Charlie Lewis

Constructing an understanding of mind: the development of children's social understanding within social interaction.

Theories of childrens developing understanding of mind tend to emphasize either individualistic processes of theory formation, maturation, or introspection, or the process of enculturation. However, such theories must be able to account for the accumulating evidence of the role of social interaction in the development of social understanding. We propose an alternative account, according to which the development of childrens social understanding occurs within triadic interaction involving the childs experience of the world as well as communicative interaction with others about their experience and beliefs (Chapman 1991; 1999). It is through such triadic interaction that children gradually construct knowledge of the world as well as knowledge of other people. We contend that the extent and nature of the social interaction children experience will influence the development of childrens social understanding. Increased opportunity to engage in cooperative social interaction and exposure to talk about mental states should facilitate the development of social understanding. We review evidence suggesting that childrens understanding of mind develops gradually in the context of social interaction. Therefore, we need a theory of development in this area that accords a fundamental role to social interaction, yet does not assume that children simply adopt socially available knowledge but rather that children construct an understanding of mind within social interaction.

Fathers’ influences on children’s development: The evidence from two-parent families

Although it is often assumed that men have an important influence on their children’s development, the supportive evidence can be difficult to locate and summarize. In this paper, we analyse the evidence with respect to four emergent themes. First, men often appear to interact with their children less sensitively than mothers do, and many children thus appear to form closer attachments to their mothers than to their fathers. Second, the data also indicate that fathers may play specific and important roles, with men in some cultures having clearly defined roles as playmates to their children. Third, paternal play styles predict later socio-emotional development while paternal involvement seems to predict adult adjustment better than maternal involvement does. Such evidence suggests, fourth, that we need appropriate measures of fatherhood that are not simply borrowed from the study of motherhood.RésuméMalgré on pense que les pères ont une influence importante sur le développement de leurs enfants, les evidences qui le rapportent peuvent être difficiles de trouver et d’expliquer. Dans cet étude, on analyse l’évidence concernant quatre conclusions importantes. En premier, les pères font apparemment une interaction avec leurs enfants avec moins de sensibilité que les mères, et donc beaucoup d’enfants forment apparemment une relation plus proche avec leurs mères que leurs pères. En second, les renseignements indiquent aussi que les pères peuvent jouer de rôles spécifiques et importantes, avec des gens placés en quelques cultures avec des rôles bien tracés comme copins de leurs enfants. En troisième, les styles d’action des pères prévoient plus tard le développement socio- emotionnel, tandis que l’engagement paternel parait prévoir l’ajustement adulte mieux que l’engagement maternel l’en fait. Une évidence comme ça suggère, en quatrième, qu’on a besoin de mesures parentaux appropriés qui ne soient pas seulement pretés des études sur la maternité.

Korean Preschoolers’ Advanced Inhibitory Control and Its Relation to Other Executive Skills and Mental State Understanding

This study assessed executive function and mental state understanding in Korean preschoolers. In Experiment 1, forty 3.5- and 4-year-old Koreans showed ceiling performance on inhibition and switching measures, although their performance on working memory and false belief was comparable to that of Western children. Experiment 2 revealed a similar advantage in a sample of seventy-six 3- and 4-year-old Koreans compared with sixty-four age-matched British children. Korean children younger than 3.5 years of age showed ceiling effects on some inhibition measures despite more stringent protocols and the link between executive function and mental state understanding was not as strong as in the British sample. The results raise key questions about the nature and development of the executive system and its relation to social understanding.

Intimate talk between parents and their teenage children: Democratic openness or covert control?

In so far as modern families subscribe to an ideal of democracy, then adolescence is a time in which the democratic ideal in the family becomes an object of explicit focus as parents and teenagers strive towards a renegotiation of their relative positions. Teenagers need to develop their adult identities and a sense of agency, while at the same time, parents who have invested both personally and financially in their children must reconsider this relationship and come to terms with the reality of the returns from that investment. Intimate relations imply both democracy and equality: in what Giddens (1992) calls the ‘pure relationship’, individuals continuously reevaluate the relationship in terms of the satisfactions which it delivers in their ‘project of the self’. This paper argues that the twin ideals of democracy and intimacy necessarily clash in parent-teenager relationships, resulting in a further complication of the negotiation processes already identified in previous research (Brannen, 1999; Brannen et al., 1994; Hofer et al., 1999).While both parents and their teenage children subscribe to the discourse of openness and honesty as the route to both intimacy and democracy, there are tensions within the concept of openness because both parties have opposing goals in the trading of information. For parents, information gain means the retention of power and control, while for teenagers, with-holding information from their parents ensures their privacy, power and identity.

