Children's reasoning about self-presentation following rule violations: the role of self-focused attention

Children's and adults' evaluations of self-enhancement and self-deprecation depend on the usual performance of the self-presenter

This study examined how evaluations of self-presentation vary with age depending on the self-presenter's usual performance. People's usual performance is a key factor because it generally influences the social evaluations and judgments that others make about them. Children aged 7 and 8 years (second graders) and 10 and 11 years (fifth graders), as well as adults, were presented with scenarios in which protagonists responded to praise after a good performance using either self-enhancement or self-deprecation. The other person in scenarios knew that the protagonist's usual performance on the task was either good or poor. After the protagonist responded to praise in a self-enhancing or self-deprecating way, the participants judged how the other person would evaluate the protagonist's ability (good/poor) and character (nice/mean). For ability evaluations specifically concerning protagonists who usually performed poorly, the results showed that by around 10 years of age children no longer tended to give more positive ability evaluations for self-enhancement than for self-deprecation. Adults gave less positive ability evaluations for self-deprecation than for self-enhancement, but only when the protagonists usually performed well. In relation to the character evaluations, by around 10 years of age self-enhancement led to less positive character evaluations than self-deprecation, but only when the protagonists usually performed poorly. Overall, second graders evaluated self-presenters as more competent and nicer. These results indicate that the expected evaluation of self-enhancement and self-deprecation is influenced by the usual level of performance but that there are developmental changes in this aspect of social cognition.

The Development of the Liking Gap: Children Older Than 5 Years Think That Partners Evaluate Them Less Positively Than They Evaluate Their Partners

After two strangers have briefly interacted with one another, both believe that they like their partner more than their partner likes them. A plausible explanation for this liking gap is that people are constantly worrying about how others are evaluating them. If so, one would expect the liking gap to emerge in young children as they become more concerned with their reputations and the impression they make on other people. The current study (N = 241 U.S. children; age range = 4-11 years) supported this hypothesis, showing a liking gap beginning when children were 5 years old, the age at which they first become concerned with other people's evaluations of them. Moreover, the liking gap became more pronounced as children got older. These findings provide the first developmental description of the liking gap and support the hypothesis that this phenomenon is related to individuals' concerns for how others evaluate them.

Chinese Youth’s Reported Social and Moral Transgressions and Strategies for Self-Correction

The aim of this study was to explore Chinese adolescent’s social and moral transgressions and strategies for self-correction. For this study, following protocols that have been approved by an Institutional Review Board, 61 Chinese adolescents living in Guangzhou—distributed across three age groups: 10- to 11-year-olds ( N = 21, Mage = 11.03 years, SD = 0.43 years), 12- to 13-year-olds ( N = 20, Mage = 12.92 years, SD = 0.35 years), and 15- to 16-year-olds ( N = 20, Mage = 16.15 years, SD = 0.30 years)—participated in one-on-one semi-structured interviews. The study employed a deductive analytical approach based on prior social domain research on children’s and adolescents’ transgressions and strategies for self-correction. This study found that Chinese youth reported conventional transgression events more frequently than any other domain. Moreover, many of adolescents’ transgressions involved academic considerations, suggesting that how adolescents’ time is organized and the social expectations for adolescent behavior influence the types of transgressions and justifications adolescents will make. Furthermore, participants reported developing self-correcting strategies following 73.6% of events, while 74.5% of strategies were reported to be developed by the adolescents themselves. Therefore, the findings suggest that there is room for adults to collaborate with adolescents in developing strategies to prevent future misbehavior and to encourage youth to not only be “good” or “moral” but also to be and do better.

Are Socially Anxious Children Poor or Advanced Mindreaders?

Why are some children more socially anxious than others? One theory holds that socially anxious children are poor mindreaders, which hampers their social interactions; another that socially anxious children are advanced mindreaders leading to heightened self-consciousness in social situations. To test these theories simultaneously, this study (N = 105, ages 8-12) assessed children's mindreading (accuracy in detecting mental states from the eye region), self-consciousness (indexed as physiological blushing during public performance), and social anxiety levels. Results support both theories, showing a quadratic relation between mindreading and social anxiety. Low mindreading was related to clinical levels of social anxiety. High mindreading was related to subclinical levels of social anxiety through blushing. Our findings suggest two social-cognitive pathways to heightened social anxiety.

Self-Reported Moral Emotions and Physical and Relational Aggression in Early Childhood: A Social Domain Approach

This study examined discrepancies between 4- and 7-year-olds' (n = 135; M_age  = 5.65) self-reported affect following hypothetical moral versus social-conventional transgressions and their associations with teacher-rated physical and relational aggression concurrently and 9-months later. Negative emotion ratings in response to prototypical moral transgressions were not associated with children's aggression. When transgressions were described as no longer prohibited by rules and authority figures, children reporting more negative affect in response to moral as compared to conventional violations were less physically aggressive at Wave 1 and showed relative and mean-level declines in physical aggression over time. Relational aggression was not associated with self-reported emotions. Findings indicate the importance of distinguishing between types of transgressions and forms of aggression in studying moral emotions.

Eina! Ouch! Eish! Professionals' Perceptions of How Children with Cerebral Palsy Communicate About Pain in South African School Settings: Implications for the use of AAC

Most children with severe cerebral palsy experience daily pain that affects their school performance. School professionals need to assess pain in these children, who may also have communication difficulties, in order to pay attention to the pain and support the children's continued participation in school. In this study, South African school professionals' perceptions of how they observed pain in children with cerebral palsy, how they questioned them about it and how the children communicated their pain back to them were investigated. Thirty-eight school professionals participated in five focus groups. Their statements were categorized using qualitative content analysis. From the results it became clear that professionals observed children's pain communication through their bodily expressions, behavioral changes, and verbal and non-verbal messages. Augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) methods were rarely used. The necessity of considering pain-related vocabulary in a multilingual South African context, and of advocating for the use of AAC strategies to enable children with cerebral palsy to communicate their pain was highlighted in this study.

Why we think we can't dance: theory of mind and children's desire to perform

Theory of mind (ToM) allows children to achieve success in the social world by understanding others' minds. A study with 3- to 12-year-olds, however, demonstrates that gains in ToM are linked to decreases in children's desire to engage in performative behaviors associated with health and well-being, such as singing and dancing. One hundred and fifty-nine middle-class children from diverse backgrounds in a Northeastern U.S. metropolitan area completed the study in 2011. The development of ToM is associated with decreases in self-esteem, which in turn predicts decreases in children's willingness to perform. This shift away from performance begins at age 4 (when ToM begins to develop), years before children enter puberty.

Five-year olds, but not chimpanzees, attempt to manage their reputations

Virtually all theories of the evolution of cooperation require that cooperators find ways to interact with one another selectively, to the exclusion of cheaters. This means that individuals must make reputational judgments about others as cooperators, based on either direct or indirect evidence. Humans, and possibly other species, add another component to the process: they know that they are being judged by others, and so they adjust their behavior in order to affect those judgments - so-called impression management. Here, we show for the first time that already preschool children engage in such behavior. In an experimental study, 5-year-old human children share more and steal less when they are being watched by a peer than when they are alone. In contrast, chimpanzees behave the same whether they are being watched by a groupmate or not. This species difference suggests that humans' concern for their own self-reputation, and their tendency to manage the impression they are making on others, may be unique to humans among primates.