Children's moral and ecological reasoning about the Prince William Sound oil spill.

Sixty 2nd, 5th, and 8th graders were interviewed on their moral and ecological reasoning about the 1990 Exxon Valdez oil spill that occurred in Prince William Sound, Alaska. Results showed that children understood that the oil spill negatively affected the local Alaskan shoreline, marine life, fishermen, recreationists, and the oil company. Children cared that harm occurred to the shoreline and marine life and conceived of both types of harm as violating a moral obligation. Fifth and 8th graders, compared with 2nd graders, used a greater proportion of anthropocentric reasoning (e.g., that nature ought to be protected to protect human welfare) and biocentric reasoning (e.g., that nature has intrinsic value, rights, or a teleology). Discussion focuses on how studying children's reasoning about nature not only extends the bounds of what counts as moral—to include a relationship with the natural world—but also provides a unique means by which to conduct basic research on children's moral development. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Reasoning about certainty and uncertainty in concrete, causal, and propositional contexts.

Examined children's comprehension of certainty and uncertainty within the context of concrete and propositional reasoning tasks. 69 1st, 3rd, and 5th graders were given G. Pieraut-LeBonniec's (1980) box task and a multisufficient causality task to assess reasoning about certainty and uncertainty in concrete contexts. Ss were also given conditional syllogisms to assess this ability in a propositional context. Half of the Ss at each grade were given contramanded syllogism task statements intended to block erroneous conversational inferences made about these conditional statements. Results indicate that there were no developmental differences in reasoning about concrete certainty, but significant improvement occurred with age in reasoning about concrete uncertainty. On syllogisms, only the 5th graders benefited from contramanding and thus demonstrated an understanding of propositional uncertainty. Correlational and error analyses showed that the discrimination between certainty and uncertainty was mastered in concrete contexts prior to the time when this discrimination occurred in propositional contexts. It is concluded that reasoning about concrete certainty and uncertainty requires a different competence than that required for reasoning about propositional certainty and uncertainty. (17 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Children's knowledge of a best friend: Fact or fancy?

40 4th and 8th graders were questioned about a best friend's personality (e.g., what the friend worries about), the friend's preferences (e.g., favorite sports), and other characteristics that were more external to the friend (e.g., the friend's birthdate). Accuracy of knowledge was determined by comparing Ss' responses with their friend's self-reports. Also assessed were Ss' frequency of contact with the friend, their attraction to the friend, the duration of their friendship, and their cognitive level as judged by the Raven Standard Progressive Matrices. Results indicate that 8th graders knew more than 4th graders about a friend's personality characteristics and preferences, suggesting that the intimacy of best friendships increases with age. Cognitive level, frequency of contact, and the duration of a friendship predicted significant portions of the variance in external knowledge. Frequency of contact was the only significant predictor of intimate knowledge; cognitive level and attraction to the friend were marginally significant predictors. (21 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Developmental analysis of the role of social comparison in self-evaluation.

The use of social comparison information for self-evaluation may be viewed as a major developmental step in children's growing understanding of their competencies and limitations. The 2 studies presented here suggested that children's achievement-related self-evaluations are little affected by relative comparisons until surprisingly late—that is, not earlier than 7–8 yrs of age. In Study 1, 104 1st and 2nd graders performed a task with 3 coacting peers; only the 2nd graders made any use at all of the social comparison information in their evaluative judgments. In Study 2 an attempt was made to maximize the potential for using comparative information by providing a strong incentive to engage in social comparsion of abilities in a situation in which objective information about a success/failure outcome was unavailable. The 90 kindergarten, 2nd, and 4th graders played a game with peers and made competence-related self-evaluations and decisions about future performance. Only the judgments of the 4th graders were consistently affected by the social comparison information. Previous research on the development of social comparison and possible explanations for the developmental trends observed are discussed. (19 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The hierarchical nature of stages of moral development.

The notion that stages of moral reasoning develop in an invariant hierarchical sequence has been supported by data indicating that Ss prefer, but fail to understand, higher stage reasoning. However, as J. J. Moran and A. J. Joniak (see record 1979-28407-001) have suggested, this pattern may be artifactually based on nonstage features of moral reasoning, such as vocabulary and syntactic complexity. In the present study, 64 students (8th and 11th graders, undergraduates, and graduates) responded to a series of moral dilemmas and assessed evaluation and understanding of moral-stage-prototypic statements that were equated for level of language. Results support L. Kohlberg's (1981) hierarchical nature of moral stages, despite the equating of language level. Understanding was limited to no more than 1 stage higher than the S's own, and Ss preferred higher over lower stage statements if they were capable of appreciating the difference. (17 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Encoding dimensions in memory: Developmental similarities at two grade levels.

Studied 192 middle-class 2nd graders and 192 middle-class 6th graders to test the hypothesis that for young children certain dimensions (e.g., the acoustic) are more likely to be the dominant attributes of a memory than are other dimensions (e.g., the semantic). Data do not replicate the findings of other developmental studies with similar-aged children. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Children's perceptions of friendships as supportive relationships.

