According to a widely shared view, experience plays only a limited role in children's acquisition of the capacity to pass the false belief test: at most, it facilitates or attunes the development of mindreading abilities from infancy to early childhood. Against the facilitation—and also the maturation—hypothesis, I report empirical data attesting that children and even adults never come to understand false beliefs when deprived of proper social and linguistic interaction. In contrast to the attunement hypothesis, I argue that (...) alleged mindreading abilities in infancy differ significantly from those required to pass the false belief test at age four. I conclude that children's success in the false belief test reflects the acquisition of a novel psychological competence, and argue that social experience in the form of conversation about mental states teaches children to exploit belief reports to predict intelligent behaviour, and induces their acquisition of a capacity to recognize and track others' beliefs across contexts. (shrink)

While issues of efficacy and specificity are crucial for the future of neurofeedback training, there may be alternative designs and control analyses to circumvent the methodological and ethical problems associated with double-blind placebo studies. Surprisingly, most NF studies do not report the most immediate result of their NF training, i.e. whether or not children with ADHD gain control over their brain activity during the training sessions. For the investigation of specificity, however, it seems essential to analyze the learning and (...) adaptation processes that take place in the course of the training and to relate improvements in self-regulated brain activity across training sessions to behavioral, neuropsychological and electrophysiological outcomes. To this aim, a review of studies on neurofeedback training with ADHD patients, which include the analysis of learning across training sessions or relate training performance to outcome, is presented. Methods on how to evaluate and quantify learning of EEG regulation over time are discussed. “Non-learning” has been reported in a small number of ADHD-studies, but has not been a focus of general methodological discussion so far. For this reason, selected results from the brain-computer interface (BCI) research on the so-called “brain-computer illiteracy”, the inability to gain control over one’s brain activity, are also included. It is concluded that in the discussion on specificity, more attention should be devoted to the analysis of EEG regulation performance in the course of the training and its impact on clinical outcome. It is necessary to improve the knowledge on characteristic cross-session and within-session learning trajectories in ADHD and to provide the best conditions for learning. (shrink)

The ability to explain the occurrence of errors in children's speech is an essential component of successful theories of language acquisition. The present study tested some generativist and constructivist predictions about error on the questions produced by ten English-learning children between 2 and 5 years of age. The analyses demonstrated that, as predicted by some generativist theories [e.g. Santelmann, L., Berk, S., Austin, J., Somashekar, S. & Lust. B. (2002). Continuity and development in the acquisition of inversion in (...) yes/no questions: dissociating movement and inflection, Journal of Child Language, 29, 813-842], questions with auxiliary DO attracted higher error rates than those with modal auxiliaries. However, in wh-questions, questions with modals and DO attracted equally high error rates, and these findings could not be explained in terms of problems forming questions with why or negated auxiliaries. It was concluded that the data might be better explained in terms of a constructivist account that suggests that entrenched item-based constructions may be protected from error in children's speech, and that errors occur when children resort to other operations to produce questions [e.g. Dabrowska, E. (2000). From formula to schema: the acquisition of English questions. Cognitive Liguistics, 11, 83-102; Rowland, C. F. & Pine, J. M. (2000). Subject-auxiliary inversion errors and wh-question acquisition: What children do know? Journal of Child Language, 27, 157-181; Tomasello, M. (2003). Constructing a language: A usage-based theory of language acquisition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press]. However, further work on constructivist theory development is required to allow researchers to make predictions about the nature of these operations. (shrink)

Objective: Appropriate reactivity to emotional facial expressions, even if these are seen whilst we are engaged in another activity, is critical for successful social interaction. Children with conduct problems (CP) and high levels of callous-unemotional (CU) traits are characterized by blunted reactivity to other people's emotions, while children with CP and low levels of CU traits can over-react to perceived emotional threat. No study to date has compared children with CP and high vs. low levels of CU (...) traits to typically developing (TD) children or each other, using a task that assesses attentional capture by irrelevant emotional faces. -/- Method: All participants performed an attentional capture task in which they were asked to judge the orientation of a single male face that was displayed simultaneously with two female faces. Three types of trials were presented, trials with all neutral faces, trials with an emotional distractor face and trials with an emotional target face. Fifteen boys with CP and high levels of CU traits, 17 boys with CP and low levels of CU traits and 17 age and ability matched TD boys were included in the final study sample. -/- Results: Compared to TD children and children with low levels of CU traits, children with CP and high levels of CU traits showed reduced attentional capture by irrelevant emotional faces. -/- Conclusions: This study is the first to demonstrate a different pattern in emotional attentional capture in children with CP depending on their level of CU traits. (shrink)

