Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development – serie

This book brings together current theory and research about atypical attachments in infants and young children at developmental risk in order to illustrate and understand some of the key issues in cases that do not fit traditional attachment patterns.

This Monograph presents a theory of cognitive development. The theory argues that the mind develops across three fronts. The first refers to a general processing system that defines the general potentials of mind to develop cognitive strategies and skills. The second refers to a hypercognitive system that governs self-understanding and self-regulation. The third involves a set of specialized structural systems that are responsible for the representation and processing of different reality domains.

This monograph studies research conducted for the purpose of investigating the relationship between vocabulary recognition and morphological knowledge during the early and middle elementary school years. The findings suggest that lexical development can be characterized in terms of increasing morphological complexity, and as a child ages, the proportion of known complex words that the child figured out by analyzing their morphological structure increased.

An investigation into differences in early childhood developmentVariability in Early Communicative Development demonstrates that the "modal child" does not, in fact, exist. Interviews with parents of over 1,800 children reveals both typical and exceptional communication development between the ages of eight and 30 months, providing unusually specific detail on the variability of individual lexical, gestural, and grammatical skills. Discussion of the Macarthur Communicative Development Inventories delves into the inventory's reliability, validity, and interrelations, before moving into an examination of the stability of differences and individual contributing factors.

The attachment bond that develops between infant and mother is the first of many intimate relationships we form throughout life, and as such it has been the focus of much research. But how does the quality of the secure base phenomena that defines this bond vary among individuals and across cultures? What methods can be used to asses its presence and characteristics? Following an interview with Mary S. Ainsworth, the originator of the concept of secure base, this new Monograph brings together eleven papers that consolidate our understanding of the empirical advances that have occurred in attachment research. The collection is organized into three sections. Part One includes papers on the generalizability of attachment theory and data, including cross-cultural research. Part Two addresses both normative and individual differences among mothers, children, caregivers, and their interactions—and methods for the valid assessment of these. Part Three examines the mental representations that children use to depict their different attachment relationships. Together these papers will stimulate child development specialists and students to explore different assessment methods and to move beyond current understandings of attachment.

In this Monograph, knowledge acquisition is examined as a process involving the coordination of existing theories with new evidence. Central to the present work is the claim that strategies of knowledge acquisition may vary significantly across (as well as within) individuals and can be conceptualized within a developmental framework.

A new model of child cognition and learningThe Role of Central Conceptual Structures in the Development of Children's Thought explores child cognition and conceptual development to present the novel "Central Conceptual Structure" theory. The culmination of a six-year instructional research program, this study examines the idea of "core knowledge" that can be applied to any task, and shows how transforming this core knowledge affects future learning. This book explores this theory in depth, providing extensive support and analysis that will interest anyone involved in child development, cognitive science, or educational psychology.

Previous experimental research has suggested that chimpanzees may understand some of the epitemological aspects of visual perception, such as how the perceptual act of seeing can have internal mental consequences for an individual's state of knowledge. Other research suggests that chimpanzees and other nonhuman primates may understand visual perception at a simpler level; that is, they may at least understand seeing as a mental event that subjectively anchors organisms to the external world. However, these results are ambiguous and are open to several interpretations. In this Monograph, we report the results of 15 studies that were conducted with chimpanzees and preschool children to explore their knowledge about visual perception.

Recent research shows that pre-school children are skilled classifiers, using categories to organize information and extend knowledge. Focusing on the role of maternal input, this monograph provides one of the first detailed examinations of how mothers convey information about category structure to their children.

The medium of television, although a daily part of most modern lives, remains mysterious in the manner it may influence its audience. At the center of this mysery lies the debate of content vs. medium without regard to its content. This monograph presents new research in this debate by following up on a report of 570 adolescents studied as preschoolers and the long-term relationships between preschool television viewing and adolescent achievement, behavior, and attitudes. The results of the report provide stron support for content-based hypotheses then for theories emphasizing television as a medium. In an interesting twist, the results of the report trace a cognitive difference in the patterns of boys and girls and the way television influences them.

