International Journal of Behavioral Development

We examined the developmental dynamics between task-avoidant behavior and different literacy outcomes, and possible precursors of task-avoidant behavior. Seventy Greek children were followed from Grade 4 until Grade 6 and were assessed every year on reading fluency, spelling, and reading comprehension. The teachers assessed the children’s achievement strategies at all testing times. In addition, in Grade 4, the children responded to a task value questionnaire and the parents reported their beliefs and expectations about their children’s academic performance. The results revealed that task avoidance was reciprocally related only to reading comprehension. In addition, only parental beliefs predicted task avoidance. These findings complement those of previous studies in transparent orthographies and suggest that the role of task avoidance on literacy development depends on the time when the literacy skills are assessed and the type of literacy outcome.

Due to their sociocognitive limitations, children between the ages of 4 and 8 years tend to resist antibias messages from others. The purpose of this study was to examine if children would be more responsive to an antibias message as a function of the race of the communicator, the strength of the antibias message, and their ability to reconcile different perspectives. As children’s inferences of communicators’ attitudes constitute an unintended message, we assessed children’s inferences of communicators’ Black and White attitudes before and after the intervention. Children’s own attitudes and cognitive elaboration of the antibias message were assessed after the intervention. Very few children were able to reconcile different ethnic perspectives. Results further revealed that communicators were inferred to hold more positive attitudes after the intervention, but that this was largely due to an increase in the ingroup communicator’s inferred White attitudes and when the message was weak. Moreover, no difference was observed for children’s own attitudes and cognitive elaboration of the message. Results are discussed with respect to social cognitive barriers that result in children’s distortion or dismissal of antibias messages.

The study investigated long-term relations between moral emotion attributions in childhood and adolescence and antisocial conduct in early adulthood while taking into account potentially confounding personality factors. Specifically, onset of prediction, unique and indirect effects of moral emotion attributions were examined. In a longitudinal study of 143 children (67 females), measures of moral emotion attributions, conscientiousness and agreeableness were obtained at the ages of 4–7, 11–12, 18 and 23 years. Antisocial conduct was assessed at the age of 23 years. Moral emotion attributions predicted antisocial behavior not before late adolescence. This effect was independent of conscientiousness and agreeableness. Moreover, moral emotion attributions indirectly contributed to the prediction of antisocial conduct by predicting change in conscientiousness. Overall, findings suggest that the emotions adolescents anticipate in the context of (im)moral actions contribute to development of antisocial conduct independently of personality traits.

Two-hundred-and-fifty-eight White British (ethnic majority) and British South Asian (minority) children (5, 9 and 13 years old) chose potential friends from descriptions of peers who had traits and preferences that were either consistent (normative) or inconsistent (deviant) with ethnic group membership. White children chose peers from the ethnic ingroup. Younger Asian children (5 years) more often selected an outgroup peer, although ingroup choices increased with age (9 and 13 years). Normativity and strength of ethnic identification did not affect choices. However, children who selected an outgroup child tended to have more cross-ethnic friendships than those who did not. The implications for theories of group dynamics and intergroup contact are discussed.

The moderating effects of three specific conditions (status hierarchy, attractiveness hierarchy and sex ratio) on the link between status (popularity) and physical and relational aggression were examined in a large sample of adolescent boys (N = 1,665) and girls (N = 1,637) (M age = 13.60). In line with the hypotheses, derived from integrating a goal-framing perspective with an evolutionary perspective, it was found for boys that status was more strongly related to both physical and relational aggression in classrooms when differences in status (status hierarchy) and physical attractiveness between same-gender peers (attractiveness hierarchy) were smaller, and to relational aggression when cross-gender peers (potential mating partners) were relatively scarce. For girls, status hierarchy and attractiveness hierarchy only moderated the link between status and relational aggression. These results suggest that competition to a certain extent triggers aggression by high-status adolescents. The findings are discussed from a broader evolutionary perspective, and the utility of this approach for understanding adolescents’ behaviour in the peer context is considered.