Frances Tustin's classic text _Autistic States in Children_ put forward convincing clinical evidence that some forms of childhood autism are psychogenic and respond to methods of treatment very different from the behavioural techniques often adopted without success. Her pioneering work with such children has gained ground since the book was first published and she herself has revised her understanding of the aetiology of psychogenic autism. This revised edition of the book incorporates her new thinking based on recent infant (...) observational studies and her own clinical experience. (shrink)

Childhood self-control is currently receiving great scientific and public attention because it could predict much of adult’s life success and well-being. Specialized interventions based on findings in social psychology and neuroscience potentially enhance children’s capacity to exercise self-control. This perspective triggers hopes that self-control enhancement allows us to say good-bye for good to potentially unsafe psychopharmacological agents and electronic brain stimulants. This chapter provides an in-depth ethical analysis of pediatric self-control enhancement and points toward a series of serious (...) conceptual and ethical concerns. First, it gives an overview of current psychological as well as neuroscientific research on self-control, and it presents longitudinal studies that emphasize the importance of childhood self-control for adult life success. Second, it critically discusses the concept of self-control presupposed in these approaches and points to crucial limitations. Going beyond an understanding of self-control as a sophisticated means of goal-achievement, I will argue for a comprehensive understanding that takes the inherent normativity of self-controlled behavior seriously. In that context, self-control enhancement appears as not necessarily desirable and occasionally even detrimental. Finally, this chapter questions the notion of childhood implicit in current research and how values typically put on this phase of life could get affected by self-control enhancement. I finish with an exploration of the conditions under which pediatric self-control enhancement is either impermissible, permissible, or maybe obligatory. (shrink)

Two recent studies have shown a relationship between male height and number of offspring in contemporary developed-world populations. One of them argues as a result that directional selection for male tallness is both positive and unconstrained. This paper uses data from a large and socially representative national cohort of men who were born in Britain in March 1958. Taller men were less likely to be childless than shorter ones. They did not have a greater mean number of children. If (...) anything, the pattern was the reverse, since men from higher socioeconomic groups tended to be taller and also to have smaller families. However, clear evidence was found that men who were taller than average were more likely to find a long-term partner, and also more likely to have several different long-term partners. This confirms the finding that tall men are considered more attractive and suggests that, in a noncontracepting environment, they would have more children. There is also evidence of stabilizing selection, since extremely tall men had an excess of health problems and an increased likelihood of childlessness. The conclusion is that male tallness has been selected for in recent human evolution but has been constrained by developmental factors and stabilizing selection on the extremely tall. (shrink)

In most children’s hospitals, there are very few ethics consultations, even though there are many ethically complex cases. We hypothesize that the reason for this may be that hospitals develop different mechanisms to address ethical issues and that many of these mechanisms are closer in spirit to the goals of the pioneers of clinical ethics than is the mechanism of a formal ethics consultation. To show how this is true, we first review the history of collaboration between philosophers and (...) physicians about clinical dilemmas. Then, as a case-study, we describe the different venues that have developed at one children’s hospital to address ethical issues. At our hospital, there are nine different venues in which ethical issues are regularly and explicitly addressed. They are ethics committee meetings, Nursing Ethics Forum, ethics Brown Bag workshops, PICU ethics rounds, Grand Rounds, NICU Comprehensive Care Rounds, Palliative Care Team case conferences, multidisciplinary consults in Fetal Health Center, and ethics consultations. In our hospital, ethics consults account for only a tiny percentage of ethics discussions. We suspect that most hospitals have multiple and varied venues for ethics discussions. We hope this case study will stimulate research in other hospitals analyzing the various ways in which ethicists and ethics committees can build an ethical environment in hospitals. Such research might suggest that ethicists need to develop a different set of “core competencies” than the ones that are needed to do ethics consultations. Instead, they should focus on their skills in creating multiple “moral spaces” in which regular and ongoing discussion of ethical issues would take place. A successful ethicist would empower everyone in the hospital to speak up about the values that they believe are central to respectful, collaborative practice and patient care. Such a role is closer to what the first hospital philosophers set out to do than in the role of the typical hospital ethics consultant today. (shrink)

In a study involving 62 Danish children with autism spectrum disorder, we obtained results showing that the mastery of linguistic recursion is a significant predictor of success in second-order false belief tasks. The same study also showed that the mastery of linguistic recursion was not significantly correlated with success in a task involving three heavily used Danish discourse particles. This calls for further explanation, as the reasoning involved in both types of tasks seems similar. In this paper, (...) we discuss second-order false belief reasoning, the reasoning underlying the use of the three Danish discourse particles, say what we know about them experimentally, and discuss what they do have in common. (shrink)