Coordination between infant and adult is thought to be essential to infant development. However, the study is theoretically and methodologically grounded in a dyadic systems perspective and relational psychoanalysis. Our automated apparatus explores the micro-second timing of 4-month infant-adult vocal coordination to predict 12-month infant attachment and cognition. This work also further defines a fundamental dyadic timing matrix that guides the trajectory of infant development.

This monograph examines the interplay between behavioral and cognitive representations of attachmet during early childhood. We track the continued development of secure base support and use while assessing maternal co-construction processes and thier joint impact on children's secure base behavior and attachment representations. First, our investigation establishes that smoothly interacting dyads have mothers who continue to provide secure base support and children who use them as secure base across early childhood (mother sensitivity-child security links). Furthermore, the patterning of children's secure base behavior when interacting with the mother is related to the structure of children's knowledge about secure base relationships. Second, we introduce mother co-construction skills and evaluate their impact on the mother child relationship. Using two different co-construction tasks, we scored maternal co-construction in terms of skills that promote secure base script knowledge. Both tasks were related to maternal AAI coherence and attachment script knowledge. In addition, studies showed that maternal co-construction skills make unique contributions to both child secure base behvior and child script knowledge. Findings support the hypothesis that mothers' cognitive/verbal co-constructive skills during conversations about attachment and emotion-laden situations play a key role in organization of children's attachment behavior and representations. Finally, we demonstrate that maternal script knowledge not only impacts children's script knowledge (intergenerational transmission), but guides mothers' expectations and judgements of mother-child interactions. Throughout this monograph, we stress the importance of an interpersonal approach when investigating attachment relationships during early childhood, where mother-child interactions and communication about attachment-related issues are considered key to unveil co-constructive processes involved in the child's behavioral and cognitive organization of attachment relationships.

The Intentionality Model builds on the child's engagement in a world of persons and objects, the effort that learning language requires, and the essential tension between engagement and effort that propels language acquisition. According to this perspective, children learn language in acts of expression and interpretation; they work at acquiring language; all aspects of a child's development contribute to this process. Provides results of a longitudinal study which examined language acquisition in the second year of life in the context of developments in cognition, affect, and social connectedness Results of lag sequential analyses are reported to show how different behaviors--words, sentences, emotional expressions, conversational interactions, and construction thematic relations between objects in play--converged, both in the stream of children's actions in everyday events, in real time, an in developmental time between the emergence of words at about 13 months and the transition to simple sentences at about 2 years of age The conclusions show that performance counts for explaining language acquisition; language is not acquired independently but in relation to other behaviors; acquiring language is not easy and requires the work of behavioral coordination

The Development of Mental Processing integrates several psychological approaches in order to create a more comprehensive theoretical system. This system is tested through a longitudinal study of children 8 to 16 years of age, where findings show that it is ones efficiency at processing information, which has the greatest impact on the development of the working memory. This working memory, in turn, becomes the underlying factor determining individual differences in thinking. Study presenting a developing comprehensive theorhetical system and showing its evolution.Includes commentary by Kurt Fischer and Theo Dawson.An interesting monograph for both students and researchers about the process of theory creation as much as the study's findings.

Child Emotional Security and Interparental Conflict tests a theory proposing that high levels of conflict between parents leads to an increased child risk for mental health difficulties by shaking the child's sense of security in the family. This insecurity was associated with greater mental health difficulties, even when considering the role of prior mental health, child perceptions of parental conflict, and parent-child relations.

Exclusion from social groups is a source of conflict, stress, and tension in social life around the globe. How do children and adolescents evaluate exclusion based on group membership? This monograph is the report of an investigation of social exclusion in the contexts of friendship, peer groups, and school. Guided by social-cognitive domain theory, social psychological, and developmental theories on intergroup relationships, children and adolescents from four different ethnic groups were interviewed. The findings revealed that gender exclusion was more readily condoned than racial exclusion, and that exclusion in the friendship and peer group contexts were judged to be more legitimate than exclusion in the school context. There were also significant differences depending on the gender, age, and ethnicity of the participants. The results support the proposal that exclusion is multifaceted, involving a range of social and moral considerations.

