The Development of Purpose During Adolescence

While there has been much research on adults' abilities to detect deception, there have been very few studies examining both children's and adults' abilities to detect children's real, spontaneous lies. The present study asked both children and adults to make judgments of children's true and false reports. Participants (N = 156) were shown videotaped sessions of children who were either spontaneously lying or telling the truth. Results indicate that both children's and adults' accuracy for detecting children's true statements was below chance. However, older children were significantly better at detecting lies than both younger children and adults.     

Parental attachment and children's memory for attachment-relevant stories

Despite evidence that parents’ attachment is associated with children's memory, less is known about the mechanisms underlying this association or the contexts in which the association is most meaningful. The present study examined whether parents’ attachment predicted children's memory for stories regarding attachment-related topics, whether the cohesiveness of children's stories mediated the association between attachment and memory, and whether the association varied by interview support at retrieval. Five- to six-year-olds completed attachment-relevant stories while parents provided information about their romantic attachment. Children's stories were coded for cohesiveness. A week later, children's memory for their stories was tested by either a supportive or nonsupportive interviewer. When the interview was nonsupportive, greater parental avoidance was associated with poorer memory, whereas when the interview was supportive, greater parental avoidance was associated with fewer errors. Findings provide insight into the context under which parents’ attachment is most influential in shaping children's memory.     

Blunted cortisol response to acute pre-learning stress prevents misinformation effect in a forced confabulation paradigm

Research examining the effects of stress on false memory formation has been equivocal, partly because of the complex nature of stress-memory interactions. A major factor influencing stress effects on learning is the timing of stress relative to encoding. Previous work has shown that brief stressors administered immediately before learning enhance long-term memory. Thus, we predicted that brief stress immediately before learning would decrease participants' susceptibility to subsequent misinformation and reduce false memory formation. Eighty-four male and female participants submerged their hand in ice cold (stress) or warm (no stress) water for 3 min. Immediately afterwards, they viewed an 8-min excerpt from the Disney movie Looking for Miracles. The next day, participants were interviewed and asked several questions about the video, some of which forced them to confabulate responses. Three days and three weeks later, respectively, participants completed a recognition test in the lab and a free recall test via email. Our results revealed a robust misinformation effect, overall, as participants falsely recognized a significant amount of information that they had confabulated during the interview as having occurred in the original video. Stress, overall, did not significantly influence this misinformation effect. However, the misinformation effect was completely absent in stressed participants who exhibited a blunted cortisol response to the stress, for both recognition and recall tests. The complete absence of a misinformation effect in non-responders may lend insight into the interactive roles of autonomic arousal and corticosteroid levels in false memory development.     

Assessing the Effectiveness of a Training Program for Interviewing Child Witnesses

Twenty-seven experienced interviewers attended a 10-day training institute designed to provide knowledge and skills for improving investigative interviews with young children. Participants completed pre- and posttraining surveys assessing their knowledge of the scientific evidence regarding memory, suggestibility, and other aspects of children's ability to provide accurate accounts of events during interviews. They also conducted pre- and posttraining interviews with preschool children about 2 previously experienced events. Participants' knowledge about children's abilities and the scientific basis of various interviewing protocols increased significantly after the training. However, training did not have a significant impact on interviewers' questioning styles or the amount of accurate information elicited from the children. Results indicate that successfully translating knowledge into practice requires multiple opportunities for skill practice and feedback.     

Facilitating the Communicative Competence of the Child Witness

Efforts to elicit reliable testimony from children are frustrated by developmental limitations on children's communicative competence. This study examines (a) how children cope when adults ask incomprehensible questions, and (b) whether interview perfonnance can be enhanced by facilitating children's comprehension monitoring and response strategies. One hundred and eighty children, half 6 and half 8-years-olds, were assigned randomly within age group to 1 of 3 treatment conditions (training, instructions, control) and I of 2 interviewer conditions (familiar, unfamiliar). Children's memories of a previously staged event were tested with interview questions varying in comprehensibility. Results suggest that when confronted with difficult-to-comprehend questions regarding easily recalled information, children in the control group tried to answer anyway but were as likely to respond incorrectly as correctly. In contrast, when children were instructed to verbalize their lack of comprehension, and given a rationale for doing so, they performed significantly better than the control group. Moreover, when children received instructions and prepared for the interview with practice detecting and coping with noncomprehension, the training group demonstrated marked improvements in interview performance compared with the other 2 groups. Results demonstrate that although children's limited communication skills present a barrier to reliable testimony, it is one that might be minimized by instructions or preparation of child witnesses.     