Research in school success in contemporary China has argued that market reforms have reproduced the advantages for children from the cadre and the professional families while simultaneously creating new opportunities for children of the new arising economic elites. However, it has performed less for traditional peasant families. This book places a special emphasis on how rural parents from different social backgrounds use _guanxi_ to maintain the interconnectedness between their families and schools to create advantages for their (...) class='Hi'>children in school success. It investigates, by an ethnographic study in a rural county in middle China, how families from different social backgrounds within rural society get involved in the schooling of their children and how this contributes to different patterns of school success. The book argues that schools provide few formal and routine channels for rural parents to become involved in their children’s schooling. This raises the importance of family strategic initiatives to employ _guanxi_ in the creation of advantages for their children’s school success. It concludes with discussions about _guanxi_ as an important mechanism for social exclusion in post-socialist China. Chapters include: Family Strategies, Parental Involvement, and School Success The Roles of Parents: Voices of Parents in Zong Regarding School Involvement Policy Discourses: Missing the Link between Family and School Peasants: Family and Kinship The Blurring Division between Home and School This concise and comprehensive book is a qualitative study that will appeal to researchers and advance students in Chinese education and society. (shrink)

From an early age, exposure to a spoken language has allowed us to implicitly capture the structure underlying the succession of speech sounds in that language and to segment it into meaningful units. Statistical learning, the ability to pick up patterns in the sensory environment without intention or reinforcement, is thus assumed to play a central role in the acquisition of the rule-governed aspects of language, including the discovery of word boundaries in the continuous acoustic stream. Although extensive evidence has (...) been gathered from artificial languages experiments showing that children and adults are able to track the regularities embedded in the auditory input, as the probability of one syllable to follow another syllable in the speech stream, the developmental trajectory of this ability remains controversial. In this work, we have collected Event-Related Potentials while 5-year-old children and young adults were exposed to a speech stream made of the repetition of eight three-syllable nonsense words presenting different levels of predictability to mimic closely what occurs in natural languages and to get new insights into the changes that the mechanisms underlying auditory statistical learning might undergo through the development. The participants performed the aSL task first under implicit and, subsequently, under explicit conditions to further analyze if children take advantage of previous knowledge of the to-be-learned regularities to enhance SL, as observed with the adult participants. These findings would also contribute to extend our knowledge of the mechanisms available to assist SL at each developmental stage. Although behavioral signs of learning, even under explicit conditions, were only observed for the adult participants, ERP data showed evidence of online segmentation in the brain in both groups, as indexed by modulations in the N100 and N400 components. A detailed analysis of the neural data suggests, however, that adults and children rely on different mechanisms to assist the extraction of word-like units from the continuous speech stream, hence supporting the view that SL with auditory linguistic materials changes through development. (shrink)

This paper interrogates and reclaims clown practices in children’s rehabilitation as ‘foolish.’ Attempts to legitimize and ‘take seriously’ clown practices in the health sciences frame the work of clowns as secondary to the ‘real’ work of medical professionals and diminish the ways clowns support emotional vulnerability and bravery with a willingness to fail and be ridiculous as fundamental to their work. Narrow conceptualizations of clown practices in hospitals as only happy and funny overlook the ways clowns also routinely engage (...) with sadness, despair, discomfort and many other ways of being and doing. Our exploration of clown practices as foolish exposes the ways children’s rehabilitation upholds particular neoliberal models of success and invites a re-centring of rehabilitation and health care research and practice towards relationship building, supporting meaningful projects and a continued nurturing of aesthetic and pleasurable ways of being-in-the-world in the present moment as valuable unto themselves. (shrink)

Definition of the problem Compassionate use is the use of unapproved drugs in groups of patients suffering from a disease that, in the absence of an alternative treatment option, is life-threatening or leads to severe disability. Physicians are not in charge because access to the drug is only granted by pharmaceutical companies, which comes along with many ethical issues. Launched in 2020, the program of Onasemnogenum abeparvovecum against spinal muscular atrophy in children reached a new dimension. The intent of (...) this drug is to stop the progression of the disease with just a single dose, but the company limited the doses in the program to only 100. The global allocation was by lottery, which was considered a novelty in compassionate use history and therefore widely criticized. This paper investigates alternative allocation principles. Arguments Each possible principle is accompanied by many aspects that need to be considered with regard to urgency and global distribution. This makes some principles like first-come-first-served seem negligible. Remaining principles are ordered hierarchically to derive an algorithm that can represent an alternative to a lottery. A combination of willingness to participate in research, urgency, and likelihood of success (relative to the availability of supportive treatment options) may be considered in similar cases in future global compassionate use programs with children. Conclusion Since universal algorithms are difficult to define, allocation criteria should always be discussed by an independent panel of experts. Both the constitution of such a panel and its mandatory consultation are necessary in order to decrease the burden for all those involved and to prevent arbitrariness. (shrink)

