Carl N. Johnson

Children's Developing Understanding of Mental Verbs: Remember, Know, and Guess.

JOHNSON, CARL NILS, and WELLMAN, HENRY M. Childrens Developing Understanding of Mental Verbs: Remember, Know, and Guess. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1980, 51, 1095-1102. Preschool children have traditionally been noted for their ignorance of internal mental events. Consistent with this view, recent studies have found young children to judge mental verbs mistakenly on the basis of external states. The present research examined 2 components of childrens developing understanding of mental verbs. First, it was hypothesized that childrens ability to distinguish mental from external states would be enhanced under conditions where a subjects directly experienced mental state (i.e., an expectancy or belief) contrasts with external conditions. Second, conditions were designed to examine childrens understanding of the different cognitive implications of the mental verbs remember, know, and guess; namely, that remember entails specific prior knowledge, know requires some evidential basis, and guess is distinguished by the absence of such a basis. Results confirmed that young children could differentiate internal from external states under the hypothesized conditions. Preschoolers in this case interpreted the mental verbs with respect to their mental state in contrast to external state. These children were nonetheless ignorant of definitive distinctions between the mental verbs, completely confusing cases of remembering, knowing, and guessing. Evidence is reviewed which indicates that acquisition proceeds from an early sense of distinctive uses of the verbs to later understanding of their definitive descriptions of mental states.

Imagining the impossible : magical, scientific, and religious thinking in children

Preface 1. The makings of the magical mind: the nature of function of sympathetic magical thinking Carol Nemeroff and Paul Rozin 2. Phenomenalistic perception and rational understanding in the mind of an individual: a fight for dominance Eugene Subbotsky 3. Metamorphosis and magic: the development of childrens thinking about possible events and plausible mechanisms Karl S. Rosengren and Anne K. Hickling 4. The development of beliefs about metaphysical causality in imagination, magic and religion Jacqui Woolley 5. Intuitive ontology and cultural input in the acquisition of religious concepts Pascal Boyer and Sheila Walker 6. On not falling down to earth: childrens metaphysical questions Paul L. Harris 7. Putting different things together: the development of metaphysical thinking Carl N. Johnson 8. Versions of personal story telling: versions of experience: genres as tools for creating alternate realities Peggy J. Miller, Julia Hengst, Kristin Alexander and Linda L. Sperry 9. The influence of culture on fantasy play: the case of Mennonite children Marjorie Taylor and Stephanie M. Carlson 10. Religion, culture, and beliefs about reality in moral reasoning Elliot Turiel and Kristin Neff 11. Beyond scopes: why creationism is here to stay E. Margaret Evans 12. Knowledge change in response to date in science, religion, and magic Clark A. Chinn and William F. Brewer 13. Theology and physical science: a story of developmental influence at the boundaries David E. Schrader.

Training Young Children to Acknowledge Mixed Emotions

The failure of children to acknowledge mixed, contradictory emotions is equally of developmental and clinical interest. Developmentally, children do not ordinarily acknowledge the existence of mixed emotions until late in middle childhood. Clinically, the failure to recognise mixed feelings toward others or self is a common presenting problem. The question addressed here is, how readily can such limitations be corrected in children of different ages. Two studies are reported showing that children as young as 6 and 7 years, who initially revealed little understanding of mixed feelings, showed more insight after a short training session. In Experiment 1. two groups of children were equated for their inability to diagnose the mixed feelings of a story character. Subsequently, both groups were presented with a second story containing a similar conflictual event, but only one group was prompted to consider the characters emotional reaction to each component of the conflict. Children in the prompted group were more accurate in diagnosing the characters emotional reaction at the end of the story than the control group, and they maintained their superiority on a post-test story where no prompts were given. Experiment 2 included a similar training procedure. but with a more stringent measure of post-test generalisation: Children were asked to describe or invent their own examples of emotionally charged conflictual situations. Four- and five-year-olds showed little benefit from the training session, but six- and seven-year-olds again showed considerable benefit. Taken together, the two experiments suggest that young school age children often fail to acknowledge mixed feelings because they engage in a cursory appraisal of the elements of an emotionally charged situation; highlighting the elements is sufficient to improve performance. Preschool children, however, appear to suffer from more basic limitations in their ability to integrate the relevant information.

Mind, Soul and Spirit: Conceptions of Immaterial Identity in Different Cultures

The cognitive science of religion has recently focused attention on whether concepts of mind, soul, and spirit derive from the same or different intuitive foundations of immaterial identity. The present research is the first to look at intuitions about these three concepts simultaneously in different cultures. Methodologically, hypothetical transplants or transfers of minds or brains have been commonly used to examine the development of inferences about the continuity of mental identity despite bodily displacement. The present research extends the transfer paradigm to compare inferences about transfers of “soul” and “spirit” as well as the “mind.” American, Brazilian, and Indonesian undergraduate participants were presented with a series of scenarios in which a characters soul, mind, or spirit is transferred to another characters body. Participants made judgments about the consequences of such transfers on behaviors selected to potentially differentiate underlying intuitive categories. Results indicate that intuitions of soul, spirit, and mind do appear to draw from different but overlapping intuitions, which are recruited in different ways depending on religion and country. For American and Indonesian participants, the mind transfer was judged more often to result in a displacement of cognitive attributes compared to bodily, social, and moral attributes. Across the three countries, the transfer of spirit led more frequently to judgments about displacement of passion than of ability; religiosity was associated with giving more weight to the transfer of the soul, thus resulting in a greater displacement of all types of attributes. The results emphasize the importance of considering how different intuitive foundations, such as essentialism, intuitive psychology, and vitalism, might be recruited by culture to highlight different aspects of immaterial identity.

