It's possible to be patronised by a helpful three-year-old

Although small children love to help, you might think the support they can offer is pretty basic - you ask them to do something and they do it. In fact, a new research paper reveals a remarkable level of sophistication in the helping behaviour of three-year-olds. They take your ultimate goal into a account, and if they think they know better than you how to reach that goal, they'll help you in their own way - a skill that the researchers call "paternalistic helping".

Nineteen three-year-olds took part in an initial study in which pairs of objects were within reach, one item functional (e.g. a cup), the other broken (e.g. a cup with a hole in the bottom). Whenever an experimenter pointed to and asked for the dysfunctional object in a pair (e.g. "Could you pass me that cup so that I can pour some water?"), the key test was whether the child would ignore the specific request and instead pass the functional equivalent.

Alia Martin and Kristina Olson at Yale university found that the children passed a requested object on 97.4 per cent of trials when the experimenter asked for the functional object in a pair. In the critical test, this dropped to 31.6 per cent when the experimenter requested a dysfunctional object. Stated differently, nearly 70 per cent of the time that an experimenter specifically requested a dud tool, the little children ignored what was asked for and instead provided a working alternative (and they often provided a spontaneous explanation for their actions).

What if kids just prefer working objects and are more likely to hand those over, regardless of the circumstances? To check this, a second study with more three-year-olds involved the experimenter requesting working or dud objects in order to place them in a rubbish bin (rather than for a specific purpose). In this case, the kids tended to pass along whatever the researchers asked for, broken or not.

A final study provided an even more impressive demonstration of three-year-olds' helping behaviour. This time, the experimenter sometimes asked for dud objects for unconventional uses - e.g. a cup to cut a circle in play dough (in which case the hole in its bottom doesn't matter). As before, the children usually ignored requests for dud objects for conventional uses, giving a working alternative instead. But if a requested dysfunctional item was perfectly useful for an unconventional task, they happily passed it over. The children seemed to be able to think in  sophisticated fashion about the adult's ultimate goal and whether or not the object they wanted could be used in the service of that goal.

"Our results demonstrate that within the first few years of life children already have a remarkably advanced understanding of helping," Martin and Olson concluded. "One that distinguishes between immediate and end goals - and can select an appropriately helpful action even when it requires overriding an explicit request."

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Martin, A., and Olson, K. (2013). When Kids Know Better: Paternalistic Helping in 3-Year-Old Children. Developmental Psychology DOI: 10.1037/a0031715

--Further reading--
How to increase altruism in toddlers

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

Lying is common at age two, becomes the norm by three

They're too young to need to fib about lipstick on their collar or even their unfinished homework but a new study finds the majority of three-year-olds are already practising liars. Deception in very young children has been documented before, but this is the first time it has been systematically tested in a laboratory.

Angela Evans and Kang Lee tested 65 two- and three-year-olds (28 girls) individually in a quiet room, part of which involved them being told not to peek at a toy. Despite this instruction, 80 per cent of the kids sneaked a peek. And when they were asked afterwards if they'd looked, around a quarter of two-year-olds lied about it, rising to 90 per cent of those aged over 43 months.

Although lying was rife among these young children, most of them weren't very adept at it. When asked what the toy was, 76 per cent of the liars blurted out the answer, exposing their dishonesty.

The researchers also put the toddlers through a series of mental tests to see if any particular skills went hand-in-hand with lying. One of these was a kiddies' version of the Stroop test that involved pointing to small pictures of fruits, while ignoring bigger versions. Like the adult Stroop, success at this task is thought to require a mix of inhibitory control and working memory. Evans and Lee found that the children who excelled at the kiddies' Stroop were more likely to lie, which supports the idea that the development of lying depends on a mix of inhibitory ability and remembering the desired answer.

An important implication of this last point, the researchers said, is that the greater honesty of the younger children isn't a mark of their moral purity, but simply a side-effect of their "fragile executive functioning skills."

A weakness of the study is that it doesn't look at different types of lies or tell us anything about the children's motivation for lying.

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Evans, A., and Lee, K. (2013). Emergence of Lying in Very Young Children. Developmental Psychology DOI: 10.1037/a0031409

--Further reading--
Adults are unable to tell when children are lying.

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

Live animals versus fancy toys - which do toddlers prefer?

Ignoring WC Fields' advice to "never work with children or animals", a team of researchers in the USA has done both at once in a research paper that compares children's interest in live animals against their interest in toys.

Older children have an obvious affinity for animals, betrayed through their love of pets and zoos. That very small children share this affection for creatures is  usually taken as a given, but in fact it's an issue that's been subject to surprisingly little systematic research, particularly when it comes to real live animals as opposed to mere pictures.

