Erin I. Smith

Media as social partners: the social nature of young children's learning from screen media.

Television has become a nearly ubiquitous feature in childrens cultural landscape. A review of the research into young childrens learning from television indicates that the likelihood that children will learn from screen media is influenced by their developing social relationships with on-screen characters, as much as by their developing perception of the screen and their symbolic understanding and comprehension of information presented on screen. Considering the circumstances in which children under 6 years learn from screen media can inform teachers, parents, and researchers about the important nature of social interaction in early learning and development. The findings reviewed in this article suggest the social nature of learning, even learning from screen media.

Cognitive Foundations in the Development of a Religious Mind

Evolutionary explanations for the existence of religious concepts have generally been based on the premise that the transmission and acquisition of religious concepts is a cognitively easy process because religious concepts build on natural cognitive predispositions. These predispositions evolved as cognitive tools essential to human survival . Theories have focused on several candidate cognitive processes that provide the cognitive foundations of religious beliefs: agency detection, folk-psychology , attributions of causality , and the animacy/inanimacy distinction. In this chapter, we review theories and studies outlining children ’s development of religious concepts such as supernatural agents, creation , religious rituals , afterlife beliefs, and the soul . These studies are discussed within the context of the contributions of ordinary cognition in religious belief , as well as the importance of also considering the cultural influences in the strength and content of belief.

Church Support as a Predictor of Children's Spirituality and Prosocial Behavior

Church affiliation has been associated with many developmental benefits for children and adolescents, including higher levels of prosocial behavior; however, research has only minimally explored the mechanisms mediating these relationships. The current study examines the extent to which social support at church (i.e., church support) predicts childrens prosocial behavior independent of family religious practices and, subsequently, the extent to which the relationships between family religious practices, church support, and prosocial behavior are mediated by spirituality. Self-report survey data were collected from 279 church-going children between the ages of 6 and 13. Results of a structural equation model (SEM) analysis found that church support independently predicted spirituality and prosocial behavior after controlling for family religious practices. Spirituality partially mediated the relationship between church support and prosocial behavior. On average, boys reported significantly lower levels of church support, which in turn predicted lower levels of prosocial behavior both directly and indirectly via spirituality. Implications for parents and church leadership are discussed.

The essence of soul concepts: how soul concepts influence ethical reasoning across religious affiliation

Abstract Current research on how humans conceptualize other humans has focused on the hypothesis that we have a dualistic conception of others, differentiating the functions of the body from the functions of the mind (Bloom, 2004). Recent criticisms of this approach have suggested that this characterization of cognition is insufficient to account for the common presence of a third intuition humans have about other humans, namely that other people have souls or spirits (Hodge, 2008; Richert & Harris, 2008). We report on a study examining the nature of similarities and differences in the soul concept based on religious affiliation, and the implications of the soul concept for reasoning about beginning-of-life and end-of-life ethical dilemmas. Four hundred and nineteen undergraduate students completed a survey examining concepts of the soul, the mind, and reasoning about ethical dilemmas. The results suggest that adult soul concepts but not mind concepts are considered independent of the life cycle and are related to reasoning about ethical dilemmas independent of religious affiliation. These data lend empirical support to the hypothesis that the human tendency toward psychological essentialism provides a foundation for adults’ concepts of the soul.