Assessed 122 2nd, 4th, 6th, and 8th graders' perceptions of the social support provided by friends. During individual interviews, Ss were asked about the frequency of emotional support or intimate self-disclosure, tangible support or prosocial behavior, and other types of support provided by a particular friend. Ss were also asked about the frequency of conflicts with the friend and the frequency of supportive interactions and conflicts with a classmate who was only an acquaintance. Factor analyses revealed an increase with grade in the differentiation between the support and conflict dimensions of friendship and acquaintanceship. At all grades, Ss perceived friends as more supportive than acquaintances, but explanations for the lack of support from acquaintances changed with grade. Sixth graders often gave personal attributions (e.g., saying that the acquaintances were selfish or hostile). Eighth graders favored more situational attributions (e.g., saying that they had few supportive interactions with acquaintances because they rarely came in contact with them). The potential value of perceived-support measures in research on the consequences of friendship is discussed. (27 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Developmental change in judging important and critical elements of stories.

Conducted 2 experiments with 54 2nd, 4th, and 6th graders and 15 undergraduates (Exp I) and 45 2nd and 4th graders (Exp II) to examine children's understanding (metacognitive awareness) that in a simple story the following parts are most important or essential for comprehending it: what precipitates the character's action (initiating event), what the character did (action), and what follows the character's action (consequence). Ss' judgments of simple stories showed that 2nd graders seldom selected this sequence, but 4th, 5th, and 6th graders and adults did so under a variety of conditions. In addition there was a modest relation between recall of the stories and older children's (5th graders) judgments of them. (9 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Measuring and monitoring general health status in elderly persons: practical and methodological issues in using the SF-36 Health Survey

An action perception approach (i.e., Heider, 1958) was used to investigate the influences of qualitatively different goal-related actions on 2nd- and 5th-grade children's and college students' perceptions of actors' effort expenditure (i.e., trying) and goal desire (i.e., wanting). Actors performed three repetitive actions or three equifinal actions within 2 reward conditions (offer of reward or no reward, for attempting to attain a prosocial goal). At each age level, perceptions of effort and want varied significantly by goal-related actions, whereas reward information did not emerge as an influential factor in differentiating perceptions of effort and want. Age-related findings suggested that, compared with the college students, the children overattributed trying and wanting to the actors. In the repetitive-actions condition, both 2nd and 5th graders gave significantly higher effort and want ratings than college students did. In the equifinal-actions condition, 2nd and 5th graders gave significantly higher effort ratings than college students did.     

Judging the important issues in moral dilemmas: An objective measure of development.

Using Kohlberg's moral stages, statements were written to exemplify stage characteristics. 73 9th graders, 40 12th graders, 40 undergraduates, and 40 graduate students (seminarians and doctoral students in moral philosophy) were asked to select the statement defining the most important issue in a moral dilemma. The importance attributed to principled (Stages 5 and 6) moral statements (the P score) evidenced developmental trends: The P score differentiated student groups of varied advancement-junior high, senior high, college, and graduate students (F >48.5); P correlated in the .60s with age, comprehension of social-moral concepts, and Kohlberg's scale-and less so but significantly with IQ. The way Ss chose important issues was not only an intellectual skill but also value related: P correlated in the .60s with attitude measures (e.g., a law and order test and a libertarian democracy measure). A 2nd student sample and an adult sample provided replications. Test-retest correlation of the P score was .81. The methodological advantages of an objective moral judgment measure are discussed. (22 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Children's Moral Judgments as a Function of Intention, Damage, and an Actor's Physical Harm.

A study was conducted to examine the moral judgments of kindergartners, third graders, and fifth graders with respect to physical harm to the actor. The subjects were exposed to stories varying in terms of intention, damage, and harm to the actor. Younger children rated the hurt actors more negatively than unhurt actors; however, this distinction disappeared by fifth grade. It is suggested that young children's belief in the notion of immanent justice accounted for the obtained results. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Development of children's inferences of the emotions of others.

According to Weiner's attribution-emotion model, the development of children's inferences of emotion in others may be affected by an increasing ability to consider causal attributions and situational outcomes together, rather than outcomes alone, when making emotional judgments. This formulation was tested in the present study of developmental changes in emotional inferences and children's justifications for them. Second graders, fifth graders, and college students heard 12 stories that varied systematically by situational domain (achievement of moral), outcome (positive or negative), and causal attribution (personal effort, another's intervention, or luck) and were asked to infer the story character's subsequent emotion and explain the reasons for it. Analyses of their responses revealed significant differences by age, with second graders offering more outcome-dependent inferences (e.g., happy, sad) and justifications focusing on the story outcome alone and fifth graders and adults providing more causal attribution-dependent inferences (e.g., pride, anger) with justifications entailing causal considerations in the story narrative. However, within each age group there were few consistent associations between the kind of emotional inference and the type of justification offered for it, and adults failed to consistently generate the kinds of attribution-dependent inferences predicted by the model. The contributions and limitations of the attribution-emotion model are assessed in light of these findings. (23 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Do children "DRM" like adults? False memory production in children.