Vanessa LoBue and her colleagues began by filming 38 toddlers (average age 24 months) as they played alone freely in a room that contained 14 "highly attractive" toys on the floor, including fire trucks and a ball, and two caged live animals: a tan Sentinel hamster and a blue and red Beta fish, each located on a shelf on opposite sides of the room. Each child's parent sat quietly in the corner during the 10-minute play session. The main finding here was that the toddlers initiated significantly more interactions with the two animals versus the two most popular toys - the doll and aeroplane. They also gestured more frequently at the animals, mentioned them more often and asked more questions about them.

A second study was similar, but this time there were four toys and four animals: the fish and hamster, plus a black Tarantula and an orange and black California Mountain King snake. Also, after the first five minutes play time, each child's parent was allowed to play with them. Thirty-eight new toddlers took part (average age 28 months) in this study and again they initiated more interactions with the animals than the toys, as did the parents. Both children and parents displayed slight caution in their interactions with the spider and snake, consistent with past research suggesting infants have an evolved fear for these creatures.

An obvious criticism of the research is that the animals were animated while the toys were inanimate. LoBue and her team acknowledged this, but they pointed out the cages were small and the animals were chosen for their relative inactivity. For instance, the hamster mostly sleeps in the day-time, which was when the testing occurred. The spider barely moved.

In a final study, the researchers sacrificed some of the realism of the set-up in favour of greater experimental control. This time toddlers were presented with a series of pairs of stimuli - a real caged animal alongside a toy version of that same animal, which was attached to the shelf. The animals used this time included the hamster and fish from before, plus a green gecko. Consistent with the findings from free play, the children spent more time interacting with the live animals. And when their parents joined them, they spent even more time interacting with the real animals, which suggests parents facilitate their children's preference for living creatures.

"Future research would be important in discovering why both children and adults show more interest in live animals than other objects," the researchers concluded, "and whether there are any potential benefits that can be gained by children's avid interest."

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LoBue, V., Bloom Pickard, M., Sherman, K., Axford, C., and DeLoache, J. (2013). Young children's interest in live animals. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 31 (1), 57-69 DOI: 10.1111/j.2044-835X.2012.02078.x

--Further reading--
Animal-sensitive cells discovered in the human brain
Three-year-olds show a bias for spotting snakes in a striking posture

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

The children of securely attached mothers think that God is close

Children's sense of God's closeness is apparently related, not to their mother's religiosity, but to their mother's attachment style - that is, whether the mother is calm and confident in her relationships or anxious and uncertain. Specifically, Rosalinda Cassibba and her colleagues have shown that the children of securely attached mothers (religious or not) tend to think that God is closer, as compared with the children of insecurely attached mothers.

The new finding builds on claims made last century by the British psychoanalyst John Bowlby that attachment style is transmitted from generation to generation (via non-genetic means). The new result suggests that a mother's attachment style affects the kind of attachment her child forms not just with her, but with other potential caring figures, even non-corporeal ones.

Seventy-one Italian mothers were classified as having a secure or insecure attachment style based on a short interview. They also answered questions about their religious faith and attachment to God. Meanwhile, their children (average age 7; 29 boys, 42 girls) were presented with a felt board depicting a child and were told six stories involving that child: some were neutral (e.g. he sits at a table and reads), others were more distressing (e.g. his dog died). For each story, the children were asked to place a felt character to show where God was located. The children were able to choose from 10 possible felt figures to represent God - most chose a man or a heart.

The children of securely attached mothers tended to place God nearer to the child in both the neutral and distressing stories. By contrast, the children's placement of God was unrelated to their mother's religiosity. Cassibba and her colleagues aren't certain of the mechanism underlying the relationship between mothers' attachment and children's sense of God's closeness, but they think it probably has to do with the mothers' care-giving style, or possibly a personality style shared with the parent.

The study has a number of short-comings including the fact that the children were locating God's closeness to a fictional child, not to themselves. Also, we don't know how specific this is - would they, for instance, have located a child's teddy bear as nearer? Notwithstanding these issues, the researchers said their finding "is important both for attachment research in developmental psychology and the psychology of religion."

Somewhat strangely for an article published in a psychology journal, Cassibba and her colleagues ended with the following advice for the pious: "A caregiver who desires his or her children to come to view God as a close relational partner may do well in placing a high priority on the children's own needs for support and closeness. The caregiver's implicit teachings about relationships is likely to be far more important than his or her explicit preaching about God."

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Cassibba R, Granqvist P, and Costantini A (2013). Mothers' attachment security predicts their children's sense of God's closeness. Attachment and human development, 15 (1), 51-64 PMID: 23216392

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

When parents lie to their children

We teach our kids that it is wrong to lie, even though most of us do it everyday. In fact, it is often our children who we are lying to. A new study, involving participants in the USA and China, is one of the first to investigate parental lies, finding that the majority of parents tell their children lies as a way to control their behaviour.

