Children Use Different Cues to Guide Noun and Verb Extensions

Learning new words involves decoding both how a word fits the current situation and how it could be used in new situations. Three studies explore how two types of cues— sentence structure and the availability of multiple instances-- affect children’s extensions of nouns and verbs. In each study, 2½-year-olds heard nouns, verbs or no new word while seeing the experimenter use a novel object to perform an action; at test, they were asked to extend the word. In Study 1, children hearing nouns in simple sentences used object shape as the basis for extension even though, during the learning phase, they saw multiple objects in motion; children in the other conditions responded randomly. Study 2 shows that by changing in the type of sentences used in the noun and verb conditions, not only is the shape bias disrupted but children are successful in extending new verbs. In a final study, access to multiple examples was replaced by a direct teaching context, and produced findings similar to those in Study 2. An implication of this result is that seeing multiple examples can be as effective as receiving direct instruction from an adult. Overall, the set of results suggests the mix of cues available during learning influences noun and verb extensions differently. The findings are important for understanding how the ability to extend words emerges in complex contexts

Developmental trajectories of positive and negative affect in children at high and low familial risk for depressive disorder

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/86902/1/j.1469-7610.2010.02331.x.pd

Developmental patterns of adolescent spiritual health in six countries

© 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).The spiritual health of adolescents is a topic of emerging contemporary importance. Limited numbers of international studies provide evidence about developmental patterns of this aspect of health during the adolescent years. Using multidimensional indicators of spiritual health that have been adapted for use within younger adolescent populations, we therefore: (1) describe aspects of the perceptions of the importance of spiritual health of adolescents by developmental stage and within genders; (2) conduct similar analyses across measures related to specific domains of adolescent spiritual health; (3) relate perceptions of spiritual health to self-perceived personal health status. Cross-sectional surveys were administered to adolescent populations in school settings during 2013–2014. Participants (n=45,967) included eligible and consenting students aged 11–15 years in sampled schools from six European and North American countries. Our primary measures of spiritual health consisted of eight questions in four domains (perceived importance of connections to: self, others, nature, and the transcendent). Socio-demographic factors included age, gender, and country of origin. Self-perceived personal health status was assessed using a simple composite measure. Self-rated importance of spiritual health, both overall and within most questions and domains, declined as young people aged. This declining pattern persisted for both genders and in all countries, and was most notable for the domains of “connections with nature” and “connections with the transcendent”. Girls consistently rated their perceptions of the importance of spiritual health higher than boys. Spiritual health and its domains related strongly and consistently with self-perceived personal health status. While limited by the 8-item measure of perceived spiritual health employed, study findings confirm developmental theories proposed from qualitative observation, provide foundational evidence for the planning and targeting of interventions centered on adolescent spiritual health practices, and direction for the study of spiritual health in a general population health survey context.Peer reviewedFinal Published versio

Adherence to 24-Hour Movement Guidelines for the Early Years and associations with social-cognitive development among Australian preschool children

Background: The new Australian 24-Hour Movement Guidelines for the Early Years recommend that, for preschoolers, a healthy 24-h includes: i) ≥180 min of physical activity, including ≥60 min of energetic play, ii) ≤1 h of sedentary screen time, and iii) 10–13 h of good quality sleep. Using an Australian sample, this study reports the proportion of preschool children meeting these guidelines and investigates associations with social-cognitive development. Methods: Data from 248 preschool children (mean age = 4.2 ± 0.6 years, 57% boys) participating in the PATH-ABC study were analyzed. Children completed direct assessments of physical activity (accelerometry) and social cognition (the Test of Emotional Comprehension (TEC) and Theory of Mind (ToM)). Parents reported on children’s screen time and sleep. Children were categorised as meeting/not meeting: i) individual guidelines, ii) combinations of two guidelines, or iii) all three guidelines. Associations were examined using linear regression adjusting for child age, sex, vocabulary, area level socio-economic status and childcare level clustering. Results: High proportions of children met the physical activity (93.1%) and sleep (88.7%) guidelines, whereas fewer met the screen time guideline (17.3%). Overall, 14.9% of children met all three guidelines. Children meeting the sleep guideline performed better on TEC than those who did not (mean difference [MD] = 1.41; 95% confidence interval (CI) = 0.36, 2.47). Children meeting the sleep and physical activity or sleep and screen time guidelines also performed better on TEC (MD = 1.36; 95% CI = 0.31, 2.41) and ToM (MD = 0.25; 95% CI = −0.002, 0.50; p = 0.05), respectively, than those who did not. Meeting all three guidelines was associated with better ToM performance (MD = 0.28; 95% CI = −0.002, 0.48, p = 0.05), while meeting a larger number of guidelines was associated with better TEC (3 or 2 vs. 1/none, p < 0.02) and ToM performance (3 vs. 2, p = 0.03). Conclusions: Strategies to promote adherence to the 24-Hour Movement Behaviour Guidelines for the Early Years among preschool children are warranted. Supporting preschool children to meet all guidelines or more guidelines, particularly the sleep and screen time guidelines, may be beneficial for their social-cognitive development