Culture, executive function, and social understanding

Much of the evidence from the West has shown links between childrens developing self-control (executive function), their social experiences, and their social understanding (Carpendale & Lewis, 2006, chapters 5 and 6), across a range of cultures including China. This chapter describes four studies conducted in three Oriental cultures, suggesting that the relationships among social interaction, executive function, and social understanding are different in these cultures, implying that social and executive skills are underpinned by key cultural processes.

The NICHD investigative interview protocol: an analogue study

One hundred twenty-eight 5- to 7-year-old children were interviewed using the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) Investigative Interview Protocol about an event staged 4 to 6 weeks earlier. Children were prepared for talking about the investigated event using either an invitational or directive style of prompting, with or without additional practice describing experienced events. The open invitation prompts (including those using childrens words to encourage further reporting) elicited more detailed responses than the more focused directive prompts without reducing accuracy. Children were most responsive when they had received preparation that included practice describing experienced events in response to invitation prompts. Overall, children were highly accurate regardless of prompt type. Errors mostly related to peripheral rather than central information and were more likely to be elicited by directive or yes/no questions than by invitations. Children who provided accounts when asked about a false event were less accurate when describing the true event. Children who received preparation that included practice recalling a recent event in response to directive and yes/no questions were least accurate when questioned about the false event first. The data provide the first direct evaluation of the accuracy of information elicited using different prompt types in the course of NICHD Protocol interviews, and underscore the importance of how children are prepared for subsequent reporting.

Is Children's Understanding of Nontraditional Advertising Comparable to Their Understanding of Television Advertising?

The dramatic changes in childrens commercial environment call for an updated evaluation of childrens grasp of advertising. The aim of this study is to compare childrens understanding of television advertising with nontraditional advertising (i.e., movie and in-game brand placement, product licensing, program sponsorship, and advergames). The authors interviewed 134 children from second-grade (ages 6–7) and fifth-grade (ages 9–10) classes in the United Kingdom about the nature and intent of different examples of advertising, combining open-ended and cued response formats. As anticipated, children demonstrated a significantly more sophisticated understanding of television advertising compared with nontraditional advertising. Embedded advertising practices (movie and in-game brand placement) were most difficult for children to understand. Thus, children appear to have limited knowledge of alternative marketing tactics and consequently lack the cognitive skills to evaluate them critically. The authors conclude by making suggestions for public policy measures.

Representation of the cardinality principle: early conception of error in a counterfactual test

There is debate over how the integration of non-verbal quantifying and verbal counting relates to the representation of number principles. A stringent representational test would be one in which a child obeyed a number principle where it ran counter to a characteristic procedure. We devised a test relying on the uniqueness principle for using evidence from a miscount in inferring a counterfactual cardinal number. All the 5-year-olds passed, as did half the preschoolers. Subtests probed associated number-skills. We suggest that a crucial preschool step is to start conceptualising error by categorising relations between counting and miscounting. That step is taken at a similar age to passing a representational theory of mind test but the two were uncorrelated.

Supportive or suggestive: Do human figure drawings help 5- to 7-year-old children to report touch?

The authors examined the accuracy of information elicited from seventy-nine 5- to 7-year-old children about a staged event that included physical contact-touching. Four to six weeks later, childrens recall for the event was assessed using an interview protocol analogous to those used in forensic investigations with children. Following the verbal interview, children were asked about touch when provided with human figure drawings (drawings only), following practice using the human figure drawings (drawings with instruction), or without drawings (verbal questions only). In this touch-inquiry phase of the interview, most children provided new information. Children in the drawings conditions reported more incorrect information than those in the verbal questions condition. Forensically relevant errors were infrequent and were rarely elaborated on. Although asking children to talk about innocuous touch may lead them to report unreliable information, especially when human figure drawings are used as aids, errors are reduced when open-ended prompts are used to elicit further information about reported touches.

Introduction: Links Between Social Interaction and Executive Function

The term executive function is used increasingly within developmental psychology and is often taken to refer to unfolding brain processes. We trace the origins of research on executive function to show that the link with social interaction has a long history. We suggest that a recent frenzy of research exploring methods for studying individual executive skills should pay more attention to the tradition exploring the role of social interaction in their development.