The level of medical care to patients and the success of the implementation of the national project "Health" depend on the health status and doctor's professionalism. Modern healthcare reform is being implemented by optimizing costs, merging medical organizations, closing ineffective hospitals, expanding the use of high-tech care and informatization of the doctor's activities. All this makes it necessary to assess the health of doctors. Scientists have studied the quality of life and identified the professional burnout of doctors in (...) class='Hi'>children's clinics in different age groups. Primary care pediatricians have a higher quality of life score when compared to the standard [1]. However, all groups have a high level of professional burnout. The pre-retirement group of doctors has more unfavorable profile. They are highly professional specialists but may experience emotional discomfort because the pension system has been reformed. This situation requires the introduction of preventive work with doctors of this age as a group with great potential and capable of professional longevity. (shrink)

During the summer of 1986, I was invited to become a Master Teacher in a summer program for gifted and talented children because of my experience and expertise with the Philosophy for Children program. Although this program is not designed specifically for gifted students, it is one which, in a regular school setting, has been seen to be particularly well-suited to their needs. I was curious to see whether implementation of the Pixie program in this setting and with (...) these students could be as successful as I had seen it be in the regular classroom. (shrink)

In vitro fertilization technology has been in use in Poland for over 25 years with success and social approval, but it is still not regulated under Polish law. The current debate over different non-medical aspects of reproductive technologies in Poland is extremely heated and highly politicized. Politicians on the right, Catholic clergy and some journalists use very radical language and criticize IVF as a technique that plays with the lives and deaths of thousands and thousands of children. The (...) aim of this article is to follow the Polish debate on IVF in the context of Poland’s transition, which is marked primarily by two events: the collapse of communism in 1989 and access to the European Union in 2004. The article shows that the IVF debate concerns not only moral choices or legal regulation, but also citizenship, nation, state, and the role of the Catholic Church within. Moreover, it creates new citizens: frozen embryos, which being independent persons, have the right to life, ‘dignity’ and care. The history of IVF in Poland reveals the different tensions in the Polish transition to liberal democracy and it can be used to view a ‘big’ history of the Polish transition. It is one of the micro-histories which make this big story about Poland after 1989. Analyses of both the abortion debate and the IVF debate in Poland show that the process of democratization is very much connected with limiting women’s reproductive rights, including the right to choose infertility treatment. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:From Children's Perspectives:A Model of Aesthetic Processing in TheatreJeanne Klein (bio)Since the children's theatre movement began, producers have sought to create artistic theatre experiences that best correspond to the adult-constructed aesthetic "needs" of young audiences by categorizing common differences according to age groups. For decades, directors simply chose plays on the basis of dramatic genres (e.g., fairy tales), as defined by children's presupposed interests or "tastes," (...) by subscribing to Winifred Ward's broad descriptions of the "imaginative period" (ages six to nine), the "heroic period" (ages nine to twelve), and the "romantic period" (over age thirteen).1 Years later, Moses Goldberg elaborated upon these generalized divisions while cautioning that "no individual fits exactly into any set of categories."2 In his position paper on aesthetic development, he argued for individual access to aesthetic techniques, processes, and products for all ages, paralleled by four stages of cognitive capabilities, based on exposure to (1) arena-style participation theatre (for ages five to eight), which emphasizes story enactments; (2) a wide range of proscenium-style theatrical conventions; (3) relevant play content that directly relates characters' problems to spectators' lives and growing self-awareness; and (4) social issue plays that pose ethical dilemmas as cultural reflections.3 Meanwhile, Jed Davis compiled Age Group Profiles, organized by cognitive, spatial, emotional, and moral/ethical development, from his review of Piagetian literature; and Johnny Saldaña summarized stages of young interpretations of theatre from his seven-year longitudinal study.4Suffice it to say, the field of developmental psychology has come a long way since Piaget formulated his four constructivist stages. Since the mid-1950s, the cognitive revolution has spurred more integrated theories of information processing and depth-of-processing models that explain and predict how people construct schematic frameworks of knowledge and [End Page 40] assimilate and accommodate new information as a function of perception, attention, emotion, comprehension, memory, and social and moral behaviors. Although masculinist metaphors of hierarchical "staircases" and linear networks of associative learning still dominate computational models, feminist perspectives, which engender social cognitive, co-relational negotiations of narratives in situated contexts, have gained more widespread acceptance—by including theatre as an apt metaphor for development.5 Over the past twenty years or more, cognitive psychologists have finally discovered what dramatic theorists have known about narrative structures since Aristotle's Poetics: Powerful stories contain universal themes about the human condition through characters' conflicting actions. The most successful dramas are those that allow spectators to enter into a protagonist's psychological consciousness or "inner" vision in order to empathize with her "outer" reality.6While several developmental models of aesthetic understanding, experience, and appreciation exist in the realms of visual art and music education, few examples have been proposed in regard to theatre, particularly for child audiences.7 Instead, producers of Theatre for Young Audiences (TYA) tend to romanticize its social and moral "effects" upon youth by believing passionately that viewing one remarkable performance has the potential (the operative word) to "cause" positive, social changes in children's minds, hearts, and behaviors, given the presumed "power of human imagination."8 This obsession with progressive change foregrounds adults' desires to control human destiny by predicting "causes and effects" located in children's responses to live performances. However, this "folk theory" fails to explain how young imaginations actually function aesthetically from the contextual evidence of reception studies with child audiences. Just as feminists have argued for a distinctive "feminist aesthetics," based on women's alternative ways of knowing,9 I argue that children gaze upon theatre in differential ways by including age as a variable factor. "Children's aesthetics," their perceived interpretations of theatre, differ from that of adults' theorized postulations, based in part on their shorter life experiences with this medium. To this end, over the course of my career, I have sought to understand theatre from children's perspectives by focusing my research in the social cognitive theories and social science methods of child development, primarily through the vast literature of television and mass media studies conducted with young people over the past forty years. In particular, medium-specific studies that parse theatrical forms from dramatic content... (shrink)