Dreaming in Spain: parental determinants of immigrant children's ambition

We examine determinants of educational and occupational aspirations and expectations among children of immigrants in Spain on the basis of a unique data set that includes statistically representative data for foreign-origin secondary students in Madrid and Barcelona plus a sample of one-fourth of their parents. Independently collected data for both generations allow us to establish effects of parental characteristics on children's orientations without the confounding potential inherent in children's reports about parents. We analyse first determinants of parental ambition and, through a series of stepwise regressions, the effects of these goals and other parental and family characteristics on children's aspirations and expectations. A structural equations model synthesizes the results of the analysis. The model confirms predictions from the research literature, especially those based on the Wisconsin status attainment model, but rejects others, including the predicted significance of private versus public school attendance. Parental ambition, knowledge of Spanish by parents and children, gender and children's age are major determinants of youths' educational and occupational goals. These results have direct implications for policy; these are discussed in the conclusion.     

The Children's Treatment of Animals Questionnaire: A Rasch Analysis

ABSTRACT

The study of human–animal interactions is limited by a paucity of empirically validated measures of humane treatment of companion animals. The current study reports findings from a psychometric analysis of the Children's treatment of animals Questionnaire (CTAQ; thompson and Gullone 2003), an instrument that assesses children's humane interactions with nonhuman animals. Specifically, the current study extends what is known about the psychometric properties of the CTAQ by using traditional and item response theory analyses. The CTAQ was administered to a sample of 217 school-age children whose mothers were currently receiving residential or non-residential domestic violence services. Item-analysis, exploratory factor analysis, and parallel analysis were conducted to replicate previous psychometric evaluations of the CTAQ. Rasch analysis of the CTAQ was also conducted to provide a stringent test of unidimensionality and to identify potential invariance in item functioning across various demographic variables. The CTAQ showed adequate fit to the Rasch model; one modification, removal of item 5, was required. A Rasch principal components analysis of residuals indicated a single latent dimension among the remaining 12 items. Scale use was appropriate; Rasch-andrich thresholds increased with category values and no disordering of categories was evident. Examination of item-person maps indicated the sample was also well-targeted. Notably, evidence of differential item function was found across Spanish and English translations. Overall, findings indicate that the CTAQ is an appropriate unidimensional measure of children's humane treatment of animals. The measure is particularly well-suited for children ages 7 to 12 years who are at risk for exposure to and perpetration of animal cruelty. We recommend use of a 12-item version of the CTAQ to enhance the utility of the total score as a latent measure of children's humane treatment of companion animals.     

Why Do Child-Directed Interactions Support Imitative Learning in Young Children?

Child-directed cues support imitation of novel actions at 18 months, but not at two years of age. The current studies explore the mechanisms that underlie the propensity that children have to copy others at 18 months, and how the value of child-directed communication changes over development. We ask if attentional allocation accounts for children''s failure to imitate observed actions at 18 months, and their success at two years of age, and we explore the informational value child-directed contexts may provide across ontogeny. Eighteen-month-old (Study 1) and two-year-old (Study 2) children viewed causally non-obvious actions performed by child-directed (Study 1 & 2), observed (Study 1 & 2), or non-interactive (Study 2) actors, and their visual attention and imitative behaviors were assessed. Results demonstrated that child-directed contexts supported imitative learning for 18-month-old children, independent of their effects on proximal attention. However, by two years of age, neither directness nor communication between social partners was a necessary condition for supporting social imitation. These findings suggest that developmental changes in children''s propensity to extract information from observation cannot be accounted for by changes in children''s interpretation of what counts as child-directed information, and are likely not due to changes in how children allocate attention to observed events.     