Towards the development of a pediatric ventricular assist device.

The very limited options available to treat ventricular failure in children with congenital and acquired heart diseases have motivated the development of a pediatric ventricular assist device at the University of Pittsburgh (UoP) and University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC). Our effort involves a consortium consisting of UoP, Childrens Hospital of Pittsburgh (CHP), Carnegie Mellon University, World Heart Corporation, and LaunchPoint Technologies, Inc. The overall aim of our program is to develop a highly reliable, biocompatible ventricular assist device (VAD) for chronic support (6 months) of the unique and high-risk population of children between 3 and 15 kg (patients from birth to 2 years of age). The innovative pediatric ventricular assist device we are developing is based on a miniature mixed flow turbodynamic pump featuring magnetic levitation, to assure minimal blood trauma and risk of thrombosis. This review article discusses the limitations of current pediatric cardiac assist treatment options and the work to date by our consortium toward the development of a pediatric VAD.

An experiment promoting interdisciplinary applied human development: The University of Pittsburgh model

Abstract The University of Pittsburgh Office of Child Development is an unusual university facilitative and administrative unit that promotes, funds, plans, implements, manages, and conducts interdisciplinary applied education, research, service demonstration, program evaluation, and policy projects pertaining to children, youth, and families. In the 9+ years of its existence, its soft-money budget has grown more than 34 times, its number of employees has increased 27-fold, and it has played a major role

A survey of University of Pittsburgh Child Development and Child Care graduates, 1970–1984

75 million worth of collaborative projects. This article describes the Offices rationale, structure, purposes, principles of operation, projects, evaluation, and positive and negative factors in its development so that others may benefit from this case-study experiment in interdisciplinary applied human development programming.

Energia Vital e Vida Após a Morte: Implicações Para a Ciência Cognitiva da Religião

Baccalaureate and masters graduates of the University of Pittsburgh Program in Child Development and Child Care from 1970–1984 were surveyed on employment history, conditions of current employment, professional development, and evaluation of the Child Development and Child Care Program. The prototypical program graduate was pleased with training, committed to working in the field, and professionally active. Comparisons are made between B.S. and M.S. graduates, early graduates and later graduates, and M.S. program graduates and B.S. graduates with masters degrees in other fields. Masters graduates were distinguished by higher salaries and greater professional activity. The findings demonstrate that university-based professional education for child and youth care practice can be successful along the dimensions considered in this survey.

Energía Vital y Vida Después de la Muerte: Implicaciones Para la Ciencia Cognitiva de la Religión

A literatura que investiga conceitos acerca de agentes sobrenaturais apontam para uma teoria da mente intuitiva por tras de tais ideias, no entanto, recentes estudos sugerem a presenca de teorias intuitivas acerca da energia vital subjacentes de tais conceitos. O presente artigo centra-se na analise da cultura e desenvolvimento das concepcoes das pessoas sobre a energia vital. Foi feita uma busca bibliografica utilizando a palavra-chave vital energy, revisando literatura oriunda da Antropologia, Psicologia e Ciencia Cognitiva. Em seguida, foi feita uma revisao sobre o tema tecendo consideracoes acerca do desenvolvimento das concepcoes das pessoas sobre a energia vital. Resultados apontam que uma biologia intuitiva, baseada em ideias de energia biologica (energia vital), pode ser a base de uma compreensao de alma, espirito e energia sobrenatural. Estudos empiricos futuros devem investigar o desenvolvimento de teorias intuitivas sobre energia vital com populacoes de diferentes faixas etarias e culturas.

Vital Energy and Afterlife: Implications for Cognitive Science of Religion

A literatura que investiga conceitos acerca de agentes sobrenaturais apontam para uma teoria da mente intuitiva por tras de tais ideias, no entanto, recentes estudos sugerem a presenca de teorias intuitivas acerca da energia vital subjacentes de tais conceitos. O presente artigo centra-se na analise da cultura e desenvolvimento das concepcoes das pessoas sobre a energia vital. Foi feita uma busca bibliografica utilizando a palavra-chave vital energy, revisando literatura oriunda da Antropologia, Psicologia e Ciencia Cognitiva. Em seguida, foi feita uma revisao sobre o tema tecendo consideracoes acerca do desenvolvimento das concepcoes das pessoas sobre a energia vital. Resultados apontam que uma biologia intuitiva, baseada em ideias de energia biologica (energia vital), pode ser a base de uma compreensao de alma, espirito e energia sobrenatural. Estudos empiricos futuros devem investigar o desenvolvimento de teorias intuitivas sobre energia vital com populacoes de diferentes faixas etarias e culturas.