ISSN : 1229-0718
This study examined differences in prosocial lies by age, sex, and effortful control in eighty-six 3- to 6-year-old preschool children, their parents, and their teachers. Prosocial lies were evaluated using six stories. Children's effortful control was evaluated using three different measures: Kochanska's Battery for Assessing Effortful Control as well as both parents' and teachers' ratings on the Children Behavior Questionnaire. Age and sex differences were observed. Prosocial lies increased with age, particularly at age five and six. Girls tended to tell more prosocial lies than boys for events related to the elderly and friends. Children's effortful control, as measured by Kochanska's battery and teachers' ratings, was positively associated with prosocial lies. However, after controlling for age in hierarchical regression analyses, three measures of effortful control did not predict children's prosocial lies. However, when the effects of the subscales of the three measures were examined, mothers' rating of low intensity pleasure and perceptual sensitivity significantly predicted children's prosocial lies even after controlling for age.
This study was conducted to test the differences in the recognition of emotional facial expressions of various races. Participants were 257 Korean children in the fifth and sixth grades and 120 undergraduates. Emotional face recognition was measured using 32 pictures of facial expressions (happy, sad, angry, fear) of four different races (Korean, Southeast Asian, Caucasian, African American). There were cross-race differences in emotional face recognition. The facial expressions of Koreans were more accurately recognized than were those of other races, and among other races, the facial expressions of Southeast Asians were more accurately recognized than were those of Caucasian or African Americans. Though the facial expressions of Koreans were more accurately recognized than were those of other races for both age groups, differences were greater among undergraduates than among fifth- and sixth-grade children. The results suggest that the developmental change in emotional face recognition is greater for the facial expressions of other races than for those of Koreans.
The purpose of this study was to identify the relationships among childhood emotional maltreatment(EM), early adulthood romantic relationship satisfaction, early maladaptive schemas(EMS) and ambivalence over emotional expressiveness(AEE). Structural equation modeling analysis was conducted using self-report data from 310 adults. The mediating effect of EMSs, as well as the dual-mediated effect of EMSs and AEE, was significant for the relationship between EM and romantic relationship satisfaction. Based on these findings, effective intervention strategies were discussed for individuals who experienced EM as a child and are experiencing difficulties in romantic relationship. The importance of addressing EMSs was also emphasized.
The current study investigated whether 5-6-year-old Korean children consider situational factors when comprehending a protagonist’s lie- and truth-telling. The participants answered a series of questions after listening to stories in which the protagonist lied or told the truth during a transgression (e.g., stealing a friend’s crayon) or a polite interaction (e.g., receiving a disappointing gift). Children more positively evaluated lying in the politeness contexts than in the transgression contexts. They also attributed more positive emotions to the protagonists who told the truth in the transgression contexts than those who told the truth in the politeness contexts. The results demonstrate that preschoolers understand that the moral value and emotional consequences of lying and truth-telling can be affected by contextual factors.
In this study, we investigated children's development of communicative perspective-taking, false belief, inhibitory control, and further relations among these variables. Ninety-two 3- and 4-year-old children were tested. Children produced the appropriate adjectives in the common-ground condition more often than in the privileged-ground condition, and chose referential targets significantly more often in the privileged-ground condition than in the common-ground condition. Regression analysis revealed that false belief understanding can predict performance in communicative perspective-taking production tasks, while inhibitory control predicts performance in communicative perspective-taking comprehension tasks. This implies that children are sensitive to the perspectives of others in communication, and further, that their communicative perspective-taking ability might be partially related to false belief understanding and inhibitory control.
The present study investigated age-related development in executive functions (EF), specifically, inhibition and shifting factors, and to explore their relationship with children’s understanding of two critical mathematical concepts: measurement and graph. Our sample included one hundred ninety-five 8- to 11-year-old children living in Seoul and Gyeongi-do, South Korea. Given the high performance of Korean students on EF tasks, we used Monro et al.’s (2006) task with easy and difficult phases to measure EF abilities. The major results of our study are as follows. First, shifting ability, but not inhibition ability, significantly improved between 9 and 10 years of age . Furthermore, shifting score was strongly related to both measurement and graph scores, but inhibition was unrelated to both. Our findings support the idea that shifting plays a critical role in learning mathematics.