Augmented Reality for the Assessment of Children's Spatial Memory in Real Settings

Short-term memory can be defined as the capacity for holding a small amount of information in mind in an active state for a short period of time. Although some instruments have been developed to study spatial short-term memory in real environments, there are no instruments that are specifically designed to assess visuospatial short-term memory in an attractive way to children. In this paper, we present the ARSM (Augmented Reality Spatial Memory) task, the first Augmented Reality task that involves a user''s movement to assess spatial short-term memory in healthy children. The experimental procedure of the ARSM task was designed to assess the children''s skill to retain visuospatial information. They were individually asked to remember the real place where augmented reality objects were located. The children (N = 76) were divided into two groups: preschool (5–6 year olds) and primary school (7–8 year olds). We found a significant improvement in ARSM task performance in the older group. The correlations between scores for the ARSM task and traditional procedures were significant. These traditional procedures were the Dot Matrix subtest for the assessment of visuospatial short-term memory of the computerized AWMA-2 battery and a parent''s questionnaire about a child''s everyday spatial memory. Hence, we suggest that the ARSM task has high verisimilitude with spatial short-term memory skills in real life. In addition, we evaluated the ARSM task''s usability and perceived satisfaction. The study revealed that the younger children were more satisfied with the ARSM task. This novel instrument could be useful in detecting visuospatial short-term difficulties that affect specific developmental navigational disorders and/or school academic achievement.     

Parents' knowledge of students' beliefs and attitudes: An indirect assay of parental solicitude?

In two studies, undergraduates filled out questionnaires containing various attitude and belief items, and their parents then provided both their own responses to the same items and their best guesses as to how their children had responded. As predicted, stepfathers were significantly less accurate then genetic fathers, and maternal accuracy increased as a function of the mother's age when her child was born. On average, mothers and fathers did not differ in accuracy, nor was offspring sex a significant predictor of parental accuracy. However, mothers were most accurate in guessing the views of firstborn sons, whereas fathers tended to be more accurate about daughters' views. These results suggest that parents' ability to guess their children's views may provide a useful index of parental interest and/or of parent-child closeness.     

Children's diurnal cortisol activity during the first year of school

The present study examined 4- to 5-year-old British children's diurnal cortisol activity during their first year of school. The children's cortisol was measured before enrollment (baseline), upon enrollment, and both 3 and 6 months after enrollment. On each day, cortisol was sampled four times, providing information about the diurnal amount of cortisol secreted (AUC_G). Mixed-effect models were constructed to examine the way children's cortisol fluctuated over the course of the school year. Physiological activity was greater 3 months after enrollment, suggesting that some children reacted more to the challenge of school later than they did initially. Implications and suggestions for transitional practices and future research are discussed.     

Fine-Grained,Local Maps and Coarse,Global Representations Support Human Spatial Working Memory

While sensory processes are tuned to particular features, such as an object''s specific location, color or orientation, visual working memory (vWM) is assumed to store information using representations, which generalize over a feature dimension. Additionally, current vWM models presume that different features or objects are stored independently. On the other hand, configurational effects, when observed, are supposed to mainly reflect encoding strategies. We show that the location of the target, relative to the display center and boundaries, and overall memory load influenced recall precision, indicating that, like sensory processes, capacity limited vWM resources are spatially tuned. When recalling one of three memory items the target distance from the display center was overestimated, similar to the error when only one item was memorized, but its distance from the memory items'' average position was underestimated, showing that not only individual memory items'' position, but also the global configuration of the memory array may be stored. Finally, presenting the non-target items at recall, consequently providing landmarks and configurational information, improved precision and accuracy of target recall. Similarly, when the non-target items were translated at recall, relative to their position in the initial display, a parallel displacement of the recalled target was observed. These findings suggest that fine-grained spatial information in vWM is represented in local maps whose resolution varies with distance from landmarks, such as the display center, while coarse representations are used to store the memory array configuration. Both these representations are updated at the time of recall.     