This Monograph addresses three questions: 1) How can we best describe childhood personality? 2) How is personality related to the child's successes and failures? 3) What sort of factors are related to personality development? Uses a longitudinal analyses of thousands of children from across the United States to define the three personality types that best describe personality: resilient, over-controlled, and under-controlled.Studies the relationship between personality type and children's successes and failuresExplores how the stresses characteristic of poverty affect children's personality development

This Monograph demonstrates that disruptions to young people's developing conceptions of personal or cultural persistence begin to explain the suicide rates among Aboriginal Canadian and non-Aboriginal Canadian youth. Presents a developmental and cross-cultural investigation into suicide among Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Canadian youth.Links disruptions to developing conceptions of personal or cultural persistence with suicide ratesFinds, through a series of normative studies, that Aboriginal Canadian and non-Aboriginal Canadian youth ordinarily follow distinctive pathways of identity development.Demonstrates that those who fail to own their personal past, and their as yet unrealized future, are at especially heightened risk of suicide, while those who live in communities making an effort to reclaim their cultural past, and to direct the future course of their civic lives, are at dramatically lower risk of suicide.

This monograph concerns the psychological processes underlying the development of executive function, or the conscious control of thought and action. It has long been clear that these processes change considerably in early childhood, transforming a relatively stimulus-driven toddler into a child capable of flexible, goal-directed problem solving. However, the nature of these processes has remained elusive. In a programmatic series of 9 experiments, the authors examine circumstances that help or hinder executive function in 3- to 4-year-old children. The results provide the basis for a revision of their Cognitive Complexity and Control (CCC-r) theory, according to which there are age-related increases in the complexity of the rules that children can formulate and use when solving problems. The revised theory (a) specifies more clearly the circumstances in which children will have difficulty using rules at various levels of complexity, (b) provides a more detailed account of how to determine the complexity of rules required in a task, (c) takes account of both the activation and inhibition of rules as a function of experience, and (d) highlights the importance of considering intentionality in the study of executive function.

This monograph provides the first in-depth look at howmothers and young children talk about gender, to discoverthe potential role of language in fostering gender stereotypes.Mothers and their sons/daughters, who were 2-½,4-½, or 6-½ years of age, were videotaped discussing apicture book that focused on gender. A consistent contrastwas found between mothers’ explicit endorsementof gender stereotypes and implicit emphasis on gender.Although mothers rarely expressed gender stereotypesdirectly, they emphasized gender concepts indirectly, byreferring to gender categories, providing gender labels,contrasting males and females, and giving approval totheir children’s stereotyped statements. With increasingage, children were more focused on gender categoriesand stereotypes, but also more gender-egalitarian.Gender-egalitarian items (e.g., a female firefighter) wereassociated with less overt stereotyping, but also with moreimplicit talk about gender. Altogether, mothers’ languageinput conveys a wealth of subtle messages about genderfrom which children may construct their own beliefs.

This Monograph addresses three questions: a) Can distinct trajectories of physical aggression be identified in children from 24 months to third grade? b) Do child and family characteristics and child care experiences predict membership in the trajectory groups? c) Do trajectory groups differ in their levels of academic and social functioning in third grade? Using a person-centered approach and data from the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development, five aggression trajectories were identified: very low, low, moderate-steeply declining, moderate-stable, and high-stable. Higher levels of family resources and more sensitive parenting predicted low levels of aggression. Higher sociodemographic risk and less involved parenting predicted higher aggression. Child care experiences were not related systematically to aggression trajectories. In third grade, children on the higher and more stable aggression trajectories were performing more poorly socially and academically. However, aggression that was evident only in the preschool period was not associated with problematic functioning. Children on the two higher aggression trajectories also differed from one another in the type and severity of their problems in third grade.