This study sought to validate the Korean version of the Bayley Scales of Infant and Toddler Development Third Edition (K-Bayley-III) for domestic application. Participants were 375 infants and toddlers from 16 days to 42 months and 15 days old from Seoul and its suburbs. The adequateness of item arrangement was determined by item difficulty analysis based on Item Response Theory. Item internal consistency was .986, and relevance of starting points for the 17 age stages were acceptable, with an average rate of 80%. Test-retest reliability and inter-coder reliability were both satisfactory. Convergent validity of the K-Bayley-III and the yielded a moderate correlation of .503 (p < .01). Exploratory factor analysis estimated a two-factor structure on 91 items. Potential amendments to administration procedures and scoring criteria were discussed.
Sequential performance refers to performing tasks in a fixed order. Performing a certain task in an orderly manner requires multiple mental processes, such as representation and retrieval of sequential information as well as blocking certain information from impeding memory performance. Among other things, it seems that the chunking strategy and inhibitory mechanisms are the most important features for sequential performance. Therefore, two experiments were administered to delineate the nature of these two components using the sequential action control task(S-ACT). We also investigated differences in recall task performance across two age groups. Older adults showed a longer mean reaction time than did young adults in Experiment 1. Both age groups formed three chunks during sequence representation when retrieving a target stimulus. Furthermore, they both showed longer RTs for the lead item of a chunk compared to the other items within a chunk. Older adults made more lag –1 errors (conservative errors) than did the young group. We conducted Experiment 2 to examine the effects of retrieval cues for improving sequential performance. Regardless of the cue type, older participants showed a relatively consistent pattern of in their retrieval. All participants showed longer RTs for the lead item of a chunk compared to its remainder. There were no significant interactions between item role and cue types for the different age groups. For different types of retrieval cues, the part-set cue-congruent group performed faster than all other groups, but retrieval accuracy was comparable across all groups.
This study aimed to investigate pathways in which childhood emotional bonding with mothers predicts adulthood attachment through self-esteem and trust in others. Participants were 401 college students in the southwest United States. The results indicated that self-esteem and trust in others fully mediated the relationship between emotional bonding with mother and anxious attachment. In contrast, trust in others partially mediated the relationship between childhood emotional bonding and avoidant attachment. These findings confirm Bowlby’s proposition and Bartholomew’s conceptualization of working model, and suggest that those who received more affection from their mother were more likely to perceive themselves as valuable and to trust others. Furthermore, those who view themselves as valuable and trust others were less likely to show anxious attachment styles (i.e., overly dependent on others). Besides, trust in others and emotional bonding with mother were predictors of avoidant attachment (i.e., compulsively self-reliant). Limitations and future directions were discussed with regard to clinical and educational implications.
Generic expressions (e.g., “Birds have wings”) describe different general properties and help children acquire knowledge of a given category. Although prior studies have suggested that generic inferences become more sophisticated around 4 years of age, no studies have tested younger age groups, and the findings have largely been limited to children in English-speaking communities. The present study examined Korean-speaking 3-year-olds’ abilities to make inferences based on generic expressions. First, we elicited and analyzed Korean-speaking adults’ utterances that described general properties of an animal category, and found that the most widely utilized generic noun phrases (NPs) of Korean were bare singulars, with the topic marker eun/nun accompanying these NPs. We then presented Korean 3-year-olds with generic expressions about properties of novel animals using these morpho-syntactic features, and observed the extent to which they were willing to extend the property to a novel instance of the given category. Specifically, we examined whether 3-year-olds can make generic inferences regardless of the strength of evidence (e.g., number of exemplars), or when an exception was introduced. We found that 3-year-olds can make generic inferences regardless of evidence strength, and distinguish genericity from nongenericity despite the presence of an exception. The findings suggest that sophisticated abilities to make generic inferences are present as early as 3 years old, and the development of inferential abilities is universal rather than language- or culture-specific.