Paul L. Harris

Trust in Testimony: Children's Use of True and False Statements:

The extent to which young children monitor and use the truth of assertions to gauge the reliability of subsequent testimony was examined. Three- and 4-year-old children were presented with two informants, an accurate labeler and an inaccurate labeler. They were then invited to learn names for novel objects from these informants. The children correctly monitored and identified the informants on the basis of the truth of their prior labeling. Furthermore, children who explicitly identified the unreliable or reliable informant across two tasks went on to demonstrate selective trust in the novel information provided by the previously reliable informant. Children who did not consistently identify the unreliable or reliable informant proved indiscriminate.

Emotion comprehension between 3 and 11 years: Developmental periods and hierarchical organization

In the last 20 years, it has been established that childrens understanding of emotion changes with age. A review of the extensive literature reveals at least nine distinct components of emotion understanding that have been studied (from the simple attribution of emotions on the basis of facial cues to the emotions involved in moral judgments). Despite this large corpus of findings, there has been little research in which childrens understanding of all these various components has been simultaneously assessed. The goal of the current research was to examine the development of these nine components and their interrelationship. For this purpose, 100 children of 3, 5, 7, 9 and 11 years were tested on all nine components. The results show that: (1) children display a clear improvement with age on each component; (2) three developmental phases may be identified, each characterized by the emergence of three of the nine components; (3) correlational relations exist among components within a given phase; and (4) hierarchical relations exist among components from successive phases. The results are discussed in terms of their theoretical and practical implications.

Preschoolers Monitor the Relative Accuracy of Informants.

In 2 studies, the sensitivity of 3- and 4-year-olds to the previous accuracy of informants was assessed. Children viewed films in which 2 informants labeled familiar objects with differential accuracy (across the 2 experiments, children were exposed to the following rates of accuracy by the more and less accurate informants, respectively: 100% vs. 0%, 100% vs. 25%, 75% vs. 0%, and 75% vs. 25%). Next, children watched films in which the same 2 informants provided conflicting novel labels for unfamiliar objects. Children were asked to indicate which of the 2 labels was associated with each object. Three-year-olds trusted the more accurate informant only in conditions in which 1 of the 2 informants had been 100% accurate, whereas 4-year-olds trusted the more accurate informant in all conditions tested. These results suggest that 3-year-olds mistrust informants who make a single error, whereas 4-year-olds track the relative frequency of errors when deciding whom to trust.

Going With the Flow Preschoolers Prefer Nondissenters as Informants

In two experiments, 3- and 4-year-olds were tested for their sensitivity to agreement and disagreement among informants. In pretest trials, they watched as three of four informants (Experiment 1) or two of three informants (Experiment 2) indicated the same referent for an unfamiliar label; the remaining informant was a lone dissenter who indicated a different referent. Asked for their own judgment, the preschoolers sided with the majority rather than the dissenter. In subsequent test trials, one member of the majority and the dissenter remained present and continued to provide conflicting information about the names of unfamiliar objects. Children remained mistrustful of the dissenter. They preferred to seek and endorse information from the informant who had belonged to the majority. The implications and scope of childrens early sensitivity to group consensus are discussed.

Children's selective trust in native-accented speakers

Across two experiments, preschool-aged children demonstrated selective learning of non-linguistic information from native-accented rather than foreign-accented speakers. In Experiment 1, children saw videos of a native- and a foreign-accented speaker of English who each spoke for 10 seconds, and then silently demonstrated different functions with novel objects. Children selectively endorsed the silent object function provided by the native-accented speaker. In Experiment 2, children again endorsed the native-accented over the foreign-accented speaker, even though both informants previously spoke only in nonsense speech. Thus, young children demonstrate selective trust in native-accented speakers even when neither informants speech relays meaningful semantic content, and the information that both informants provide is non-linguistic. We propose that children orient towards members of their native community to guide their early cultural learning.

