Suchergebnisse

As a professor of infant and child development, Vanessa LoBue had certain expectations about how pregnancy and motherhood would go. Experiencing it was a different story. As she learned, the first few months of parenthood are much harder than anyone tells you. Written in real time as LoBue proceeded through pregnancy and first-time parenthood, 9 Months In, 9 Months Out explores the science of infant development alongside an honest account of how that science translates to a mother's experience.

'9 Months In, 9 Months Out' is a month-to-month real-time account of pregnancy and first-time parenthood that integrates the science of infant and child development with the personal journey involved in becoming a parent. Expertise can explain the science of what's happening to a fetus or a baby throughout development, but all the science in the world can't tell you what it feels like to have a baby: the pang of morning sickness, the pain of labour, the excitement of birth, and the joy that comes from seeing your baby's first smile. This work is about pregnancy and first-time parenthood and what we experience in the 9 months of pregnancy and the 9 months that follow.

Abstract Threatening facial expressions can signal the approach of someone or something potentially dangerous. Past research has established that adults have an attentional bias for angry faces, visually detecting their presence more quickly than happy or neutral faces. Two new findings are reported here. First, evidence is presented that young children share this attentional bias. In five experiments, young children and adults were asked to find a picture of a target face among an array of eight distracter faces. Both age groups detected threat‐relevant faces – angry and frightened – more rapidly than non‐threat‐relevant faces (happy and sad). Second, evidence is presented that both adults and children have an attentional bias for negative stimuli overall. All negative faces were detected more quickly than positive ones in both age groups. As the first evidence that young children exhibit the same superior detection of threatening facial expressions as adults, this research provides important support for the existence of an evolved attentional bias for threatening stimuli.

AbstractIn the current brief report, we examined threat perception in a group of young children who may be at‐risk for anxiety due to extreme temperamental shyness. Results demonstrate specific differences in the processing of social threats: 4‐ to 7‐year‐olds in the high‐shy group demonstrated a greater bias for social threats (angry faces) than did a comparison group of low‐shy children. This pattern did not hold for non‐social threats like snakes: Both groups showed an equal bias for the detection of snakes over frogs. The results suggest that children who are tempermentally shy have a heightened sensitivity to social signs of threat early in development. These findings have implications for understanding mechanisms of early threat sensitivity that may predict later socioemotional maladjustment.

AbstractThe ability to quickly detect potential threat is an important survival mechanism for humans and other animals. Past research has established that adults have an attentional bias for the detection of threat‐relevant stimuli, including snakes and spiders as well as angry human faces. Recent studies have documented that preschool children also detect the presence of threatening stimuli more quickly than various non‐threatening stimuli. Here we report the first evidence that this attentional bias is present even in infancy. In two experiments, 8‐ to 14‐month‐old infants responded more rapidly to snakes than to flowers and more rapidly to angry than to happy faces. These data provide the first evidence of enhanced visual detection of threat‐relevant stimuli in infants and hence offer especially strong support for the existence of a general bias for the detection of threat in humans.

Abstract Why are snakes such a common target of fear? One current view is that snake fear is one of several innate fears that emerge spontaneously. Another is that humans have an evolved predisposition to learn to fear snakes. In the first study reported here, 9‐ to 10‐month‐old infants showed no differential spontaneous reaction to films of snakes versus other animals. In the second study, 7‐ to 18‐month‐old infants associated snakes with fear: As predicted, they looked longer at films of snakes while listening to a frightened human voice than while listening to a happy voice. In the third study, infants did not look differentially to still photos of snakes and other animals, indicating that movement is crucial to infants' association of snakes with fear. These results offer support for the view that humans have a natural tendency to selectively associate snakes with fear.

AbstractRecent research implicates the importance of social and contextual factors in children's fair behavior. Here, we explored the social and emotional influences that might contribute to fair behavior in young children. We examined 79 pairs of 3‐ to 5‐year‐old children (N = 158; 85 female; M = 4.3 years; Range = 3.03–5.54) in a naturalistic sharing interaction to measure their verbal, emotional, and behavioral responses to an unfair distribution of rewards, as well as their subsequent sharing behavior. Children who received fewer rewards responded verbally, behaviorally, and emotionally as predicted, protesting the unfair distribution. However, children who received more rewards either failed to notice their partner's responses, or they failed to consider these responses when given the chance to behave prosocially and correct the unfair distribution. The only cue that predicted prosociality was a negative affective response from the disadvantaged peer.

AbstractFairness is central to morality. Previous research has shown that children begin to understand fairness between the ages of four and six, depending on the context and method used. Within distributive contexts, there is little clear evidence that children have a concept of fairness before the age of five. This research, however, has mostly examined children's explicit verbal responses to questions about unequal distributions—a method that often underestimates children's knowledge. In the current study, we instead examined emotional and behavioral signs that children notice and dislike inequality. We distributed an unequal number of rewards (stickers) among pairs of children (the ages of three to five years) and probed their responses to the inequality. Both implicit and explicit measures revealed that children as young as three years old notice and react negatively to an unfair distribution, particularly when they receive less than their partner. The few age trends that were found involved verbal (explicit) responses, providing evidence that although children do not explicitly talk about fairness until the age of five or six, this talk is an effort to explain emotional reactions that emerged earlier in development.