Gail Heyman and her colleagues presented 114 parents in the USA and 85 in China with 16 so-called "instrumental lies" in four categories - lies intended to influence the kids' eating habits (e.g. "you need to finish all your food or you will get pimples all over your face"); lies to get the children to leave or stay put (e.g. "If you don't come with me now, I will leave you here by yourself); lies to control misbehaviour (e.g. "If you don't behave I will call the police"); and finally, lies to do with shopping and money (e.g. "I did not bring any money with me today. We can come back another day.").

Eighty-four per cent of US parents and 98 per cent of Chinese parents admitted telling at least one of the 16 lies to their children, and a majority of parents in both countries admitted to telling lies from three of the four categories. The exception was the misbehaviour category - just under half the US parents said they told lies to make their children behaviour better, compared with 80 per cent of Chinese parents.

The lie that the greatest proportion of parents said they told was threatening to leave a child behind if he/she refused to follow the parent. Rates of lying by parents were higher in China than in the US, especially in relation to misbehaviour and eating. The Chinese parents also viewed instrumental lying by parents with more approval than the US parents did; at the same time, they (the Chinese) viewed lying by children with more disapproval. "This cross-cultural difference may reflect greater concern with social cohesiveness and a greater emphasis on respect and obedience," the researchers said.

Asked why they told instrumental lies to their children, parents across both countries talked in terms of a cost-benefit trade-off and the stress of getting children to comply. Other times it was felt children would struggle to understand the truth, such as the complexities of the family budget.

As well as looking at instrumental lies, the study also asked parents about untruths they told their children regarding fantasy characters like the tooth-fairy, or to make their children feel better, for example praising a poor piano performance. Here there were no cultural differences in rates of lie-telling, although the Chinese parents showed less approval toward lying about the existence of fictional characters.

The study has limitations, as acknowledged by the researchers. The two samples differed in other ways besides their culture - the US parents being more highly educated, for example. And of course there was a reliance on self-report rather than an observation or record of actual lies told. Despite these issues, Heyman said their study "helps fill a void in an understudied area that may have strong implications for children's social and moral development."

What do you think about parents lying to their children? Do you lie to yours? Do you remember being lied to as a child?

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Heyman, G., Hsu, A., Fu, G., and Lee, K. (2012). Instrumental lying by parents in the US and China. International Journal of Psychology, 1-9 DOI: 10.1080/00207594.2012.746463

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

Why do toddlers bother learning to walk?

You're a cheeky 10-month-old, an expert crawler able to move with impressive speed on your hands and knees. The world is your oyster, so why do you bother staggering to your feet to become a doddering, novice walker?

Before now, psychologists looking for an answer to this question have been handicapped by the lack of observational data on how infants crawl and walk in a natural environment. When it comes to language development, there's a long tradition of recording the words that infants are exposed to in real life, and the utterances they produce. But strangely, all the research on walking has been based on lab studies, getting toddlers to crawl or walk in a straight(-ish) path across a mat.

Now Karen Adolph and her colleagues at New York University have videoed 151 infants (aged 11 to 19 months) mucking about in a play room for an hour with their mum or other care-giver. The videos were coded to compare the movement patterns and fall rates of crawlers and walkers. The infants typically got mobile during brief bursts of activity - amounting to 32.3 per cent of the total time they were observed.

The data provide dramatic insight into the learning process involved in walking. In an hour, the average toddler took 2,368 steps (either walking or crawling), travelled 701 meters, and fell 17 times. Extrapolating to 6 hours (half a toddler's typical waking day), this would translate to 14,000 steps a day,  travelling the distance of 46 football fields, with 100 falls.

Comparing expert crawlers with novice walkers, the researchers made a particularly surprising discovery. After controlling for the fact the novice walkers spent more overall time being mobile than crawlers, the data showed that they didn't in fact fall with any more frequency than the crawlers. This helps explain the mystery of why expert crawlers would give up a proven transport technique. "Part of the answer to 'why walk?'," the researchers said, "is 'why not?'."

Another useful outcome from the current research was that the researchers were able to compare the observational walking data from the play room with the infants' performance on the classic standardised measure of walking (in a straight-line across a gait mat). The two correlated, providing for the first time evidence of the validity of the standard walking test.

"This corpus of natural locomotion indicates that infants accumulate massive amounts of ... practice," the researchers concluded. "They may be motivated to walk in the first place because walking takes them farther faster than crawling without increasing the risk of falling."

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Adolph, K., Cole, W., Komati, M., Garciaguirre, J., Badaly, D., Lingeman, J., Chan, G., and Sotsky, R. (2012). How Do You Learn to Walk? Thousands of Steps and Dozens of Falls per Day. Psychological Science, 23 (11), 1387-1394 DOI: 10.1177/0956797612446346

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

How does drawing improve children's mood?

Watch a child draw and they can seem so absorbed, their brow furrowed in blissful concentration. It seems an ideal way for them to cope with negative emotion. But what's the best approach - should they draw about what's upsetting them ("venting"), copy illustrations by someone else, or create their own unrelated picture?