This Monograph reports a series of ten studies on the social-cognitive abilities of three young chimpanzees, ages to four years. Compares outcomes to similar studies conducted on human infacts for a comparative understanding.Looks at chimpanzees' abilities to understand and imitate goal-directed actions.Results suggest that the ontogeny of human social cognition comprises two relatively distinct trajectories: one for understanding intentional action and perception, common to all apes, and another for sharing psychological states with others in collaborative acts involving joint intentions and attentions, unique to the human species.

The research reported in this Monograph documents the narrative accounts and moral evaluations that children between the ages of 5 and 16 made of incidents in which they had been the targets of their peers’ unfair or harmful actions and incidents in which they had been those inflicting harm on their peers. By systematically examining children’s construals of social interactions, this research brings to the fore the role of interpretation in moral thinking. By moving beyond the assessment of moral judgments made from an uninvolved third-person perspective, it underscores the possibility that children apply their moral concepts differently when they judge instances of harm or injustice from the victim’s or the perpetrator’s perspectives. Together, these issues bear on how children’s moral concepts are applied and develop within their actual social interactions, especially those interactions that appear to violate those very moral concepts. By contributing to our understanding of children’s moral thinking as it is manifested in their everyday interactions, this research also brings us a step closer to better conceptualizing the study of children’s moral behavior.

What can parents, and others interested in adolescents, do to facilitate their healthy development? In many decades of work, researchers have continually identified three central dimensions of parenting: support, behavioral control, and psychological control, all of which have been associated consistently with either positive or negative indicators of adolescent functioning. Notwithstanding its volume, the research has been non specific as to the effects of these dimensions and has otherwise been limited by a predominant concentration on western families. This monograph reported on research that addressed these limitations by testing specific effects of the parenting dimensions and by doing with multiple analytic techniques on data from adolescents in 11 cultures across the world. In al sites, it was found that support was associated with higher adolescent social competence and lower depression; psychological control with higher depression and antisocial behavior; and behavioral control with lower antisocial behavior. Recommendations included considering that these dimensions are the parental contribution to relationship types or socialization conditions that, when achieved, (with parents or other significant person) are responsible for the effects.

The Black Caucus of the Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD) was founded in 1973 to address concerns about the portrayal of Black children in scientific research, the lack of participation of ethnic minority members in the governance structure of SRCD, and the perceived need for a mutual support system for minority scholars aspiring to productive careers in the child development field. In this monograph, early members of the Caucus describe its history through the first 25 years, 1973-97, in 15 chapters distributed among sections on Caucus history, teaching and mentoring, publications and research-related issues, and supportive academic institutions. The volume celebrates the accomplishments of the Caucus while also revisiting challenges that have arisen both internally and through membership in the SRCD parent organization. Key thematic issues include: cultural deficit versus cultural difference; linkages between poverty, race, and empowerment; advocacy versus objectivity in scientific research; and how the cultural or racial identity of the researcher informs scientific knowledge.The collaborations of Caucus members and others in SRCD modified the lens through which children of racially and ethnically diverse backgrounds are portrayed in the scientific literature.

This Monograph examines the role that children's questions play in their cognitive development. When children encounter a problem with their current knowledge state (a gap in their knowledge, some ambiguity they don't know how to resolve, some inconsistency they've detected), asking a question allows them to get targeted information exactly when they need it. This information is available to them when they are particularly receptive to it, and since it comes as a result of their own disequilibrium, it may have depth of processing benefits. In that questions allow children to get information they need to move their knowledge structures closer to adult-like states, the ability to ask questions to gather needed information constitutes an efficient mechanism for cognitive development. The studies presented here indicate that children ask information-seeking questions that are related in topic and structure to their cognitive development (usually). Parents give answers to these questions, but when they don't, the children persist in asking for the information, which suggests that the goal of this behavior is to recruit needed information. The content of these questions shifts within exchanges and over the course of development in ways that reflect concept building. Finally, children generate questions efficiently in order to gather needed information, and then are able to use this information productively; they tap into their existing conceptual knowledge in order to do this. Thus, the ability to ask questions is a powerful tool that allows children to gather information they need in order to learn about the world and solve problems in it.