Effects of the built environment on childhood obesity: The case of urban recreational trails and crime

We study the effects of urban environment on childhood obesity by concentrating on the effects of walking trails and crime close to children's homes on their BMI and obesity status. We use a unique dataset, which combines information on recreational trails in Indianapolis with data on violent crimes and anthropomorphic and diagnostic data from children's clinic visits between 1996 and 2005. We find that having a trail near a home reduces children's weight. However, the effect depends on the amount of nearby violent crimes. Significant reductions occur only in low crime areas and trails could have opposite effects on weight in high crime areas. These effects are primarily among boys, older children, and children who live in higher income neighborhoods. Evaluated at the mean length of trails this effect for older children in no crime areas would be a reduction of 2 lb of the body weight. Falsification tests using planned trails instead of existing trails, show that trails are more likely to be located in areas with heavier children, suggesting that our results on effects of trails represent a lower bound.     

Stress exposure in specific growth periods associates with children's weight,height, and body mass index

Objectives

We investigate associations between children exposure to stressful events, considering: (1) the period in which the event took place, (2) the type of event, and (3) the cumulative effect of the events on children's weight, height and body mass index (BMI).

Methods

A total of 8429 Portuguese children (3349 exposed to at least one stressful event during their lifetime; 50.2% males; mean age = 7.21 ± 1.85 years) were included in the analysis. The occurrence of stressful (i.e., adverse) events was reported in a parental questionnaire; children's weight and height were objectively measured.

Results

When the stress event took place in the first 2 years of life, compared with during pregnancy or after the 2 years, children were shorter; but the association was weak and only significant for boys. After adjustment for child's birthweight, gestational age, breastfeeding duration, number of siblings, and father's education, the experience of 3+ stressful events (vs. 1 or 2) was associated with higher weight and height in boys. No interaction effect was found between stress and BMI.

Discussion

We found some evidence of associations between exposure to stressful events and physical growth of boys. We highlight the complex relationship between exposure to stressful experiences and children's physical growth, particularly the different effects of specific characteristics of the stress event and the sex differences.

     

Salt Content Impacts Food Preferences and Intake among Children

Decreasing dietary sodium intake, which can be achieved by reducing salt content in food, is recommended. Salt contributes to the taste of foods and makes them more enjoyable. Whether a food is liked or disliked is an important determinant of food intake, especially among children. However, the role of salt in children''s food acceptance has received little attention. The impact of salt content on children''s hedonic rating and intake of two foods was investigated in children. Using a within-subject crossover design, we recruited 75 children (8–11 years) to participate in five lunches in their school cafeteria. The target foods were green beans and pasta. The added salt content was 0, 0.6 or 1.2 g/100 g. The children''s intake (g) of all lunch items was measured. The children provided their hedonic rating of the food, a preference ranking and a saltiness ranking in the laboratory. Children could rank the foods according to salt content, and they preferred the two saltier options. A food-specific effect of salt content on intake was observed. Compared to the intermediate level (0.6 g salt/100 g), not adding salt decreased green bean intake (−21%; p = 0.002), and increasing the salt content increased pasta intake (+24%; p<0.0001). Structural Equation Modeling was used to model the relative weights of the determinants of intake. It showed that the primary driver of food intake was the child''s hunger; the second most important factor was the child''s hedonic rating of the food, regardless of its salt content, and the last factor was the child''s preference for the particular salt content of the food. In conclusion, salt content has a positive and food-specific effect on intake; it impacted food preferences and intake differently in children. Taking into account children''s preferences for salt instead of their intake may lead to excessive added salt.     

