ISSN : 1229-0718
The current study examined the main and moderating effects of adolescents’ social goals and friendship quality on social adjustment behavior. Social goals (i.e., intimacy, popularity, and dominance) and friendship quality (i.e., positive and negative) were assessed in a sample of fifth and sixth graders and used to predict their social adjustment behavior (i.e., physical and relational aggression, bullying, prosocial behavior, and isolation). The results indicated that intimacy goals negatively predicted relational aggression and bullying. Social dominance goals positively predicted aggression, bullying, and isolation, and negatively predicted prosocial behavior. In addition, positive friendship quality negatively predicted physical aggression and isolation, whereas negative friendship quality positively predicted aggression and bullying. Results also found evidence of moderating effects, such that positive friendship quality mitigated the level of physical aggression for youth who had high social dominance goals. These findings emphasize the importance of considering social goals in tandem with their friendship quality to better understand adolescents’ social adjustment behavior.
Regularities in the learning environment allow us to make predictions and guide behavior. Growing evidence of location probability learning (LPL) demonstrates that the statistical regularity of target locations affects spatial attention allocation. However, existing studies on LPL mostly focus on learning in adults. To achieve a comprehensive understanding of the mechanism of LPL, we investigated the effect of target location probability on visual search in children aged 5 to 9 years compared to adults. Both children and adults responded faster when the target appeared in the high probability "rich" quadrant than in the low probability "sparse" quadrants of the search space. Importantly, the magnitude of the bias was constant across participants of various ages and not dependent on individual differences in executive functions. These results provide novel evidence that implicit statistical learning of target locations occurs early in development and remains stable until early adulthood and this is a distinct developmental pattern from learning of explicit goal-driven spatial attention.
This study aimed to examine the effect of preparation for old age on the psychological well-being of middle-aged adults and evaluate the serial multiple mediating effects of aging anxiety and perceived stress in the relationship between preparation for old age and psychological well-being based on the perspective of life span development theory that successful accomplishment of developmental tasks affects successful adaptation. A total of 353 middle-aged adults (165 male, 198 female) aged 40 to 65 years completed questionnaires. Results from the analysis using PROCESS macro showed that as the degree of preparation for aging increased also increased the psychological well-being of participants. In addition, the simple and serial mediating effects of aging anxiety and perceived stress were confirmed regarding the relationship between preparation for old age and psychological well-being. This means that the higher the level of preparation for old age of middle-aged adults, the lower the anxiety about aging, which contributes to lowering the perception of stress and as a result, the psychological well-being increases. Results from this study confirm the importance of preparation for old age to improve the psychological well-being of middle-aged adults. Interventions to prepare these adults for old age and increase their psychological well-being should be focused on aging anxiety and perceived stress. Finally, the implications, limitations of this study and follow-up studies are discussed.
The ability to infer a speaker’s epistemic certainty based on the information source conveyed by evidential morphemes develops well into 6 years. However, 3–4-year-olds could accomplish this when the source was marked by lexical verbs, and 5-year-olds’ performance improved if the accuracy of the source of hearsay was available. The present study re-examined 5–6-year-olds’ evidential reasoning abilities when the choice of testimony is relevant to the child’s eventual gain and when three sources are contrasts simultaneously. We presented three animals’ testimony—each based on direct experience, inference from indirect evidence, and hearsay—to children and asked them to find a hidden sticker using the most reliable testimony. Six-year-olds, as well as 5-year-olds, could reliably select testimony based on direct experience, suggesting that evidential reasoning ability develops earlier than 6 years. Furthermore, children showed a tendency to trust hearsay over indirect evidence sources, showing the pattern of hierarchy different from proposed by general evidential hierarchy.