open access
메뉴
open access
메뉴
ISSN : 1229-0718
The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between maternal meta-emotion philosophy, children's meta-emotion philosophy and social competence among preadolescent elementary school(grades 5-6) children and their mothers. Forty-three children, along with their mothers, were recruited from five elementary schools located in Seoul and Gyeonggi-do, South Korea. Results can be summarized as follows: first, preadolescent children's meta-emotion philosophy was influenced by maternal self-directed meta-emotion philosophy. Second, children's meta-emotion philosophy significantly influenced their own social competence. Third, the relationship between maternal self-directed meta-emotion philosophy and children's social competence was mediated by children's meta-emotion philosophy.
The purpose of this study was to examine the roles of children's emotion regulation and social information processing on the relationship between childhood physical abuse and reactive aggression. Emotion regulation was operationally defined as effortful control. Structural equation modeling was used to examine the overall relationship between variables of interest. Data was obtained from 1,197 elementary school students belonging to 5th- and 6th-grade who met specific criteria for physical abuse. Results indicated that children's experience of physical abuse directly affected reactive aggression. The direct effect of physical abuse on reactive aggression was greater than the total indirect effects of other variables. Both social information processing and effortful control served as mediators for the relationship between physical abuse and reactive aggression. Additionally, the mediating effect of effortful control was greater than that of social information processing, and effortful control appeared to influence all three stages of social information processing. Based on these findings, effective intervention strategies are discussed for decreasing reactive aggression among physically abused children. The implications of a newly identified concept related to effortful control were also emphasized.
Off-Topic Speech (OTS) refers to speech that may start with a particular topic but quickly becomes prolonged, unconstrained, and irrelevant to that topic. Key determinants of OTS are lack of focus and lack of coherence. Inhibitory deficits and pragmatic changes in communicative goals have been proposed as causes for age-linked OTS. The present study investigated whether OTS might be related to a difficulty in decoding emotional states from facial expressions and lexical stimuli. Participants were 69 younger (18-27 years; M = 21.75, 34 male & 35 female) and 68 older (63-86 years; M = 72.22, 33 male & 35 female) adults. Participants were asked to recognize emotions expressed either facially or lexically, then tell stories about 4 topics. They were also asked to test inhibition ability, crystallized intelligence, fluid intelligence, and social competence. The results showed that older adults were less accurate in recognizing facial and lexical emotion as compared to younger adults for all basic emotions, including happiness, fear, anger, disgust, sadness, and surprise. Older adults’ OTS levels were higher than those of younger adults. The facial recognition ability and age were related to OTS, and these variables were significant predictors of OTS among older adults. These findings suggest that declining emotion recognition ability along with inhibitory deficits may be another cognitive determinant of OTS.
The present study was designed to investigate Korean mothers' emotion-related beliefs and their relationship to mothers' emotional expressions and responses to children's negative emotional expressions. Mothers with 3-6 years old children completed questionnaires regarding emotion-related beliefs, mother's own emotional expressions, and coping strategies for children's negative emotional expressions. Our results showed that Korean mothers had twelve beliefs regarding value, control, developmental processes, guidance, and relation. Beliefs about positive emotional value were the highest, and beliefs about contempt were the lowest. Our results also revealed a significant relationship between Korean mothers' emotion-related beliefs and their emotion-related parenting behaviors. Beliefs about negative emotional value, positive emotional value, and parental guidance were positively related to supportive responses. Beliefs that all emotions are bad were positively related to non-supportive responses and negatively related to emotional expressions. Beliefs about contempt and manipulation were positively related to supportive responses. Furthermore, Korean mothers' emotion-related beliefs significantly predicted emotion-related parenting behaviors. Overall, these results suggest that emotion-related beliefs are crucial cognitive variables related to parenting behaviors
The current study investigated to what extent a developmental lag exists between children's understanding of first-order and second-order beliefs. Children aged 4-5 years (N=72) were divided into four age-subgroups and received 2 first- and 2 second-order false belief tasks. First- and second-order tasks were designed to have a similar story structure and length, while minimizing differences in complexity between the two tasks. In addition to analyzing mean level of success, the study provided information about individual patterns of performance through within-child comparisons. The main findings were that first-order success did precede second-order success and that this sequence of mastery was invariant across all participants. It also appeared that the time lag between the two success was approximately 1 year; first-order success emerged after 4.5 years of age while second-order success emerged after 5.5 years of age. These findings provide evidence for the predicted developmental lag between first- and second-order theory-of-mind.
Age and sex differences in children's prosocial behavior, knowledge of mental states, and empathy were examined during a dictator game. Participants were 132 children aged 4, 6, and 8 years. Children were asked to divide 10 candies between themself and an anonymous recipient. Knowledge of mental states was measured by first-order and second-order false belief tasks. Empathy was measured by The Index of Empathy for Children and Adolescents. Older children and girls engaged in more prosocial behavior, and 8 year olds offered significantly more candy to recipients than 4 year olds. In addition, first-order and second-order false belief understanding and empathy were significantly and positively correlated with prosocial behavior. The greater a child’s understanding of mental states and empathy, the more he/she engages in prosocial behavior. Finally, a hierarchical regression analysis revealed that empathy significantly predicted children's prosocial behavior; however, understanding mental states was not predictive. These results suggest that children's prosocial behavior is related more to emotional factors rather than cognitive factors.