Jennifer Drake and Ellen Winner first compared the effects of children venting versus creating their own picture. They recruited 83 kids age 6 to 12 at a museum. They nudged them into a bad mood by having them spend a minute thinking about a time they'd been disappointed. Half the kids then spent 5 minutes drawing about that disappointing occasion; the others drew a house. Using a scale of smiley faces for the kids to indicate their mood, the researchers found that the mood of children who drew a house recovered more than the children who drew about the disappointing experience.

A second study was similar but this time 123 children were split into three groups. After recalling a disappointing experience, some of them drew that experience, others drew a house, and a final group copied pictures of household items. Mood recovery in the "venting" group and the copying group was equivalent, and failed to match the recovery enjoyed by the kids who created their own drawing of a house. In this study, but not the first, the mood benefits of drawing were greater for the younger children, perhaps because they were more absorbed in the task.

Kids found the house task more enjoyable than venting in the first study, but in the second study there was no difference in enjoyment across conditions. Drake and Winner speculated that drawing a house was more beneficial than venting or copying because it was more distracting.

The researchers concluded: "Improved understanding of the mechanisms by which drawing helps children regulate their emotions could have implications for therapeutic interventions for children with poor emotion-regulation skills and for those with depression."

Unfortunately the first of these studies suffered from a serious methodological weakness. The researchers ought to have included a no-draw control condition. It's possible that the children's mood would have bounced back without the benefits of drawing. If so, the results actually show the "venting" task having an adverse effect, rather than the house-drawing having a positive benefit.

The second study rectified this issue somewhat by having a copying task, but still we don't know how the children's mood would have repaired if they'd just been left to their own devices. Another issue, acknowledged by the researchers, is that we don't know if the apparent house-drawing benefits came from the creative aspect of that task or from the subject matter. Perhaps houses have positive connotations for most children and their mood was repaired by house drawing for that reason.
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Drake, J., and Winner, E. (2012). How children use drawing to regulate their emotions Cognition and Emotion, 1-9 DOI: 10.1080/02699931.2012.720567


--Further reading-- Can you tell which of these pictures is the work of a child?
Esther Burkitt on whether those pictures stuck to the fridge are really a window to a child’s mind.


Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

The jokes that toddlers make

Few sounds can be as heart-warming as a chuckling toddler. Often they're laughing at a joke you or someone else has performed, but what about their own attempts at humour? To find out, Elena Hoicka and Nameera Akhtar filmed 47 parent-child pairs (just five involved dads) playing for ten minutes with various toys. The kids were English-speaking and aged between 2 and 3 years.

Coding of the videos revealed 7 forms of humour performed by the toddlers: using objects in an unconventional way (e.g. brushing a pot); deliberately mislabelling things (e.g. holding a cat but saying "here's a fish"); making deliberate category errors (e.g. making a pig go "moo"); breaching taboos (e.g. spitting and saying "that's disgusting"); performing funny bodily actions (e.g. falling back and putting their legs in the air); tickling and chasing; and playing peekaboo.

There were signs of maturing humour abilities. The three-year-olds more often made conceptual humour than the two-year-olds, and they showed a trend towards more label-based humour. Two-year-olds depended predominantly on object-based humour. Moreover, whereas the two-year-olds were just as likely to copy or riff off their parent's jokes as to make their own original attempts at humour, the three-year-olds most often came up with original jokes.

There was also good evidence that the toddlers were being deliberately humorous and not just making mistakes. When engaged in a funny behaviour versus an unfunny act, they were four times as likely to look and laugh at their parent, twice as likely to laugh without looking, and three times as likely to smile and look. "Children only increased smiling in combination with looks to parents, indicating parents should share their humour," the researchers said.

An online survey of 113 British parents (9 dads) about their children's humour largely supported the observational data. The children in this sample included infants and so an extended timeline of humour-production was possible. Before one year, infants mainly produced humour through peekaboo; from one year they graduated onto chasing and tickling and funny body movements; from two years they started object-based, conceptual and taboo-based jokes; and from age three they started label-based jokes.

The researchers said their results showed: "toddlers produce novel and imitated humour, cue their humour, and produce a variety of humour types."

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Hoicka, E., and Akhtar, N. (2012). Early humour production. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 30 (4), 586-603 DOI: 10.1111/j.2044-835X.2011.02075.x

--Further reading--
Little comedians.

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Why do children hide by covering their eyes?

A cute mistake that young children make is to think that they can hide themselves by covering or closing their eyes. Why do they make this error? A research team led by James Russell at the University of Cambridge has used a process of elimination to find out.

Testing children aged around three to four years, the researchers first asked them whether they could be seen if they were wearing an eye mask, and whether the researcher could see another adult, if that adult was wearing an eye mask. Nearly all the children felt that they were hidden when they were wearing the mask, and most thought the adult wearing a mask was hidden too.