The present study was designed to investigate the impact of familiarity and audience age on children’s self-presentation in self-drawings of happy, sad and neutral figures. Two hundred children (100 girls and 100 boys) with the average age of 8 years 2 months, ranging from 6 years 3 months to 10 years 1 month, formed two age groups and five conditions (n = 20). All children completed two counterbalanced sessions. Session 1 consisted of drawing a neutral figure followed by a sad and happy figure in counterbalanced order. The drawing instructions specified the age of the audience (adult vs. child) and familiarity (familiar vs. unfamiliar) differently for each condition. Measures of colour preference were taken in session 2. Certain drawing strategies, such as waving and smiling, varied as a function of audience age and familiarity whilst others, such as colour use, did not. The results are discussed in terms of cue dependency and framework theories of children’s drawings and the need to be aware of specific characteristics of who children are drawing for.

In this article, we review, on three grounds, the nature of the life story. First, we evaluate the appropriateness of the proposal that the life story emerges in adolescence (the time of the traditional identity crisis). Second, we examine the relation between big stories (of which the life story is one) and small stories. Finally, we consider whether the construction of the life story (and narration more broadly) represents the sole mode of identity formation. It is argued here that (a) the belief that adolescence marks the emergence of the life story is based on an unnecessarily limiting requisite for autobiographical reasoning; (b) collective understanding of stories, big and small, would be furthered through a more thorough consideration of their relation; and (c) the construction of a life story represents one of at least two viable routes for identity formation; identity can also be attained via a non-narrative, paradigmatic route.

The study examined the contribution of reinforcement sensitivity to childhood personality at three levels of the hierarchical structure, mid-level traits, the Big Five and two higher-order factors, and the moderating role of sex and age in a sample of 3–18-year-olds. The canonical correlation analyses indicated that reinforcement sensitivity and personality have more than 50% of common variance; reward and punishment sensitivities had opposing effects and were linked to both higher-order factors, Extraversion and Agreeableness, and lower-order traits Sociability and Shyness. There were no sex differences in the effects of reinforcement sensitivity, the negative effect of reward sensitivity on Alpha domain in school age was higher than in adolescence, whereas the negative effect of punishment sensitivity on Beta domain decreased from age 3–4 years to age 17–18 years.

The present investigation examined the relation between honesty, benevolence, and trust in children. One hundred and eight 7-, 9-, and 11-year-olds were read four story types in which the character’s honesty (honesty or dishonest) was crossed with their intentions (helping or harming). Children rated the story character’s honesty, benevolence, and whether they trusted the character. Results indicated that 7- to 11-year-olds considered both honesty and benevolence when making trust judgments, and older children were more likely than younger children to trust helpful lie-tellers. Further, the relation between dishonesty and trust judgments was mediated by children’s judgments of benevolence. These findings suggest that at least from 7 years onward, children have a nuanced understanding about the relationship between honesty and trust.

We investigated cultural influences on young children’s acquisition of social-cognitive concepts. A theory of mind (ToM) scale (Wellman & Liu, 2004) was given to 129 children (71 boys, 58 girls) ranging in age from 3 years 0 months to 7 years 10 months. The children were from three distinct cultural groups: (a) trash pickers (pemulung) living a subsistence lifestyle in Jakarta, Indonesia; (b) middle-class Jakartans living and attending preschools within 5 km of the pemulung group; and (c) middle-class Australians. All children were individually tested in their native language. Cross-group comparisons revealed no significant differences among the three groups in mastery of false belief (the traditional ToM indicator), despite their widely different socio-economic circumstances. However, the pemulung children were slower than the two middle-class groups in mastering two other ToM concepts, namely knowledge access and emotion concealment. These findings shed new light on patterns of cross-cultural consistency in false-belief mastery, as well as revealing cross-cultural variation in other ToM concepts that plausibly reflect variation in children’s everyday life circumstances.

Previous research on sensation seeking (SS) was dominated by a variable-oriented approach indicating that SS level has a linear relation with a host of problem behaviors. Our aim was to provide a person-oriented methodology—a probabilistic clustering—that enables examination of both inter- and intra-individual differences in not only the level, but also in the pattern of SS. We have applied model-based clustering to a four-semester long longitudinal high school survey (N = 3334) and to a cross-sectional university survey (N = 438). The results indicated that impulsive patterns are linked to negative outcomes whereas non-impulsive patterns are associated with positive outcomes. Our study aims to serve as a methodological example on how to apply model-based clustering to examine different types of sensation-seeking patterns. This modern clustering method allows for probabilistic categorization, with continous typicality scores besides cluster membership variables. These typicality scores turned out to have higher temporal stability than simple categorical membership variables did.