Policy makers in education do not perceive the education system as a unique discipline, but rather judge it using terms appropriate for the world of economics. Methods of analysis and decision-making that exist in the world of economics are implemented in the field of education. This reality was the basis for the authors’ research on the integration of technological systems for the advancement of students which was conducted as part of their desire to understand processes of change in learning systems. (...) It became clear that in order to succeed in the process of integrating innovative technological systems in the schools, society should not “flood the schools” with technology, but should rather use the “islands of success method.”. (shrink)

In April 1998, the post-apartheid South African government introduced a monthly cash transfer for children in poor households. A requirement for getting the grant was that the birth of the child had to be registered, and the adult primary caregiver had to have the citizen identity document. The success of the system of support was contingent on the new democratic government's ability to integrate into one national welfare system what had been fragmented under apartheid into many racially separated (...) systems; it also, ironically, built on the apartheid-era state pension delivery system. Within a decade the grant reached more than ten million children, and was associated with a rapid increase in birth registrations, marking the poorest children's first step into citizenship, and opening up the possibility of later access to other programmes and entitlements. (shrink)

Middle- and upper-middle-class students continue to outpace those from less privileged backgrounds. Most attempts to redress this inequality focus on the issue of access to financial resources, but as _Producing Success_ makes clear, the problem goes beyond mere economics. In this eye-opening study, Peter Demerath examines a typical suburban American high school to explain how some students get ahead. Demerath undertook four years of research at a Midwestern high school to examine the mercilessly competitive culture that drives students to advance. (...) _Producing Success_ reveals the many ways the community’s ideology of achievement plays out: students hone their work ethics and employ various strategies to succeed, from negotiating with teachers to cheating; parents relentlessly push their children while manipulating school policies to help them get ahead; and administrators aid high performers in myriad ways, even naming over forty students “valedictorians.” Yet, as Demerath shows, this unswerving commitment to individual advancement takes its toll, leading to student stress and fatigue, incivility and vandalism, and the alienation of the less successful. Insightful and candid, _Producing Success_ is an often troubling account of the educationally and morally questionable results of the American culture of success. (shrink)

The Archaeology of Semiotics and the social order of things is edited by George Nash and George Children and brings together 15 thought-provoking chapters from contributors around the world. A sequel to an earlier volume published in 1997, it tackles the problem of understanding how complex communities interact with landscape and shows how the rules concerning landscape constitute a recognised and readable grammar. The mechanisms underlying landscape grammar are both physical and mental, being based in part on the mindset (...) of the individual; the same landscape can thus evoke different meanings for different people and at different times. People's perception has greatly influenced the construction of landscapes over millennia but, until recently, the potential of this area has been largely untapped. Apart from chapters focusing solely upon human interaction with landscape, there are several which skilfully integrate artefacts and place with landscape (e.g. Gheorghiu and Sognnes). Other chapters look at the way people have marked the landscape through such mechanisms as rock-art (e.g. Clegg, Devereux, Estévez, Fossati, Kelleher and Skier). Rock-art establishes personal and communal identity in relation to landscape and it is clear that other forms of visual expression were in place which distinctively created special places within the landscape. Landscape constructs can bind cultures together; bringing the old ways of reading the landscape into contemporary life (e.g. Smiseth). Defining early and late prehistoric landscapes and segregating these into, say, mundane domestic and ritualised spaces rely on both clear and subtle archaeologies and in this volume distinct monument clustering and ritualised linearity are considered (e.g. Mason and Nash). A volume such as this cannot escape the influence of New World approaches, such as anthropology, and in many respects chapters by Bender, Muller and Merritt give context to other chapters within the book. Finally, one must consider text as a means of constructing landscape and this is considered by Heyd, who eloquently deconstructs the travel diary of a 17th century Japanese poet. This will be an important volume for archaeologists, landscape scholars and students. The many approaches used are tried and tested, forming an invaluable resource and not just another edited book. (shrink)