Next, Russell and his colleagues established whether children think it's the fact that a person's eyes are hidden from other people's view that renders them invisible, or if they think it's being blinded that makes you invisible. To test this, a new group of young kids were quizzed about their ability to be seen when they were wearing goggles that were completely blacked out, meaning they couldn't see and their eyes were hidden, versus when they were wearing a different pair that were covered in mirrored film, meaning they could see, but other people couldn't see their eyes.

This test didn't go quite to plan because out of the 37 participating children, only 7 were able to grasp the idea that they could see out, but people couldn't see their eyes. Of these 7, all bar one thought they were invisible regardless of which goggles they were wearing. In other words, the children's feelings of invisibility seem to come from the fact that their eyes are hidden, rather than from the fact that they can't see.

Now things get a little complicated. In both studies so far, when the children thought they were invisible by virtue of their eyes being covered, they nonetheless agreed that their head and their body were visible. They seemed to be making a distinction between their "self" that was hidden, and their body, which was still visible. Taken together with the fact that it was the concealment of the eyes that seemed to be the crucial factor for feeling hidden, the researchers wondered if their invisibility beliefs were based around the idea that there must be eye contact between two people - a meeting of gazes - for them to see each other (or at least, to see their "selves").

This idea received support in a further study in which more children were asked if they could be seen if a researcher looked directly at them whilst they (the child) averted their gaze; or, contrarily, if the researcher with gaze averted was visible whilst the child looked directly at him or her. Many of the children felt they were hidden so long as they didn't meet the gaze of the researcher; and they said the researcher was hidden if his or her gaze was averted whilst the child looked on.

"... it would seem that children apply the principle of joint attention to the self and assume that for somebody to be perceived, experience must be shared and mutually known to be shared, as it is when two pairs of eyes meet," the researchers said.

Other explanations were ruled out with some puppet studies. For instance, the majority of a new group of children agreed it was reasonable for a puppet to hide by covering its eyes, which rules out the argument that children only hide this way because they are caught up in the heat of the moment.

The revelation that most young children think people can only see each other when their eyes meet raises some interesting questions for future research. For example, children with autism are known to engage in less sharing of attention with other people (following another person's gaze), so perhaps they will be less concerned with the role of mutual gaze in working out who is visible. Another interesting avenue could be to explore the invisibility beliefs of children born blind.

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Russell, J., Gee, B., and Bullard, C. (2012). Why Do Young Children Hide by Closing Their Eyes? Self-Visibility and the Developing Concept of Self. Journal of Cognition and Development, 13 (4), 550-576 DOI: 10.1080/15248372.2011.594826

--Further reading--
A similar study covered on the Digest in 2006: “If I cover my eyes I’ll be hidden” – how young children understand visibility.

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Mother-toddler play-time is more interactive and educational with old-fashioned toys

Attention toddlers of the world! The brightly coloured Cookie Shape Surprise toy from Fisher-Price promises a world of fun. Push the right shapes through the right holes and enjoy the reward of flashing lights, music and even the names of the shapes! The bad news? Well, frankly - with this toy, your mum's play skills are likely to take a dive.

That's the message from a new study by psychologists in Vancouver. Where other studies have focused on the potential adverse effects of young children and teenagers spending too much time staring at screens - a controversial issue - this new study by Michaela Woolridge and Jennifer Shapka is the first to examine how electronic toys affect the way mothers and toddlers play together, compared with how they play with traditional, tech-free toys.

Twenty-five highly-educated mothers and their toddlers (average age 20 months) were filmed playing for ten to fifteen minutes with three traditional toys - a board book; the Shape & Sort it toy; and a plastic farm set. And then they were filmed playing for the same length of time with three electronic versions of those kinds of toys - an electronic book, from Touch and Teach Busy Books; the Fisher-Price Cookie Shape Surprise; and the Funderful Roll Along Safari plastic toys with flashing lights, music and activating buttons. For half the mother-child pairs, it was the electronic toys that were played with first.

The videos were analysed by two independent coders who were trained to look for important aspects in the way mothers play with toddlers. The results showed that when mums played with a toddler with electronic toys, they were less responsive, less educational in their play style (for example, providing fewer labels, less often expanding children's words etc), and slightly less encouraging.

In past research, these factors in mother and child playing style have been linked with later outcomes for the kids, for example in terms of language development. In the case of the poorer teaching scores when playing with electronic toys, the difference from the conventional toy play time was substantial and could "have very real implications," the researchers said. In contrast, the type of toy - electronic or conventional - made no difference to the ratings of the mothers' warmth whilst playing.

Woolridge and Shapka think that one reason mothers play differently with electronic toys is because they are noisy and so interrupt or deter mothers and children from communicating with each other. Another thing is that mothers seem to tend to try to use the electronic toys in the way they were designed, which constrains their play skills. They showed a lot more creative use of the conventional toys, initiating more make-believe play with them.

