Thoughtful Friends: Executive Function Relates to Social Problem Solving and Friendship Quality in Middle Childhood

The present study examined links between best friendship quality, social problem solving in response to a transgression and conscious control of behavior (i.e., executive function or EF). Eighty-one 7- to 10-year-olds answered questions about their best friendship quality and responses to friendship transgressions (i.e., interpretations, goals, and strategies they would endorse). They also completed a battery of EF tasks measuring working memory, inhibition, and shifting. Results revealed few relations between social problem solving and best friendship quality. Social problem solving related to EF abilities, with inhibition relating to fewer revenge goals and cognitive flexibility relating to more neutral interpretations. Better working memory related to worse best friendship quality. Finally, verbal IQ was a strong predictor of several positive social problem-solving interpretations, goals, and strategies. Results suggest cognitive abilities in EF and language may be important to consider during middle childhood in this period of advancing social problem solving and friendships.

Effort as Person-Focused Praise: "Hard Worker" Has Negative Effects for Adults After a Failure

Although work with children demonstrates a benefit of process-focused praise relative to person-focused praise on post-failure motivation, few studies have examined this result in adults. We tested the effect of three types of praise on adults' post-failure outcomes: person-focused intelligence ("high intelligence"), person-focused effort ("hard worker"), and process-focused effort ("worked hard") in a sample of 156 adults recruited from Amazon's MTurk. Participants completed a set of easy visual pattern recognition problems and were told that they performed better than most adults and were given one of the three types of feedback. They then completed more difficult problems and were told that they had not performed well. Participants in the "hard worker" condition (compared to "worked hard") were more likely to endorse intelligence as a reason for failure. They also reported lower perceived success and less enjoyment than participants in other conditions. Participants in the "high intelligence" condition were more likely to attribute their failure to intelligence than participants in the "worked hard" condition. The results suggest that the benefit of process-focused praise typically found in children (worked hard compared to intelligent) was mostly not replicated in adults, and person-focused effort praise was detrimental in a non-college student adult sample.

A self-affirmation exercise does not improve intentions to vaccinate among parents with negative vaccine attitudes (and may decrease intentions to vaccinate)

Two studies investigated the effectiveness of a self-affirmation exercise on vaccine safety beliefs and intent to vaccinate future children. In Study 1, a sample of 585 parents with at least one child under the age of 18 in the home participated through Amazon’s MTurk. Participants were randomly assigned to one of four conditions in a 2 x 2 design. Participants read either correcting information refuting a link between the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism or a control passage about bird feeding. Additionally, participants either completed a self-affirmation exercise where they reflected on their personal values or in a control condition in which they reflected on least-personally-important values that might be important to others. Participants exposed to the correcting information were less likely to believe that vaccines cause serious side effects, but no less likely to believe that the MMR vaccine causes autism. For parents with initially positive vaccine attitudes, there was no effect of condition on intent to vaccinate a future child. For parents with initially negative vaccine attitudes, self-affirmation was ineffective in the presence of correcting information and resulted in less intention to vaccinate in the absence of correcting information. This effect was partially replicated in Study 2 (N = 576), which provided no correcting information but otherwise followed the same procedure as Study 1.

Trajectories of Peer Victimization: The Role of Multiple Relationships

This study examined early elementary school children's trajectories of peer victimization with a sample of 218 boys and girls. Peer victimization was assessed (via peer report) in kindergarten, 1(st), 2(nd), and 5(th) grades. Hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) was used to examine multiple types of relationships (mother-child, student-teacher, friendship) as predictors of kindergarten levels of peer victimization and changes in peer victimization across time. Results indicated that the mother-child relationship predicted kindergarten levels of peer victimization, and that the student-teacher relationship did not provide additional information, once the mother-child relationship was accounted for in the analyses. Friendship predicted changes in peer victimization during the elementary school years. Results are discussed in a developmental psychopathology framework with special emphasis on the implication for understanding the etiology of peer victimization.

The Role of Emotion Regulation and Children's Early Academic Success

This study investigated the role of children's emotion regulation skills and academic success in kindergarten, using a sample of 325 five-year-old children. A mediational analysis addressed the potential mechanisms through which emotion regulation relates to children's early academic success. Results indicated that emotion regulation was positively associated with teacher reports of children's academic success and productivity in the classroom and standardized early literacy and math achievement scores. Contrary to predictions, child behavior problems and the quality of the student teacher relationship did not mediate these relations. However, emotion regulation and the quality of the student-teacher relationship uniquely predicted academic outcomes even after accounting for IQ. Findings are discussed in terms of how emotion regulation skills facilitate children's development of a positive student-teacher relationship and cognitive processing and independent learning behavior, both of which are important for academic motivation and success.