Individual differences in children's emotion understanding: Effects of age and language

Over the last two decades, it has been established that childrens emotion understanding changes as they develop. Recent studies have also begun to address individual differences in childrens emotion understanding. The first goal of this study was to examine the development of these individual differences across a wide age range with a test assessing nine different components of emotion understanding. The second goal was to examine the relation between language ability and individual differences in emotion understanding. Eighty children ranging in age from 4 to 11 years were tested. Children displayed a clear improvement with age in both their emotion understanding and language ability. In each age group, there were clear individual differences in emotion understanding and language ability. Age and language ability together explained 72% of emotion understanding variance; 20% of this variance was explained by age alone and 27% by language ability alone. The results are discussed in terms of their theoretical and practical implications.

Early understanding of emotion: Evidence from natural language

Abstract Young childrens early understanding of emotion was investigated by examining their use of emotion terms such as happy, sad, mud, and cry. Five childrens emotion language was examined longitudinally from the age of 2 to 5 years, and as a comparison their reference to pains via such terms as burn, sting, and hurt was also examined. In Phase 1 we confirmed and extended prior findings demonstrating that by 2 years of age terms for the basic emotions of happiness, sadness, anger, and fear are commonly used by children as are terms for such related states as crying and hurting. At this early age children produce such terms to refer to self and to others, and to past and future as well as to present states. Over the years from 2 to 5 childrens emotion vocabulary expands, their discussion of hypothetical emotions gets underway, and the complexity of their emotion utterances increases. In Phase 2 our analyses go beyond childrens production of emotion terms to analyses of their conception of emotion. W...

Language and Children's Understanding of Mental States

Children progress through various landmarks in their understanding of mind and emotion. They eventually understand that peoples actions, utterances, and emotions are determined by their beliefs. Although these insights emerge in all normal children, individual children vary in their rates of progress. Four lines of research indicate that language and conversation play a role in individual development: (a) Children with advanced language skills are better at mental-state understanding than those without advanced language skills, (b) deaf children born into nonsigning families lag in mental-state understanding, and (c) exposure to maternal conversation rich in references to mental states promotes mental-state understanding, as do (d) experimental language-based interventions. Debate centers on the mechanism by which language and conversation help childrens understanding of mental states. Three competing interpretations are evaluated here: lexical enrichment (the child gains from acquiring a rich mental-state vocabulary), syntactic enrichment (the child gains from acquiring syntactic tools for embedding one thought in another), and pragmatic enrichment (the child gains from conversations in which varying perspectives on a given topic are articulated). Pragmatic enrichment emerges as the most promising candidate.

Deception by young children following noncompliance.

A paradigm devised by M. Lewis, C. Stanger, and M. W. Sullivan (1989) was adapted to study deception and false-belief understanding. In Study 1, 3- and 5-year-olds were asked not to touch a toy in the experimenters absence. Just over half of the children touched the toy, and of those children, the majority denied having done so. Of control children who were given permission to touch the toy, all touched it and admitted having done so. In Study 2, 3- and 5-year-olds were asked not to look in a box to identify its contents. Almost all children looked, most denied having looked, and a minority consistently feigned ignorance of the contents. False-belief understanding was linked to denial of looking but not to feigning ignorance. Of control children who were given permission to look, all acknowledged looking, and they almost always revealed their knowledge of the contents. The studies confirm that preschoolers deceive in the context of a minor misdemeanor but are less effective at feigning ignorance.

I Should but I Won’t: Why Young Children Endorse Norms of Fair Sharing but Do Not Follow Them

Young children endorse fairness norms related to sharing, but often act in contradiction to those norms when given a chance to share. This phenomenon has rarely been explored in the context of a single study. Using a novel approach, the research presented here offers clear evidence of this discrepancy and goes on to examine possible explanations for its diminution with age. In Study 1, 3–8-year-old children readily stated that they themselves should share equally, asserted that others should as well, and predicted that others had shared equally with them. Nevertheless, children failed to engage in equal sharing until ages 7–8. In Study 2, 7–8-year-olds correctly predicted that they would share equally, and 3–6-year-olds correctly predicted that they would favor themselves, ruling out a failure-of-willpower explanation for younger childrens behavior. Similarly, a test of inhibitory control in Study 1 also failed to explain the shift with age toward adherence to the endorsed norm. The data suggest that, although 3-year-olds know the norm of equal sharing, the weight that children attach to this norm increases with age when sharing involves a cost to the self.