This study examines steroid production in fathers watching their children compete, extending previous research of vicarious success or failure on men’s hormone levels. Salivary testosterone and cortisol levels were measured in 18 fathers watching their children play in a soccer tournament. Participants completed a survey about the game and provided demographic information. Fathers with higher pregame testosterone levels were more likely to report that referees were biased against their children’s teams, and pre- to postgame testosterone elevation (...) was predicted by watching sons compete rather than daughters as well as perceptions of unfair officiating. Pregame cortisol was not associated with pregame testosterone or with perceived officiating bias, but cortisol did fluctuate synergistically with testosterone during spectator competition. Although fathers showed no consistent testosterone change in response to winning or losing, pregame testosterone may mediate steroid hormone reactivity to other aspects of their children’s competition. (shrink)

Young children’s failures in reasoning about beliefs and desires, and especially about false beliefs, have been much studied. However, there are few accounts of successful belief-desire reasoning in older children or adults. An exception to this is a model in which belief attribution is treated as a process wherein an inhibitory system selects the most likely content for the belief to be attributed from amongst several competing contents [Leslie, A. M., & Polizzi, P. (1998). Developmental Science, 1, 247–254]. (...) We tested this model with an ‘avoidance false belief task’ in which subjects predict the behavior of a character, who wants to avoid an object but who is mistaken about which of three locations it is in. The task has two equally correct answers—in seeking to avoid the location where she mistakenly believes the object to be, the character might equally go to the location where the object actually is, or to the remaining empty location. However, the model predicts that subjects will prefer one of these answers, selecting the object’s actual location over the empty location. This bias was confirmed in a series of five experiments with children aged between 4 and 8 years of age. A sixth experiment ruled out two rival explanations for children’s biased responding. Two further experiments found the opposite bias in adults. These findings support one selection model as an account of belief-desire reasoning in children, and suggest that a different model is needed for adults. The process of selecting contents for mental state attributions shows a developmental shift between 8 years of age and adulthood. (shrink)

We welcome Ms Smajdor’s critique into our investigations of expected future tax gains to the state from children conceived by in vitro fertilisation .1 To better inform the JME readership, we wish to correct some misinterpretations of our research by Smajdor, and to highlight some weaknesses of current IVF funding policies.Our investigation sought to establish the long-term net tax contribution from an IVF-conceived child, assuming that the child was average in every respect .2 We conducted this analysis on the (...) basis that IVF, and other assisted reproductive treatments, are unique among all medical interventions—unique in the sense that their success leads to the creation of human life; a life that would not have existed had the technology not been available and accessible to couples willing to undergo treatment. Hence, this method provides us with an opportunity to explore lost tax revenue to the state resulting from children that have not been born due to limited public access to IVF treatments currently observed in the UK and many other countries.In our investigations, the costs of IVF were treated as an investment in human capital with future long-term cost and revenue implications for the state. Our evaluation ignored the many humanistic reasons for offering IVF treatment to infertile couples and concentrated solely on the possible economic benefits.3 The perspective of the analysis was that of the state; hence …. (shrink)

The reform of China’s one-child policy allows families to have more children and thus may affect anticipation of intergenerational succession of family businesses and drive family firms to improve their corporate social responsibility (CSR). Using a difference-in-differences design, we find that the reform positively affects the CSR of family firms. We also find that the positive impact is more pronounced for family firms whose owners have fewer children, have no son, and have not yet surpassed reproductive age (older (...) than 50), which confirms the theory that anticipation of intergenerational succession drives CSR in such firms. Moreover, we find that the positive impact is more pronounced for firms that operate in environments where CSR is more strategically important. We validate our findings by showing that the reform prompts investment in value-enhancing CSR and curtails short-termism. This study offers novel evidence that government policies conducive to intergenerational succession in family firms can lead to not only strategic CSR but also to truly ethical corporate behaviour. (shrink)

Ecologically valid procedures for eliciting and measuring children's anger are needed to enhance researchers' theories of children's emotional competence and to guide intervention efforts aimed at reactive aggression. The purpose of this article is to describe a laboratory-based game-playing procedure that has been used successfully to elicit and measure children's anger across observational, physiological, and self-report channels. Steps taken to ensure that participants are treated ethically and fairly are discussed. The article highlights recently published data that emphasize (...) the importance of provoking and assessing children's anger across multiple channels using laboratory-based procedures. Finally, it presents preliminary data that suggest that the safeguards taken to protect children were successful in making both children and their parents feel well treated and comfortable. (shrink)

