Agent familiarity and emotional context influence the everyday empathic responding of young children with autism

Whereas research addressing empathy in ASD tends to employ pencil-and-paper and lab-based behavioural methods, the current study is novel in eliciting parent-report data regarding everyday empathy, sampling various emotional situations regularly encountered by children. Parents of typically-developing children and children diagnosed with ASD and DS completed the newly-developed Day-to-Day Child Empathy Questionnaire. Analysis of descriptions of their children’s responses to the various empathy-inducing situations supports the notion of an empathy deficit in ASD, confirming previous laboratory-based findings. However, important moderation effects were also demonstrated, for both control and clinical groups. In particular, parents reported children in all groups to be more likely to respond empathically to a familiar agent. The nature of children’s responses also according to the specific emotional context

Spankers and Nonspankers: Where They Get Information on Spanking

Because spanking is common, puts children at risk for harmful side effects, and is ineffective as a positive behavior management tool, it is important to identify the kind of advice families receive about the appropriateness of spanking. Using the health belief model, I examined spankers and nonspankers on the spanking messages they received from eight sources of discipline information and how important they perceived these messages to be. Data from telephone interviews with 998 mothers with children aged 2 to 14 years showed that 33% of mothers rated advice from workshops, pediatricians, newspapers and magazines, and books as ‘‘very important.’’ Less than 15% rated parents and relatives and friends as such. Spankers perceived sources as recommending spanking, whereas nonspankers perceived sources as opposing spanking. Mothers were more likely to spank when they perceived more intense messages to spank, less intense messages opposing spanking, had younger children, and were of lower socioeconomic status

Why are Some Engaged and Not Others? Explaining Environmental Engagement among Small Firms in Tourism

This paper examines the reasons for different levels of environmental engagement among small firms in tourism. Drawing on theories of motivation, notably Social Cognitive Theory, Motivation Systems Theory and Goal Orientation Theory, as well as the literature on environmental sensitivity, it proposes a novel conceptual framework that is subsequently used to inform an empirical study. The findings of the research suggest that varying levels of environmental engagement may be explained by differences in worldviews, self-efficacy beliefs, context beliefs and goal orientation. The paper concludes by considering the policy implications of the results. © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd

Parent-Child Value Similarity in Families with Young Children: The Predictive Power of Prosocial Educational Goals

Value transmission from one generation to the next is a key issue in every society, but it is not clear which parents are the most successful in transmitting their values to their children. We propose parents’ prosocial educational goals as key predictors of parent-child value similarity and accordingly hypothesized that the more parents wanted their children to endorse values of self-transcendence (helping, supporting, and caring for others) and the less parents wanted their children to endorse the opposing values of self-enhancement (striving for power and achievement), the higher would be parent-child overall value similarity. Findings from two studies of families – Study 1: 261 Swiss families, children aged 7-9 years; Study 2: 157 German families, children aged 6-11 years – confirmed this hypothesis. The effect was even stronger after controlling for values that prevail in the Swiss and German society, respectively. We integrate evidence from this study of values in families with young children with existing findings from studies with adolescent and adult children, and we discuss potential pathways from parents’ educational goals to parent-child value similarity

Introduction to the Special Section Value Development from Middle Childhood to Early Adulthood: New Insights from Longitudinal and Genetically Informed Research

Research into values at an early age has only started recently, although it has expanded quickly and dynamically in the past years. The purpose of this article is twofold: First, it provides an introduction to a special section that aims to help fill the gap in value development research. The special section brings together four new longitudinal and genetically informed studies of value development from the beginning of middle childhood through early adulthood. Second, this article reviews recent research from this special section and beyond, aiming to provide new directions to the field. With new methods for assessing children's values and an increased awareness of the role of values in children's and adolescents' development, the field now seems ripe for an in-depth investigation. Our review of empirical evidence shows that, as is the case with adults, children's values are organized based on compatibilities and conflicts in their underlying motivations. Values show some consistency across situations, as well as stability across time. This longitudinal stability tends to increase with age, although mean changes are also observed. These patterns of change seem to be compatible with Schwartz's (1992) theory of values (e.g., if the importance of openness to change values increases, the importance of conservation values decreases). The contributions of culture, family, peers, significant life events, and individual characteristics to values are discussed, as well as the development of values as guides for behavior

Gender and Children's Housework Time in China: Examining Behavior Modeling in Context

Differentiated gender roles in adulthood are rooted in one's gender role socialization. In order to understand the persistence of gender inequalities in the domestic sphere, we need to examine the gendered patterns of children's housework time. Although researchers have identified behavior modeling as a major mechanism of gender role reproduction and characterized gender socialization as a contextually embedded process, few have investigated contextual variation in behavior modeling, particularly in non-Western developing countries. Analyzing data from the China Family Panel Studies 2010, the author examined the differences in behavior modeling between boys and girls age 10-15 from 2-parent families (N = 1,903) in rural and urban China. The results revealed distinctive gendered interplays in the way parental housework and employment behavior helps shape children's housework time. This analysis is a crucial illustration of how the distinctive sociocultural contexts of rural and urban China moderate the effects of housework-behavior modeling on intergenerational gender role socialization

The role of parental achievement goals in predicting autonomy-supportive and controlling parenting

Although autonomy-supportive and controlling parenting are linked to numerous positive and negative child outcomes respectively, fewer studies have focused on their determinants. Drawing on achievement goal theory and self-determination theory, we propose that parental achievement goals (i.e., achievement goals that parents have for their children) can be mastery, performance-approach or performance-avoidance oriented and that types of goals predict mothers' tendency to adopt autonomy-supportive and controlling behaviors. A total of 67 mothers (aged 30-53 years) reported their goals for their adolescent (aged 13-16 years; 19.4 % girls), while their adolescent evaluated their mothers' behaviors. Hierarchical regression analyses showed that parental performance-approach goals predict more controlling parenting and prevent acknowledgement of feelings, one autonomy-supportive behavior. In addition, mothers who have mastery goals and who endorse performance-avoidance goals are less likely to use guilt-inducing criticisms. These findings were observed while controlling for the effect of maternal anxiety

Adapting an attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder parent training intervention to different cultural contexts: the experience of implementing the New Forest Parenting Programme in China, Denmark, Hong Kong, Japan and the United Kingdom

Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is a highly prevalent disorder affecting around 4% of preschool and school-aged children worldwide (Egger & Arnold, 2006; Polanczyk et al 2007). The presence of ADHD in preschool age children is associated with a clear risk of later educational difficulties (Washbrook et al. 2013) and ADHD leads to family borne costs (e.g. time off work, cost of damage in the home) as well as increased health and education costs (Chorozoglou et al, 2015). The challenges of bringing up a child with ADHD are compounded when parents lack social and educational resources to cope with and manage that child’s difficult and challenging behaviour (Larsson et al, 2014). Parents who have ADHD themselves (Sonuga-Barke et al, 2002) or mental illness will find parenting a child with ADHD more difficult (Chronis et al, 2007). One of main targets of the New Forest Parenting programme (NFPP) is working with the parent to improve self-regulation in their child. Thus, it was important to discuss with the leaders in each country in which we were going to train, what the influences were behind the development of self–regulation in the children in their culture

Social Integration and the Mental Health of Black Adolescents

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/106936/1/cdev12182.pd