Making sense of the pandemic: Parent-child conversations in two cultural contexts

The present study focused on parent-child conversations about COVID-19 related changes in children's lives in Estonia and Germany with an aim to understand how children's conceptual understanding of the disease and their emotional security is created and reflected in these interactions. Twenty-nine parent-child dyads from both cultural contexts provided self-recorded conversations. The conversations were analyzed for the type of explanations, emotional content, and valence. Estonian conversations were longer than those of German dyads. Explanatory talk appeared in both contexts but was general in nature. Conversations in both cultural contexts also included very few emotional references and tended to focus on both positive and negative aspects of the situation. The conversations show that parents tend to support children's coping with stressful situations by helping them conceptually understand COVID-19 and paying little attention to children's comprehension of feelings about the situation.

Mental Models of Illness during the Early Months of the COVID-19 Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic and its profound global effects may be changing the way we think about illness. In summer 2020, 120 American adults were asked to diagnose symptoms of COVID-19, a cold, and cancer, and to answer questions related to the diagnosis, treatment, prevention, time-course, and transmission of each disease. Results showed that participants were more likely to correctly diagnose COVID-19 (91% accuracy) compared to a cold (58% accuracy) or cancer (52% accuracy). We also found that 7% of participants misdiagnosed cold symptoms as COVID-19, and, interestingly, over twice as many participants (16%) misdiagnosed symptoms of cancer as COVID-19. Our findings suggest a distinct mental model for COVID-19 compared to other illnesses. Further, the prevalence of COVID-19 in everyday discourse—especially early in the pandemic—may lead to biased responding, similar to errors in medical diagnosis that result from physicians’ expertise. We also discuss how the focus of public-health messaging on prevention of COVID-19 might contribute to participants’ mental models.

The Substance of Cold: Indonesians' Use of Cold Weather Theory to Explain Everyday Illnesses

Many people across the world use cold conditions, such as cold air and wet clothes, to explain everyday illness, such as colds and flu. In Indonesia, the concept masuk angin, or "trapped wind," appears to reflect this line of folknatural thinking. Interestingly, Indonesians distinguish masuk angin from the common cold, which is a frequent target for "cold weather" explanations in other cultures. We interviewed Indonesian 8- and 10-year-old children, lay adults, and medical expert adults, about the cause, contagiousness, and treatment of everyday illnesses: the common cold, the flu, and masuk angin. Most Indonesian children, and especially adults, believed that cold and flu are caused by germs and are contagious. In contrast, most children and lay adults (but not experts) attributed masuk angin to cold conditions and viewed it as non-contagious. These findings reveal how folknatural and scientific theories of illness coexist in the minds of Indonesian children and lay adults.

Is the bias for function-based explanations culturally universal? Children from China endorse teleological explanations of natural phenomena

Young children in Western cultures tend to endorse teleological (function-based) explanations broadly across many domains, even when scientifically unwarranted. For instance, in contrast to Western adults, they explicitly endorse the idea that mountains were created for climbing, just like hats were created for warmth. Is this bias a product of culture or a product of universal aspects of human cognition? In two studies, we explored whether adults and children in Mainland China, a highly secular, non-Western culture, show a bias for teleological explanations. When explaining both object properties (Experiment 1) and origins (Experiment 2), we found evidence that they do. Whereas Chinese adults restricted teleological explanations to scientifically warranted cases, Chinese children endorsed them more broadly, extending them across different kinds of natural phenomena. This bias decreased with rising grade level across first, second, and fourth grades. Overall, these data provide evidence that children's bias for teleological explanations is not solely a product of Western Abrahamic cultures. Instead, it extends to other cultures, including the East Asian secular culture of modern-day China. This suggests that the bias for function-based explanations may be driven by universal aspects of human cognition.

The Mnemonic of Intuitive Ontology Violation is not the Distinctiveness Effect: Evidence from a Broad Age Spectrum of Persons in the uk and China during a Free-Recall Task

The typical formulation of Pascal Boyer’s counterintuitiveness theory asserts that concepts violating intuitive ontological-category structures are more memorable. However, Boyer’s (2001) original claim centred on the transmission advantages of counter-ontological representations that were cultural. Nevertheless, subsequent studies focused on the recall of novel counterintuitive representations, and an “alternative account” of the memorability of counterintuitive concepts has emerged resembling the distinctiveness effect. Yet, experimental evidence shows that familiar concepts have memorability advantages over novel ones. This investigation of these pan-cultural transmission biases used a large age-representative sample (13–86 years; N = 365) in the uk and China. Results were analysed by hlm, with familiarity, counterintuitiveness, and delay as 2-level fixed factors, and age as a covariate. No support was revealed for the typical formulation of the hypothesis — however, a significant age effect and interaction of familiarity × counterintuitiveness were found.

Developing Concepts of the Mind, Body, and Afterlife: Exploring the Roles of Narrative Context and Culture

Children and adults from theus(Study 1) and China (Study 2) heard about people who died in two types of narrative contexts – medical and religious – and judged whether their psychological and biological capacities cease or persist after death. Most 5- to 6-year-olds reported that all capacities would cease. In theus, but not China, there was an increase in persistence judgments at 7–8 years, which decreased thereafter.uschildren’s persistence judgments were influenced by narrative context – occurring more often for religious narratives – and such judgments were made especially for psychological capacities. When participants were simply asked what happens to people following death, in both countries there were age-graded increases in references to burial, religious ritual, and the supernatural.