ISSN : 1229-0718
Cognitive flexibility and proactive control have been considered to play important roles in the sentence processing abilities of preschoolers. In particular, sequential congruency effect measured from a flanker task not only reflects flexible thinking but also taps into proactive control to spontaneously monitor and maintain upcoming goals. The present study attempted to extend prior findings by examining whether proactive control is also an underlying ability that affects 4-5-year-old children’s sentence processing. To examine this, a sentence act-out task, Receptive Expressive Vocabulary Test - Receptive, a verbal fluency task, a go/no-go task, a Head-Toes-Knees-Shoulders task, an auditory working memory task, and a flanker task were administered to 4-5-year-olds. The results demonstrated that sequential congruency effect is indeed a significant predictor of the sentence processing ability after child’s age, vocabulary, working memory, and inhibitory ability are controlled for. However, no direct relationship was observed between proactive control and sentence processing measures. The potential role of proactive control is discussed in light of limitations in using a verbal fluency task for its measurement among preschoolers.
The goal of the present study was to investigate the effect of category label, properties and visual appearance on children’s reasoning during inductive inference and categorization. A property inference task and a categorization task were used to examine the effects of category label and properties. The results based on the data collected from 71 4-and 5-year-old children and 20 adults indicated that the participants’ reasoning was more category-based during the property inference task than during the categorization task. However, this tendency was not significant when the properties were highly familiar. Perceptual cues played a strong role in the categorization task when categorizing arbitrary categories compared to natural categories, but this was not the case during the property inference task. The results also showed that older participants tended to use conceptual information (category labels and properties) more than did younger participants, regardless of tasks and domains. These findings indicate that category labels have higher inductive potential compared to properties in human reasoning, and that even young children may consider conceptual information as main information that may override other factors, such as perceptual similarity.
Positivity effect, which is a bias toward positive information rather than negative, appears during old age. Prior studies have demonstrated positivity effects in the initial attention process by presenting positive stimuli with processing goals or clues and have studied the effect of those positivity effects on item memory. The purpose of this study is twofold: 1) to investigate whether positivity effects are also found in attentional bias to distractors and 2) to study whether the attentional bias influences a subsequent associative memory task. Both young (aged 20-25 years) and older (aged 61-85 years) adults participated in this study. Older adults showed initial attentional capture effects to the positive distractor after four seconds, confirming the positivity effect in older adults. Further, older adults performed better on the association memory task for happy faces. In sum, this study demonstrated older adults' attentional bias toward positive emotional information by dividing the attention process into attention capture and holding for the first time. Moreover, we found a positivity effect in the subsequent associative memory through incidental learning.
This study examined a mediating effect of internalized stigma and a moderated mediating effect of ethnic identity in the relationship between perceived discrimination and self-esteem among multicultural children in Korea. A total sample of 131 4-6th grade children (59 boys and 69 girls) completed a survey. We found that multicultural children’s perceived discrimination was significantly and negatively associated with self-esteem. Internalized stigma mediated this association. This mediation effect of perceived discrimination on self-esteem through internalized stigma was moderated by ethnic identity. Specifically, the children who scored low on ethnic identity were more likely to internalize stigma against their race and ethnicity when they experienced more frequent discrimination. That, in turn, led to lower levels of self-esteem. We included the importance of exploring multicultural children’s internalized stigma and ethnic identity in school and psychotherapy when they experienced unfair treatment and discrimination inside and outside of school.
In this paper, we conceptualized parental favoritism in the shared environment of siblings. We hypothesized that siblings’ self-esteem would be negatively associated with their perceived parental favoritism regardless of the directions of favoritism. Furthermore, we hypothesized that rejection sensitivity would mediate the relationship between perceived parental favoritism and siblings’ self-esteem. A total of 169 siblings participated in this study. We ran correlational analyses among relative scores and absolute scores of parental favoritism, self-esteem, and rejection sensitivity. We also performed a paired t test between the “favored group” and the “non-favored group”. We found that absolute scores of parental favoritism were significantly associated with siblings’ self-esteem and rejection sensitivity. However, relative scores of parental favoritism were not. In other words, both siblings showed lower self-esteem and higher rejection sensitivity when they perceived more parental favoritism regardless of the directions of favoritism within the family. There were no significant differences between the favored group and the non-favored group in terms of self-esteem and rejection sensitivity. The final mediation analysis revealed that rejection sensitivity mediated the relationship between absolute scores of parental favoritism and siblings’ self-esteem. We discuss implications of parental favoritism in the shared environment of siblings on their psycho-social development.
The purpose of this short-term longitudinal study is to examine the effect of marital quality, maternal parenting efficacy, and paternal involvement on infant development. Participants of the study were 310 mothers who were raising infants in the Seoul and Gyeonggi-do area. The data were analyzed using the statistics programs SPSS 21.0 and AMOS 21.0. The maximum likelihood method was utilized for parameter estimation, and statistical significance was examined using the bootstrapping procedure. The results of the study are as follows. First, marital quality was found to affect 6-month infant development through maternal parenting efficacy. Second, the marital quality has a direct effect on 6-month and 12-month infant development. Third, the marital quality was found to affect 6-month infant development through paternal involvement. Fourth, 6-month infant development directly affected the 12-month infant development. The results of this study indicate that the marital relationship and parenting characteristics exert influence on infant development in the short term and over the persistence of early infant development. On the basis of these results, suggestions were provided for enhancing maternal parenting efficacy and paternal involvement in parenting.
The purpose of this study was to identify and evaluate the model concerning relations among death attitude(daeth avoicdance, death acceptance), happiness(subjective well-being), and the mediators of materialism and orientation to meaning. Data were collected from 489 middle-aged adults. Results of the study indicated that the hypothesized model fit the data well. Death avoidance and death acceptance did not directly affect happiness, but they were indirectly affected by materialism and orientation to meaning. This study suggests that the death acceptance can play an important role in lowering the value of materialism and increasing the orientation to pursue meaning, leading to the happiness of middle-aged adults.
This study examined the effects of maternal parenting efficacy, autonomy support, and structure support behaviors on children’s theory of mind. Participants were 101 4-year-old children (55 boys, 46 girls) and their mothers. Maternal parenting efficacy was measured using K-EGSCP by maternal self-report and maternal autonomy and structure supports were observed and graded from mother-child interactions when creating a drawing with an Etch-a-Sketch. Children’s levels of theory of mind were measured by a series of false belief tasks provided by an experimenter. Maternal parenting efficacy was positively correlated with children’s theory of mind, and maternal autonomy and structure supports were significantly and positively associated with children’s theory of mind. Confirmatory factor analysis with these three variables showed that the relationship between maternal parenting efficacy and children’s theory of mind was completely mediated by a parenting latent variable including maternal autonomy and structure supports. These findings confirm social constructive perspectives of children’s theory of mind development and self-determination theory for maternal autonomy support and structure support; political implications and limitations of the current study are also discussed.
Recently, training studies have increased to examine the effect of facilitating executive function(EF), which is known to be an important predictor of later development across various domains. The present study aimed to examine the effect of board-game based training on EF and whether it can also lead to the facilitation of language processing abilities among 4-5-year-olds who typically show sentence interpretation errors. By adopting the principles of the Flexible Item Selection Task (FIST), we developed a board-game that requires one-to-one interaction with an adult; we administered the program for 30 minutes per session for a total of 8 sessions. Comparing the training group with the waitlist control group, we observed significant improvement in working memory and an improvement trend in proactive control among children in the training group. The effect, which was observed on two cognitive factors, demonstrates that the current program is effective even when the type of tasks used during training and testing is not similar.