of morality? Study 1 investigated the developmental origins of morality in 18-month-old infants. A novel eye-tracking paradigm (anticipatory looking, pupil dilation) was used to examine whether infants differentiate between prototypical moral (harmful) and conventional (harmless) violations. In a between-subjects-design, children watched the same video clip whose audio stream differed according to condition. In the first two (conventional) conditions, an instructor told an observer to destroy a picture with a particular tool chosen from two available tools (tool A: conventional violation condition; tool B: no violation condition). In the moral violation condition, the instructor forbade the observer to destroy the picture at all. In all three conditions, the observer then grasped tool B and destroyed the picture, which led to three different (violation) situations. Infants differentiated between two types of conventional norm situations in their anticipatory looking. Moreover, they showed a larger relative increase in pupil dilation in response to a moral violation than to a conventional violation. These findings suggest that 18-month-old infants have third-party descriptive expectations about the distinction between conventional and moral violation situations. Moreover, they provide the first evidence that empathic concern may be a decisive capacity for the distinction between these two violation situations. Study set 2 looked at the underlying prosocial motivation for the appreciation of morality as a normative notion in 3-year-old children. In three experiments, children were given a third-party fairness task (which varied across experiments) and two different prosocial tasks. To investigate whether the children have a proper norm understanding of fairness by looking not only at norm adherence, but also at norm enforcement, a spontaneous protest paradigm was used. In Experiment 1, children protested and corrected unequal (but not equal) allocations, suggesting a normative understanding of third-party fairness. Experiment 2 assessed whether children’s normative expectations about fairness have a moral (authority-independent) dimension. To do so, children observed a distributor who followed (unequal condition) or violated (equal condition) an authority’s command to allocate resources unequally. Again, despite the authority’s dictate to act unequally, children protested more against unequal versus equal allocations. In Experiment 3, results show that children enforced fairness norms by altruistic punishment in the sense of restorative justice. While in Experiment 1 and 2 I found a positive relation of protest behavior and emotional sharing (empathic concern), in Experiment 3 children’s altruistic punishment was associated with their own costly sharing behavior (altruism). Finally, in Study 3, I explored the scope of morality (looking at equal treatment) in 5-to 6-year-old children in a typical intergroup context. Here, I investigated whether decategorization – a candidate mechanism to overcome in-group bias by emphasizing the individual person – would lead preschoolers to treat in-group and out-group members equally when sharing resources in a dictator game. I found that preschoolers shared more resources with an in-group than with an out-group recipient when social category membership was emphasized. When individuating information was emphasized (decategorization), however, children shared the same with in-group and out-group individuals. Taken together, the empirical studies of this dissertation provide a novel overview of the prosocial roots of children's developing morality. In particular, the present findings suggest that (1) the ability to feel sympathy may be critical for the development of the moral-conventional distinction and that 18-month-old infants, at minimum, have third-party descriptive expectations about that distinction. (2) The ontogeny of fairness norms can be characterized as moral in that it is associated with 3-year-old children’s developing concern for the welfare of others in different contexts. (3) The presentation of out-group members as individuals may be a powerful tool to reduce in-group bias and to foster equal treatment (an important moral category) of in-group and out-group members in 5- to 6-year-old preschool children

The Effects of a Peer-Mediated Social Skills Intervention on the Social Communication Behavior of Children with Autism at Recess

Children with ASD face enormous challenges in the area of social functioning. Research has shown that impairments in social functioning distinguish this population from both typically developing children and children with disabilities. Fortunately, multiple techniques and intervention packages have been demonstrated to effectively increase appropriate social communication between children with ASD and their peers at school. Another challenge that adults working with children with ASD face is the problem of generalization. Social skills taught during structured social skill groups, for example, may not generalize to natural settings. This study incorporated several social skills-teaching procedures from the literature (direct instruction, priming, prompting, peer-mediation, contingent reinforcement, and token economies) to target social skills for four children with ASD (ages 6-8) directly in the recess setting. Elements of Peer Networks and Pivotal Response Training (two types of social skills intervention packages in the literature) were included. Results show significant increases in social communication between focus children and their peers, as well as generalization of skills to non-intervention recesses

A comparison of single and combined social interaction interventions to increase the social interaction of preschool children in inclusive settings

Many young children with disabilities are being educated in inclusive preschool settings. Social competence for these children is often less than that of their peers and the typical children in the inclusive setting usually are not aware of appropriate methods for interacting with children with disabilities. Research concerning effective methods to increase the social interactions between children with and without disabilities is needed to ensure successful educational experiences for children with and without disabilities in these settings; This study investigated the difference between the use of a single social interaction strategy and the use of a combined social interaction strategy for preschool children with and without disabilities in an inclusive setting. The study compared triads of children with and without disabilities who participated in either a single intervention condition or a combined intervention condition. Play sessions were videotaped for the purpose of analyzing the social interaction behaviors of the children. Pre- and post-measures of the children\u27s social skills and observation of social interactions during the play sessions in the study were analyzed using statistical tests. The frequencies of the social interactions of the children with and without disabilities in the two groups were compared and the social interaction behaviors of the children with disabilities in the two groups were compared; In this study the teachers perceived that the children with and without disabilities improved in the use of four social skills (e.g., joining in, waiting your turn, sharing, asking someone to play) across the phases, although there was no significant difference between the intervention groups. The children with and without disabilities demonstrated an increase in the frequency of social interaction behaviors, although there was no significant difference between the intervention groups. The children with disabilities demonstrated an increase in effective social behaviors and a decrease in ineffective social behaviors across phases of the study, although there was no significant difference between the intervention groups. All of the children in the study exhibited few negative social behaviors during the play sessions of the study

Using gender research in development: food security in practice

Gender, Development, Research, food security, Household surveys, Food policy, Intrahousehold issues, Decision-making, Research projects, Practitioners, Project management, Women in development, Food supply, Economic development projects,

Income sources of malnourished people in rural areas: Microlevel information and policy implications

"This research is stimulated by the preliminary insight that rural households, even if they are poor and/or located in so-called subsistence-oriented regions, are dependent on a variety of farm, nonfarm, and nonagricultural income sources. The scale and nature of these income sources and their relationship to the major economic sectors (agriculture, rural manufacturing, and services), through backward and forward linkages, need to be better understood for priority setting in development policy. The objectives of this study are threefold: 1) to identify employment and income sources of rural households of different socioeconomic characteristics in regions and countries at different stages of agricultural transformation and development; 2) to trace income and employment strategies (as revealed by these) of rural households, and, thus, to broaden the information base for policy priorities for integration of the poor into a sustainable growth and development process. 3) to look into distributions below and above the poverty line in order to identify relevant differences in demographic, income, and employment characteristics of poor and nonpoor rural households and, thereby, assess the scope for "targeting" income sources of the poor as a poverty alleviation strategy. Poverty is essentially, but not always, a matter of low incomes, where the cost of acquiring a certain commodity bundle determines the income- or expenditure-based poverty line. An income-based indicator is an indirect means of measuring poverty. In this study, poverty is measured directly through consumption, given certain commodity characteristics and behaviors, rather than in directly through incomes. A central and fundamental characteristic of absolute poverty is insufficient food consumption for an active and healthy life. The poverty line (cutoff point) is defined here by calorie consumption being 80 percent of the recommended consumption for an active and healthy life." from authors' abstractRural poor Developing countries., Income Developing countries., Rural poor Developing countries Nutrition., Malnutrition Developing countries.,