Rather than demonising electronic toys, it's worth remembering that electronic toys might well have benefits of their own that were untapped by this research. Moreover, it might be productive to inform parents how to make the most of the new toy gadgets without completely forsaking their traditional pretend-play skills. As the researchers said - "perhaps parents can ... be taught how to mediate manipulative and interactive products to more positively support their infants' and toddlers' development and learning." It would also be interesting for future research to see if these findings replicate when fathers play with their toddlers.

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Michaela B. Wooldridge, and Jennifer Shapka (2012). Playing with technology: Mother–toddler interaction scores lower during play with electronic toys. Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology DOI: 10.1016/j.appdev.2012.05.005

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Parents underestimate their children's worry levels and overestimate their optimism

It's well-established that parents frequently overestimate their children's intelligence and the amount of exercise they get. Now a team led by Kristin Lagattuta has uncovered evidence suggesting that parents have an unrealistically rosy impression of their kiddies' emotional lives too. It's a finding with important implications for clinicians and child researchers who often rely on parental reports of young children's psychological wellbeing.

It's previously been assumed that children younger than seven will struggle to answer questions about their emotions. Undeterred, Lagattuta and her colleagues simplified the language used in a popular measure of older children's anxiety and they developed a pictorial scoring system that involved the children pointing to rectangles filled with different amounts of colour. Time was taken to ensure the child participants understood how to use the scale.

An initial study with 228 psychologically healthy children aged 4 to 11 from relatively affluent backgrounds found that the children's answers to oral questions about their experience of worry (including general anxiety, panic, social phobia and separation anxiety) failed to correlate with their parents' (usually the mother's) written responses to questions about the children's experience of worry. Specifically, the parents tended to underestimate how much anxiety their children experienced.

A second study was similar, but this time the researchers ensured the parents and children answered items that were worded in exactly the same way; the parents were reassured that it was normal for children to experience some negative emotion; and the parents were able to place their completed questionnaires in envelopes for confidentiality. Still the children's answers about their own emotions failed to correlate with parents' answers, with the parents again underestimating the amount of worry experienced by their children.

A revealing detail in this study was that parents also answered questions about their own emotions. Their scores for their own emotions correlated with the answers they gave for their children's experiences. "These data suggest that even parents from a low-risk, non-clinical sample may have difficulty separating their emotional perspective from that of their child," the researchers said.

Finally, 90 more children aged 5 to 10 answered questions about their optimism, whilst their parents also answered questions about their own and their children's optimism. Again, parents' and children's verdicts on the children's emotions failed to correlate, with the parents now overestimating their children's experience of optimism. And once more, parents' own optimism was related to how they interpreted their children's optimism.

Lagattuta and her colleagues admitted that it's theoretically possible that the children were the ones showing a distorted view of their own emotions, and it's the parents who were painting the true picture. However, they think this is highly unlikely. For starters it's revealing that parents underestimated their children's negative emotion and yet over-estimated their positive emotion, which argues against the idea that the children were simply answering more conservatively, or giving systematically extreme answers in one direction. Moreover, the new findings fit with the wider literature showing how parents tend to have an unrealistically rosy impression of their children's wellbeing. An obvious study limitation is the focus on middle class US participants, so there is of course a need to replicate with people from other backgrounds and cultures.

"From the standpoint of research and clinical practice, this mismatch between parent and child perceptions raises a red flag," the researchers concluded. "Internally consistent self-report data can be acquired from young children regarding their emotional experiences. Obtaining reports from multiple informants - including the child - needs to be the standard."
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  Lagattuta KH, Sayfan L, and Bamford C (2012). Do you know how I feel? Parents underestimate worry and overestimate optimism compared to child self-report. Journal of experimental child psychology, 113 (2), 211-32 PMID: 22727673

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Introducing the SuperAgers - the elderly people whose brains have stayed young

They say the slow inevitable decline sets in during our early twenties. Like a rocket reaching its apogee, once the brain is fully developed there is the briefest lull, and then it's all downhill, the last neural areas to develop being the first to start unravelling. By the time of old age, so certain are the impairments in mental processing that psychological tests are age-adjusted - "You're slow Bob, but not for your age. For an 80-year-old you're doing just fine."

But wait. A team led by Theresa Harrison at the Cognitive Neurology and Alzheimer's Disease Center at Northwestern University say they've identified a group of elderly individuals whose brains appear relatively immune to the physical effects of ageing.

Harrison and her colleagues identified these 12 "SuperAgers" (average age 84) by their exceptional mental performance. They outperformed 10 typical healthy older folk (average age 83) on a test that involved recalling lists of words, and they matched the performance of 14 healthy middle-aged volunteers (average age 58). The SuperAgers also matched the middle-aged on tests of naming things, attention and task switching, and identifying drawings by category.