The Emerging Study of Positive Empathy

Lay intuitions suggest that the ability to share, celebrate, and enjoy others' positive emotions - a phenomenon we term positive empathy - bolsters individual well-being and relationship strength. However, it is unclear from the current literature whether (i) positive empathy is distinct from highly related constructs and (ii) whether positive empathy is associated with salutary social and personal outcomes. Here, we begin by examining basic evidence suggesting that positive empathy is related to, but independent from, constructs such as general positivity and empathy for others' distress. We then review evidence that positive empathy correlates with increased prosocial behavior, social closeness, and well-being. Lastly, we discuss open directions for the study of positive empathy, such as investigating the potential role of positive empathy (or its disruption) in psychiatric disorders

A construct divided: prosocial behavior as helping, sharing, and comforting subtypes

The development and maintenance of prosocial, other-oriented behaviors has been of considerable recent interest. Though it is clear that prosocial behaviors emerge early and play a uniquely important role in the social lives of humans, there is less consensus regarding the mechanisms that underlie and maintain these fundamental acts. The goal of this paper is to clarify inconsistencies in our understanding of the early emergence and development of prosocial behavior by proposing a taxonomy of prosocial behavior anchored in the social-cognitive constraints that underlie the ability to act on behalf of others. I will argue that within the general domain of prosocial behavior, other-oriented actions can be categorized into three distinct types (helping, sharing, and comforting) that reflect responses to three distinct negative states (instrumental need, unmet material desire, and emotional distress). In support of this proposal, I will demonstrate that the three varieties of prosocial behavior show unique ages of onset, uncorrelated patterns of production, and distinct patterns of individual differences. Importantly, by differentiating specific varieties of prosocial behavior within the general category, we can begin to explain inconsistencies in the past literature and provide a framework for directing future research into the ontogenetic origins of these essential social behaviors

The Image Of The Hired Girl In Literature The Great Plains, 1860 To World War I

On farms and in small towns across the Great Plains during the nineteenth century, hired girls were necessary domestic helpers. Spring planting and fall harvest compounded the normally heavy work load of farm women, and even in towns, housekeeping was labor intensive. Help with the daily chores was always welcome. As a result, hired girls were in keen demand and short supply. Despite their crucial role in housekeeping, hired girls have received little systematic attention from scholars. Social historians have recently displayed renewed interest in servants, but their works have focused on domestics in the urban East and have given scant consideration to hired girls in rural and small-town America. Little is known about these women: who they were and why they hired out. Novels and memoirs of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries suggest answers to these questions. If they do not reveal precisely who these women were, they do at least tell us who people at the time thought they were. The purpose of this article is to examine, from a historical perspective, the image of the hired girl held by novelists and writers of memoirs, and to compare this image with what presentday historians have written about servants. Annette Atkins, Julie Roy Jeffrey, Sandra Myres, and Glenda Riley, among others, have exposed the dangers of treating novels about frontier women as historical fact. who then, in the eyes of contemporary writers, were the hired girls? Were they young or old, single or married? Had they been born in America or overseas? Were they black or white? How well educated were they? Why did they hire out? Did people perceive hired girls as fundamentally different from other females? DEMOGRAPHIC CHARACTERISTICS OF HIRED GIRLS Age is one of the most important demographic characteristics to consider. Those females identified specifically as hired girls in both novels and memoirs about the agrarian plains were invariably young, in their mid teens to early twenties. Girls who hired out in their midteens include Faye Lewis, who later wrote about her South Dakota childhood in Nothing to Make a Shadow, and suffragist Jessie Haver Butler. Susette, in Mari Sandoz\u27s biography of her father, Old Jules, was in service at nineteen. The most detailed treatment of hired girls in the works under consideration is found in Willa Cather\u27s My Àntonia. In this classic, Cather lovingly fictionalized the lives of those immigrant pioneers who settled the plains. One of these, the novelist\u27s heroine, was the Bohemian Antonia Shimerda. Antonia worked as a field hand for three years before becoming a hired girl at seventeen. During her five years as a domestic, a number of her farm friends also moved to town seeking employment. Although Cather did not specify the ages of these secondary characters, it is clear from both the narrative and the context that they were also in their mid- to late teens. Cather suggested this in describing the girls physically and socially. First, the language used to portray them conveys the image of nascent sexuality. Lena Lingard, for example, caused a stir when she appeared in church dressed as a young lady. Until then, apparently no one had noticed the swelling lines of her figure . . . hidden under the shapeless rags she wore in the field. Similarly, Cather\u27s narrator Jim Burden described the three Bohemian Marys as a menace to the social order for the same reason. Secondly, the hired girls clearly shared interests transcending their status as immigrants and working women. Cather, who used hired girl to refer to all wage-earning women except teachers, described the preoccupation of the hired girls with their social lives, clothes, and dancing in terms that approximate historian Leslie Tentler\u27s depiction of the female urban workplace as an adolescent counterculture in which social relations assumed paramount importance