Iron status,malaria parasite loads and food policies: Evidence from sub-Saharan Africa

This brief article investigates the consequences of improving children's iron status for malaria parasite loads by analyzing data from Cote d’Ivoire, Zambia, and Tanzania; the treatment of iron deficiencies has been argued to flare up malaria in under-nourished populations. The data from a randomized controlled trial in Cote d’Ivoire showed statistically insignificant effects of the consumption of iron-fortified biscuits on children's malaria parasite loads. Second, nutrient intakes data from Zambia showed insignificant correlations and associations between children's iron and folate intakes and malaria parasite loads. Third, malaria parasite loads did not change significantly for Tanzanian children receiving anthelmintic treatment; malaria loads were lower for older children and for those using bed nets. Overall, the evidence from sub-Saharan African countries suggests that small improvements in iron status achieved via suitable food policies are unlikely to have detrimental effects for children's malaria parasite loads.     

Companion Animals and other Factors Affecting Young Children's Development

ABSTRACT

This study focuses on three factors presumed to affect young children's development: their age, the quality of their home environments, and the child-pet relationship. Three sets of analyses are presented: effects associated with pet ownership (pet presence), effects associated with the strength of the child-pet relationship, and the combined effects of age, home environment, and the child-companion animal relationship. This study includes both a parent survey (n = 88) and in-home assessments (n = 44) of the three- to six-year-old children. The analyses support the hypothesis that normal preschool children's intellectual, motor, and social development is associated with the presence of a companion animal and increases with their age, the quality of their home environment, and their relationship with a companion animal. While the children's age and the quality of their home environments were associated with measures of the children's cognitive, motor, and social development, the companion animal effect was limited to the young children's social development including their empathy for other children.     

Influence of Body Composition on the Accuracy of Reported Energy Intake in Children

Objective: Mis‐reporting dietary intake is a substantial barrier to understanding the role of dietary behavior in disease. Work with adults indicates that heavier individuals under‐report dietary intake and that under‐reporting may be macronutrient‐specific. Whether weight status and macronutrient intake influence the accuracy of dietary reports among children, however, is less clear. This research evaluated children's dietary reporting accuracy as a function of their relative weight, body composition, and macronutrient intake. Research Methods and Procedures: Participants included 146 4‐ to 11‐year‐old children. Reported energy intake was determined by interviewing children in the presence of parents, using three multiple pass, 24‐hour recalls. Children were classified as having had an under‐reported, accurately reported, or over‐reported dietary intake relative to total energy expenditure, as measured by doubly labeled water. Reporting accuracy was examined as a function of children's body weight, body composition (using dual energy x‐ray absorptiometry), and macronutrient intake. Results: Average reported intake was, on average, 14% greater than children's estimated expenditure (p < 0.01). Reporting accuracy varied as a function of children's relative weight and body composition; under‐reporting tended to occur among heavier children, having the highest body fat content (p < 0.0001) and relative weight (p < 0.0001). Discussion: These findings suggest that weight status influences the accuracy of dietary reports made by children and their parents. More research is needed to address possible psychological and social factors that introduce bias in reporting children's dietary data.     

Individual Differences in Children's Eyewitness Recall: The Influence of Intelligence and Shyness

This study was conducted to examine influences of personality characteristics on children's eyewitness recall. A sample of 217 children from 3 age groups (6-, 8-, and 10-year-olds) were included in the study. To explain individual differences in children's free recall of an observed event as well as in their ability to answer specific questions accurately, intelligence and teachers' rating of shyness were selected as central personality characteristics. The results revealed a significant influence of intelligence on free recall but not on suggestibility and a significant influence of shyness on the accuracy of cued recall. Whereas the effect of intelligence was positive, shyness was negatively related to eyewitness recall: Shy children were less accurate in answering specific questions than were those children of the same age group who were not shy.     

Individual differences in children's innovative problem-solving are not predicted by divergent thinking or executive functions

Recent studies of children''s tool innovation have revealed that there is variation in children''s success in middle-childhood. In two individual differences studies, we sought to identify personal characteristics that might predict success on an innovation task. In Study 1, we found that although measures of divergent thinking were related to each other they did not predict innovation success. In Study 2, we measured executive functioning including: inhibition, working memory, attentional flexibility and ill-structured problem-solving. None of these measures predicted innovation, but, innovation was predicted by children''s performance on a receptive vocabulary scale that may function as a proxy for general intelligence. We did not find evidence that children''s innovation was predicted by specific personal characteristics.