Using a structural brain scanner, the researchers found that the SuperAgers had brains that seemed to have resisted the erosive influence of time. Whereas the typical older participants had thinner cortices and smaller average brain volumes (244mm cubed average) than the middle-aged (306mm cubed), the SuperAgers' brain surfaces were just as thick as the middle-aged and their brain volumes (288mm cubed) not significantly different in statistical terms. Moreover, there was one brain region - the left anterior cingulate - that was actually thicker in the SuperAgers than in the middle-aged.

"These findings are remarkable," the researchers said, "given the numerous reports that grey matter loss is a common, if not universal, part of normal ageing."

Across the groups, brain volume correlated with episodic memory performance. Although cingulate thickness did not, Harrison's team still think it's interesting that this region was thicker in the SuperAgers. Relevant here is previous research showing that early protein accumulations in the cingulate region have been detected in Alzheimer patients.

This new study provides a tantalising demonstration that continuing neural decline into old age is not inevitable. Crucial now is to find out why the SuperAgers are so well preserved. It's not known, for example, if they had larger brains and greater cognitive reserves to begin with, or if their brains have simply aged more slowly than usual. Perhaps their lifestyles will hold clues, although the obvious role of education appears not to be relevant with this group. Their time in education was no longer than the other participants and in fact only four of them went to university.

"Identifying the underlying factors that promote this trajectory of unusually successful cognitive aging may lead to novel insights for preventing age-related cognitive impairments or strategies for evading the more severe changes associated with Alzheimer’s disease," the researchers said.

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Theresa M. Harrison, Sandra Weintraub, M.-Marsel Mesulam, and Emily Rogalski1 (2012). Superior Memory and Higher Cortical Volumes in Unusually Successful Cognitive Aging. Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society DOI: 10.1017/S1355617712000847

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

What children think of people who wear glasses

Removing his spectacles was part of Clark Kent's metamorphosis from geeky journalist into superhero. With popular symbolism like that, perhaps it's no wonder that Francine Jellesma has found many children endorse negative stereotypes about people who wear glasses.

Jellesma conducted a literature review finding 28 relevant studies on this subject published since 1980. Although the results showed glasses were far less salient to children than other identifying features, such as gender, their views on glass-wearers were largely negative. For example, asked to compare pairs of children, one of whom was always wearing glasses, 5- to 9-year-olds consistently rated the child without glasses as prettier and better looking. Another study found that children were less interested in being friends with glass-wearing peers.

The one positive caveat was that many children associate the wearing of glasses with superior intelligence. For example, asked to draw a smart person or a scientist, children tend to depict their creations as wearing glasses (but they don't do so when asked to draw a stupid, nice or nasty person). Jellesma said this association was probably aided by the prevalence of intelligent, glass-wearing fictional characters like Harry Potter and John in Peter Pan.

What about children's views of their own glass-wearing? Here the findings from four relevant studies were more encouraging. Studies that have tracked the general self-concept of children over time have found little effect of their changing to wearing contact lenses, suggesting glass wearing isn't that important to the way they see themselves. It's only when attention has been focused specifically on self-perceptions of physical appearance that changing to contacts has made a difference, with contacts boosting appearance-related self-esteem. Also relevant are studies looking at children's willingness to wear glasses. Younger children don't' seem too bothered, but there's evidence of older children refusing to wear glasses, especially in urban areas. Jellesma said this could be due to fears of bullying in larger schools with more hostile social environments.

Jellesma concluded that more positive, glass-wearing media role models could help improve the self-esteem of glass-wearing children, and improve the stereotypes that children hold about people who wear glasses.

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F.C. Jellesma (2012). Do glasses change children's perceptions? Effects of eyeglasses on peer- and self-perception. European Journal of Developmental Psychology DOI: 10.1080/17405629.2012.700199

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Another look at the "magical" benefit of frequent family meals

"The statistics are clear," Nancy Gibbs wrote in her article for Time magazine in 2006 entitled the Magic of the Family Meal: "Kids who dine with the folks are healthier, happier and better students". She's right, there is lots of evidence showing these positive associations, and there are plausible explanations for the benefits, such as a chance for children and parents to talk, and the sense of structure that the ritual provides.

But as Daniel Miller and his colleagues point out in their new study, the supposed benefit of frequent family meals is based on research with limitations. Many studies have been cross-sectional snap-shots in time - so it's possible that frequent family meals are merely a proxy for other relevant factors, such as warmer family relations or parental wealth and education. And the causal direction could run backwards. Maybe parents are more inclined to dine with children who are happier and better behaved.

Miller's team have conducted a comprehensive, longitudinal study using data that was collected from 1998 - when 21,400 participating US children were aged 5 years - to 2007, by which time the average age of the remaining 9,700 participants was 13.6. At five time points during that period, the children's parents were surveyed about how often they ate as a family at breakfast and dinner; the children's reading and maths abilities were assessed; and teachers were surveyed about the children's behaviour.