The argument for children's rights in health care has been long in the making. The success of this position is reflected in the 1995 American Academy of Pediatrics recommendations for the role of children in health care decisionmaking, which suggest that children be given greater voice as they mature. But there are good moral and practical reasons for exercising caution in these health care situations, especially when the child and parents disagree. Parents need the moral and (...) legal space within which to make decisions that will facilitate their child's long‐term autonomy, not only her present‐day autonomy. Moreover, third‐party intrusion, by physicians or the state, should be resisted unless negligent and abusive decisions are in the making. (shrink)

Offers a self-help and how-to guide for parents that will help to: examine the psychology of failure; define the major student success factors; explore the multiple intelligences of children; design the home as a learning center; manage homework and study time; sustain candid and comforting conversations; create family rituals and celebrations.

BackgroundResearch during 2020 has been rapidly attending to the impact of COVID-19 on various dimensions of wellbeing on adults and children around the world. However, less attention has focused on the psychoeducational impact on children and their families. To our knowledge, no currently available studies have looked specifically at the impact of COVID-19 on students with dyslexia and their families. Research on this topic is needed to offer greater support for this population of students and their families.ObjectiveThe main (...) objective of this paper is to examine the psychoeducational impact of the required COVID-19 quarantine in Spain among children with dyslexia and their families.MethodA sample of 32 children with dyslexia and their mothers participated in this study.MeasuresChildren and adolescents with dyslexia and their mother completed several measures before the required national quarantine in Spain and again during the quarantine. Children completed measures of depression, state anxiety, reading activity, and reading motivation. Mothers provided demographic information and completed measures related to students’ emotional and behavioral difficulties as well as parenting stress, parental distress, and a questionnaire about educational problems during quarantine.ResultsMajor findings showed that during quarantine, children with dyslexia had increased levels of depression and anxiety symptoms, and parents perceived their children as having more emotional symptoms, hyperactivity-inattention, and conduct problems. During quarantine, children and adolescents with dyslexia also showed less reading activity and less reading motivation. Parents also reported significantly more stress, during quarantine compared to pre-quarantine conditions. Some demographic and psychological variables predicted children’s state anxiety as well parental stress. The questionnaire related to impacts of quarantine also revealed several important findings. For example, nearly all parents of children with dyslexia reported difficulties in establishing study routines, that the quarantine negatively affected their child’s learning, and that they did not receive sufficient help from teachers on how to support their child’s learning. Additionally, the vast majority of the parents were very worried about the child’s learning and school success, the child’s motivation and interest in reading, the child’s peer relations, and the professional skills of the child’s teacher.ConclusionThis study offers a preliminary investigation into this topic and elucidates several psychoeducational challenges that children with dyslexia and their families have experienced during the quarantine in Spain. Study findings highlight the need to provide immediate support for children with dyslexia and emphasizes the importance of developing prevention programs to mitigate any future negative impacts of COVID-19 on children with dyslexia and their parents. (shrink)

To protect children in research, procedures that are not administered in the medical interests of a child must be restricted. The risk threshold for these procedures is generally measured according to the concept of minimal risk. Minimal risk is often defined according to the risks of “daily life.” But it is not clear whose daily life should serve as the baseline; that is, it is not clear to whom minimal risk should refer. Commentators in research ethics often argue that (...) “minimal risk” should refer to healthy children or the subjects of the research. I argue that neither of these interpretations is successful. I propose a new interpretation in which minimal risk refers to children who are not unduly burdened by their daily lives. I argue that children are not unduly burdened when they fare well, and I defend a substantive goods account of children’s welfare. (shrink)

The chapter presents the prototyping of a thinking routine designed to foster good inference habits in children ages 6 to 11. The prototyping was developed at Ninho, an educational project for children from underprivileged households in Brazil. The thinking routines by Ritchhart and colleagues (2006) served as our starting point. Following a Virtue Education (VE) approach, we supposed that the repeated application would conduce to habituation. In addition, to increase peer-to-peer interactions, the teacher applying the routines worked as (...) a facilitator in a Community of Inquiry (CI). After six months of application, the results were partially successful. We identified that the repeated exposition to the magic question “What makes you say that?” made children more aware of the evidence supporting their assumptions. Furthermore, the interactions between peers made them recognize different perspectives. However, we also identified some shortcomings. Most of them seemed to arise from cognitive biases. At the individual level, belief perseverance kept children too attached to their first assumptions. They preferred self-serving rationalizations instead of accepting a counter-argument. At the group level, we identified problems of social contagion such as information cascades. The effects of a first opinion rhetorically voiced were hard to efface. Since none of the steps on the previous routines addressed these biases, we prototyped a routine to start filling this gap. Following Critical Thinking (CT) theorists, we added a step of structured instruction concerning one specific reasoning technique - the inference to the best explanation. Moreover, the recommendation of cognitive psychologists motivated the inclusion of some extra features to avoid groupthink biases. For instance, a visual table that juxtaposes contrasting arguments should facilitate comparative evaluations. Also, a star-based evaluation scale should help different individuals to discuss their assessments based on a common ground. As described in the end, the prototype with elements from VE, CI and CT presented promising results. (shrink)