The Deese/Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm was used to investigate developmental trends in accurate and false memory production. In Experiment 1, DRM lists adjusted to be more consistent with children's vocabulary were used with 2nd graders, 8th graders, and college students. Accurate and false recall and recognition increased with age, but semantic information appeared to be available to all age groups. Experiment 2 created a set of child-generated lists based on the free associations by a group of 3rd graders to critical items. The child-generated associates were different from those generated by adults; long and short versions of the child-generated lists were therefore presented to 2nd, 5th, and 8th graders and college students in Experiment 3. Second graders exhibited few false memories, whereas 5th graders were similar to adults in low-demand conditions and more similar to younger children in high-demand conditions. Findings are discussed in terms of developmental changes in automatic and effortful processing and the use of semantic networks. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Reasoning and secondary reinforcement in 6–7-year-olds and 10–11-year-olds.

Conducted 2 experiments to investigate the 1st author's cognitive theory of secondary reinforcement effects, which predicts that Ss of a preoperational age (i.e., younger than 7 yrs) should not necessarily learn responses followed by a stimulus object previously instrumental in obtaining a reward, while Ss of a postoperational age should do so. Using 24 1st and 24 5th graders in 2 learning tasks, the prediction was confirmed. Furthermore, verbal responses indicated that the logical operations that presumably influenced the behavior of the older children actually did occur. In Exp II, using 28 2nd and 15 6th graders, the training task was simplified in order to try to facilitate logical reasoning, but the behavior of the younger Ss was not affected. It is concluded that secondary reinforcement of a stimulus–response associative type has yet to be demonstrated, and that secondary reinforcement of a cognitive type is heavily dependent on reasoning ability. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A developmental study of the cognitive basis of performance impairment after failure.

Tested the egotism hypothesis against the learned-helplessness hypothesis while considering developmental variation in reasoning about ability, using 30 male and 30 female 2nd graders and 30 male and 30 female 6th graders. The egotism hypothesis states that performance impairment after failure follows from attempts to avoid appearing low in ability. The learned-helplessness hypothesis states that this performance impairment occurs as a result of the perception of noncontingency. Ss were assigned either solvable or unsolvable matching-familiar-figures task items. Performance on a subsequent anagram task constituted the dependent measure. Results show that performance deficits on anagrams following failure on the matching-familiar-figures task appeared for 6th graders only. These deficits occurred when the anagrams were purported to be of moderate normative difficulty but not when they were said to be of high difficulty. Moreover, performance deficits were apparent only in those 6th graders who had a mature conception of ability. Males tended to increase performance when task conditions were unfavorable; females, especially younger ones, faced with this combination of adverse conditions showed substantial declines in performance. (17 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Moral reasoning, classroom behavior, and sociometric status among elementary school children.

Relations among moral reasoning, classroom behavior, and sociometric status were investigated in a sample of 133 2nd and 3rd graders. It was hypothesized that hedonistic and needs-oriented moral reasoning, 2 forms of L. Kohlberg's (1984) Stage 2 moral reasoning, would be differentially related to teachers' ratings of classroom behavior and to sociometric status. Among boys, hedonistic moral reasoning was associated with the lack of social competencies, acting-out behavior, and low social preference. In addition to influencing sociometric status indirectly through social behavior, moral reasoning was found to explain variance in sociometric status not accounted for by either acting out or social competencies. Results support N. Eisenberg's (1986) claim that hedonistic and needs-oriented reasoning are qualitatively distinct. Although both forms of reasoning characterize Kohlberg's Stage 2, it is hedonistic reasoning, not needs-oriented reasoning, that appears to be associated with poor social behavior and, in turn, low sociometric status. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Children's beliefs about familiar and unfamiliar peers in relation to their sociometric status.

Examined children's general beliefs about familiar and unfamiliar peers in relationship to their sociometric status and their experience with parents. In the initial phase involving 886 4th and 5th graders, submissive rejected children but not aggressive rejected children reported less positive beliefs about peers than average status children. In the 2nd portion, which included 77 boys and girls from the larger sample, no relationship between children's sociometric status and their beliefs about unfamiliar peers was found. Beliefs about unfamiliar peers were related, however, to children's perception of the amount of acceptance and support they received from parents. Implications of these findings for children's social competence are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Analysis of risk to children participating in a sociometric task.

Fourth and 5th graders (N?=?119) were individually interviewed regarding their reactions to completing group-administered, positive and negative peer nomination techniques. Results were consistent with previous findings of no obvious harm; but, additional, unique information regarding children's discussions was identified. For example, 7 children reported that 6 low-status peers were talked about behind their backs. However, these 7 children further reported that, to the best of their knowledge, none of the 6 low-status peers found out about the negative comments. No child reported having hurt feelings or having knowledge of anyone else having hurt feelings. Overall, 17% of the children (n?=?20) reported that they were complimented by others; high-status peers were significantly more likely to be complimented. It was determined that the condition of minimal risk of harm, harm not greater than children might encounter in daily life, was not breached. Directions for further research are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)