The results were clear - there was little or no evidence (depending on the precise analysis used) of any association between more family meals at earlier time points and better outcomes later, in terms of the children's academic abilities or good behaviour. "Our results suggest that the findings of previous work regarding frequency of family meals and adolescent outcomes should be viewed with some caution," the researchers said.

But we shouldn't be too hasty about dismissing the value of family meals. This study comes with its own caveats. Chief among these is that the children were younger than in most other studies on this issue. Relevant here is that past research has linked frequent family meals with outcomes such as less substance abuse among older teenagers - a potential benefit that was not addressed in this study given the younger sample. Another problem, acknowledged by the researchers, was the reliance on parental reports about the frequency of family meal times. A suspiciously high number of parents reported having family meals every day of the week. If they were lying it could have affected the trustworthiness of the results, although the researchers think this is unlikely based on some checks they made of their data.

Taken altogether, Miller and his colleagues said their study should be seen as "an extension rather than a repudiation of previous work". Their cautious conclusion is that "the magnitude of the effect of family meal frequency may be less than suggested by previous work."

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Daniel Miller, Jame Waldfogel, and Wen-Jui Han (2012). Family meals and child academic and behavioural outcomes. Child Development : 10.1111/j.1467-8624.2012.01825.x

--Further reading-- You are what you eat? Meal type, socio-economic status and cognitive ability in childhood.

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Using yuk! and weird! to teach children new morals

Some morals - such as it being wrong to hurt others - children learn because they see the distress a particular behaviour causes others, or the harm it can bring upon themselves. But other immoral behaviours don't necessarily have obvious victims. These relate to so-called purity-based morals, such as taboo sexual relations, sacrilegious acts or inappropriate eating behaviours. How do kids learn that these things are wrong, especially if they've never actually encountered them?

A new study shows that children are primed to recognise the immorality of certain behaviours by feelings of disgust and beliefs about unnaturalness, especially when these factors are combined. Joshua Rottman and Deborah Kelemen at Boston University manipulated these factors to provoke 7-year-olds into judging novel behaviours by alien characters as immoral.

"This is the first experimental investigation of a clear-cut case of moral acquisition," Rottman and Kelemen said, "one involving morally naive subjects ... and entirely novel and superficially amoral situations."

Sixty-four 7-year-olds were introduced to the faraway planet "Glinhondo" and its alien occupants. The children were then split into four groups and shown pictures of 12 different scenarios, each accompanied by a short spoken description. The scenarios involved several aliens engaging in behaviours directed at their own bodies (e.g. covering their heads with sticks) or at the environment (e.g. sprinkling blue water into a big puddle). After seeing each scenario, the kids had to say whether the depicted behaviour was "wrong" or if it was "OK".

Children in the "disgust" condition viewed the pictures in a room sprayed with the stinky but harmless joke-shop product "Liquid ASS", and the description of the scenarios also highlighted that the alien behaviours were disgusting. Children in the "unnatural" condition viewed the scenarios in a fresh room, but they saw pictures in which only a minority of aliens performed the behaviours and the description highlighted that what they were doing was "unnatural". Kids in a third group experienced a combination of the disgust and unnaturalness - the room stank and it was a minority of aliens performing the behaviour, which was described as unnatural. Finally, some of the kids formed a control group - the room was fresh, all the aliens performed the behaviours and the description merely said that what they were doing was boring.

Children in the combined disgust and unnaturalness condition judged 65 per cent of alien behaviours as "wrong", compared with just 19 per cent of behaviours judged that way by the control group. "This demonstrates that moral acquisition can occur rapidly and in the absence of direct experience with moralised behaviour," the researchers said. "This also speaks against the idea that the primary mechanism guiding moral acquisition is children's active reasoning about harmful or unjust consequences."

The children in the disgust-only or the unnatural-only conditions also judged more alien behaviours as wrong, compared with kids in the control condition, but in both cases they tended to answer "wrong" about half the time, so there's a possibility they were just alternating their answers at random.

The findings show how visceral feelings of disgust combine with intellectual thoughts about what's "natural" to invoke in children a sense of moral wrongness. Another finding was that environmentally directed actions were more often judged as wrong than self-directed actions. "Ultimately, the degree of plasticity inherent within a young child’s moral repertoire is a crucial area of future exploration, and one that is currently under explored," Rottman and Kelemen concluded. "The implications of such research will be substantial, promising to answer fundamental questions about the horizons of our moral nature."
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  Rottman J, and Kelemen D (2012). Aliens behaving badly: Children's acquisition of novel purity-based morals. Cognition, 124 (3), 356-60 PMID: 22743053

Note: image provided courtesy of Josh Rottman.

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.