This second edition of Young Children and the Environment is a practical resource that illustrates the difference that early childhood educators can make by working with children, their families and the wider community to tackle the contemporary issue of sustainable living. This second edition has been substantially revised and updated, with a new section exploring sustainability education in a variety of global contexts. Researched and written by authors recognised as leaders in their own countries, this section provides readers (...) with international resources and perspectives to further their teaching about early childhood education for sustainability. The text engages with new curriculum initiatives that have placed greater emphasis on educating for sustainability, and equips educators with the knowledge to teach this revised content. It remains accessibly written with ample case studies, vignettes and 'Provocations' to engage readers and provide insights into how early childhood education for sustainability can occur successfully in practice. (shrink)

In the majority of research, resettled immigrant and refugee parents are often considered to be less involved with their children’s schooling than majority parents. This study challenges such research positions, based on narrative interviews about parenting in exile conducted with refugee parents resettled in Norway. Cultural psychology and positioning theory have inspired the analyses. The choice of methodology and conceptualisations have brought forth a rich vein of material, which illuminated agency and active positions in the parents’ narratives about involvement (...) with their children’s education. Involvement narratives of success achieved by parents taking action are presented as well as narratives of thwarted agency. Parents’ narrated action includes also involvement outside officialdom, such as informal contact with teachers. It is assumed that the latter involvement forms have become invisible in the majority of earlier research on refugee parents’ school involvement due to methodological choices, and may have contributed to deficit positioning of refugee parents as passive in school involvement. This article’s agency narratives form a sharp contrast to such deficit positioning. (shrink)

The paper deals with Czech teachers’ experiences of teaching immigrant children in Czech schools at the primary and lower secondary level. Upon introducing the theoretical context the paper presents the results of empirical research based on semi-structured interviews with teachers. The survey demonstrates teachers’ attitudes to the current state of integration of immigrant children and the extent to which they are prepared for teaching this group of children. Teachers have a wide variety of opinion on different measures (...) for improving the education of immigrants. Their attitudes towards immigrant children are largely influenced by the amount of previous experience with teaching immigrant children. An individualized teacher approach to immigrants plays an essential role in the successful integration of immigrant children in schools, as do the quality of interaction with immigrant parents, the similarity of the immigrant family culture to Czech culture and the range of measures designed to improve integration. (shrink)

This study sets out to examine Finnish and Russian children?s representations of intellectual competence as contextualised in the hierarchies of abilities, age and gender. Finnish and Russian pupils, aged 11?12?years, were asked to draw pictures of an intelligent person and an ordinary person. It was found that gender appearance of intelligent men and women was less heterosexual than that of ordinary men and women. In Russian pictures, the intelligent characters, especially women, were widely separated from the ordinary ones in (...) terms of cognitive-mental features. In Finnish depictions, the differentiation between the intelligent and ordinary characters, especially women, was not so categorical and was primarily based on status. It appears that Russian children are apt to relate their representations of intellectual ability to the institutionalised systems of cognitive competence, education and science, whereas Finnish children associate intelligence to social success as well. Further, cultural and gender-related hierarchies of age seemed to reflect in the children?s images. (shrink)

Sounds play crucial roles in a poem’s meaning (re)construction. Grasping the content of a literary work such as poetry often requires a profound interpretation of the underlying linguistic cum phonetic codes of its discourse. Extant studies on Nigerian children’s poetry have paid little attention to this aspect of meaning conception, thereby concentrating mainly on the surface lexical constructs. Hence, this study aims to examine imagic iconicity in children’s poems in order to demonstrate how a poem’s thematic realization is (...) inferred through the interpretation of the phonic and acoustic nature of the sounds employed. The study involves five poems: three from Ossie Enekwe’s Gentle Birds Come to me and two from Ikeogu Oke’s Song of Success and Other Poems for Children. The analysis is anchored to insights from Charles Sanders Peirce’s concept of the iconic sign, and exploits the action of acoustic and phonetic articulation of sounds to determine their functions and effects in the poems. The study reveals how specialized lexemic choices and onomatopoeia (kinaesthemes, phonaestheme or sound symbolism) in children’s poems make each poem functional and purposeful. Thus, children’s poetry contains language structures and configurations that transmit sense and embody what the poem is asserting in a way that interestingly engages the reader. (shrink)