Temperament has been a central element of the on-going effort to describe the distinctiveness of persons at every stage of development. Many researchers have examined the relations of temperament to emotions, behavior, and adjustment generally. Fewer studies have focused primarily on the nature and structure of temperament, however, and even fewer have examined the developmental course of temperament. This Monograph reports a significant exception. The authors undertook theoretically relevant behavioral, biological, and self-report assessments of a sample of 14-to-17 year olds who had been classified into one of four temperamental groups at 4 months of age. Infant temperamental categories were based on observed behavior to a battery of unfamiliar stimuli. The infants classified as high reactive (20 percent of the sample) displayed vigorous motor activity and frequent crying. Those classified as low reactive (40 percent) displayed minimal motor activity and crying. About 25 percent of the infants, called distressed, showed minimal motor activity but cried frequently, and 10 percent, characterized by vigorous motoricity but little crying, were called aroused.Previous evaluations of these children at 14 and 21 months, and 4, 7, and 11 years had revealed that those children initially classified as high reactive were most likely to be avoidant of unfamiliar events at the early ages and emotionally subdued, cautious, and wary of new situations at the later ages. By contrast, initially low-reactive children had been the least avoidant of unfamiliarity in the second year and most emotionally spontaneous and sociable at the later ages. At age 11 years, assessments also had revealed that initially high-reactive children were more likely than the low-reactive participants to display right hemisphere activation in the EEG, a larger evoked potential from the inferior colliculus, larger event related waveforms to discrepant scenes, and greater sympathetic tone in the cardiovascular system. In the follow-up of these individuals reported here, adolescents (14-17 years of age) who had been classified as high reactive in infancy were more likely than initially low reactive participants to display sympathetic tone in the cardiovascular system, to combine a fast latency with a large magnitude of the evoked potential from the inferior colliculus, and to show shallower habituation of the event-related potential to discrepant visual events.Moreover, compared to their low-reactive agemates, initially high reactive adolescents more often reported being subdued in unfamiliar situations, experiencing a dour mood and anxiety over the future, and being religious. An important finding is that behavior and biology were more clearly dissociated in adolescence than at earlier ages. However, infant temperamental category at 4 months remained a powerful predictor of behavior in adolescence, suggesting that the features that characterize the two temperamental biases by initially high- and low-reactive are not completely malleable to the profound effects of brain growth and experience.

We present a domain-general framework called constrained attentional associative learning to provide a developmental account for how and when infants form concepts for animates and inanimates that encapsulate not only their surface appearance but also their movement characteristics. Six simulations with the same general-purpose architecture implement the features of the theory to model infant behavior in learning about objects’ motion trajectory, their causal role, their onset of motion, and the initial mapping between a label and a moving object. Behavioral experiments with infants tested novel hypotheses generated by the model, showing that verbal labels initially may be associated with specific features rather than overall shape. Implications of the framework and model are discussed in relation to the mechanisms of early learning, the development of the animate–inanimate distinction, and the nature of development in the first years of life.

Adolescence is often thought of as a period during which parent–child interactions can be relatively stressed and conflictual. There are individual differences in this regard, however, with only a modest percent of youth experiencing extremely conflictual relationships with their parents. Relatively little empirical research, however, addresses individual differences in the quality of parent–adolescent interactions concerning potentially conflictual issues. The research reported in this monograph examined dispositional and parenting predictors of the quality of parents’ and their adolescent children’s emotional displays and positive and negative verbalizations when dealing with conflictual issues. Of particular interest were patterns of continuity and discontinuity in the factors related to conflicts. A multimethod, multireporter (mother, teacher, and sometimes adolescent reports) longitudinal approach(over 4 years) was used to assess adolescents’ dispositional characteristics (control/regulation, resiliency, and negative emotionality), youths’ externalizing problems, and parenting variables (warmth, positive expressivity, discussion of emotion, positive and negative family expressivity). Parentadolescent conflicts appear to be influenced by both child characteristics and quality of prior and concurrent parenting, and child effects may be more evident than parent effects in this pattern of relations.