Relieved or disappointed? Children's understanding of how others feel at the cessation of events.

People's emotional states are influenced not just by events occurring in the present but also by how events have unfolded in the past and how they are likely to unfold in the future. To what extent do young children understand the ways in which past events can affect current emotions even if they are no longer ongoing? In the current study, we explored children's ability to understand how others feel at the cessation of events-as events change from being present to being past. We asked 97 4- to 6-year-olds (40.2% female) and 35 adults (54.3% female) to judge how characters felt once particular types of events had ended relative to how they felt during these events. We found that from age 4, children judged (as adults do) that the character would feel positive at the cessation of negative events-what we refer to as temporal relief. This understanding of relief occurs earlier than has been shown in previous research. However, children were less likely than adults to judge others as feeling sad at the cessation of positive events-what we refer to as temporal disappointment. Overall, our findings suggest that children not only understand that the cessation of events can affect others' emotions but also recognize that people feel differently following the cessation of positive, negative, and neutral events.

Episodic future thinking and delay of gratification in children: Is imagining reward pay-off helpful?

Previous studies have failed to show an effect of episodic future thinking (EFT) on children's delay of gratification (DoG), contrasting strikingly with adult findings. Recent findings from a sample of 8-11-year-old children by Canning et al. (J. Exp. Child Psychol., 228, 2023, 105618) indicate that EFT cueing is not effective compared to a no-cue control even when it is reward related. Canning et al. suggest children's DoG performance, unlike that of adults, may be negatively affected by the cognitive load of cueing, but this leaves unexplained why EFT reward-related cueing produced significantly better performance than cueing that did not involve EFT in their study. The current study attempted to further delineate the importance of linking future thinking cues to rewards. A reward-related EFT condition was compared to a reward-unrelated EFT condition and a no-cue control on a delay choice task. No significant differences were observed between the three conditions. This suggests that even reward-related future thinking is ineffective at improving children's delayed gratification. Further research is needed to determine why children struggle to benefit from EFT cues.

Do both anticipated relief and anticipated regret predict decisions about influenza vaccination?

OBJECTIVE: Anticipated regret has been found to predict vaccination intentions and behaviours. We examined whether anticipated relief also predicts seasonal influenza vaccination intentions and behaviour. Given claims about differences in their antecedents and function, we distinguished between counterfactual relief (relief that a worse outcome did not obtain) and temporal relief (relief that an unpleasant experience is over). DESIGN: Cross-sectional. METHODS: Unvaccinated participants (N = 295) were recruited online in November 2020. Participants completed measures of anticipated regret, anticipated counterfactual relief, and anticipated temporal relief and measures of theory of planned behaviour constructs (attitudes, norms, perceived control, and intentions). One month later, the same participants were re-surveyed and asked to report their vaccination status. RESULTS: Although all anticipated emotion measures were associated with intentions and behaviour, only anticipated counterfactual relief and regret independently predicted vaccination intentions in regression analyses. Mediation analysis showed both anticipated counterfactual relief and regret were indirectly, via intentions, associated with behaviour. CONCLUSIONS: Results suggest that, regardless of valence, counterfactual emotions predict vaccination intention and, indirectly, behaviour. Furthermore, participants may differ in their sensitivity to the anticipation of positive versus negative counterfactual emotions. These findings may permit more precise targeting of interventions to increase vaccine uptake.

Listen up, kids! How mind wandering affects immediate and delayed memory in children.

Mind wandering occurs when attention becomes disengaged from the here-and-now and directed toward internally generated thoughts; this is often associated with poorer performance on educationally significant tasks. In this study, 8- to 9-year-old children (N = 60) listened to audio stories embedded with intermittent thought probes that were used to determine if participants' thoughts were on or off task. The key objective was to explore the impact of probe-caught mind wandering on both immediate and delayed memory retention. Children reported being off task approximately 24% of the time. Most inattention episodes were classified as task-unrelated thoughts (i.e., 'pure' instances of mind wandering, 9%) or attentional failures due to distractions (9%). Higher frequency of mind wandering was strongly associated with poorer memory recall, and task-unrelated thoughts strongly predicted how well children could recall components of the audio story both immediately after the task and after a 1-week delay. This study is the first to demonstrate the impact of mind wandering on delayed memory retention in children. Results suggest that exploring mind wandering in the foundational years of schooling could provide the necessary empirical foundation for the development of practical interventions geared toward detecting and refocusing lapses of attention in educational contexts.

Basic Symbolic Number Skills, but Not Formal Mathematics Performance, Longitudinally Predict Mathematics Anxiety in the First Years of Primary School.

Mathematical anxiety (MA) and mathematics performance typically correlate negatively in studies of adolescents and adults, but not always amongst young children, with some theorists questioning the relevance of MA to mathematics performance in this age group. Evidence is also limited in relation to the developmental origins of MA and whether MA in young children can be linked to their earlier mathematics performance. To address these questions, the current study investigated whether basic and formal mathematics skills around 4 and 5 years of age were predictive of MA around the age of 7-8. Additionally, we also examined the cross-sectional relationships between MA and mathematics performance in 7-8-year-old children. Specifically, children in our study were assessed in their first (T1; aged 4-5), second (T2; aged 5-6), and fourth years of school (T3; aged 7-8). At T1 and T2, children completed measures of basic numerical skills, IQ, and working memory, as well as curriculum-based mathematics tests. At T3, children completed two self-reported MA questionnaires, together with a curriculum-based mathematics test. The results showed that MA could be reliably measured in a sample of 7-8-year-olds and demonstrated the typical negative correlation between MA and mathematical performance (although the strength of this relationship was dependent on the specific content domain). Importantly, although early formal mathematical skills were unrelated to later MA, there was evidence of a longitudinal relationship between basic early symbolic number skills and later MA, supporting the idea that poorer basic numerical skills relate to the development of MA.

Reward-related episodic future thinking and delayed gratification in children.

Cuing adults to imagine their personal futures enhances prudent choice in delay discounting tasks. However, it has not been established that such cueing also reduces discounting in children. We assessed the effect of episodic future thinking (EFT) on delay of gratification in children using EFT cues specifically related to the rewards on offer. One hundred and thirty-nine 8-12-year-olds were assigned to one of three conditions: (i) EFT (imagine spending money in the future), (ii) Imagine Place (imagine being in a certain place), or (iii) No Cue. They were cued on each trial of two tasks: a delay discounting task with hypothetical monetary rewards and a real delay choice task involving choices between real rewards over real delays (coins that could be swapped for treats). In the delay discounting task, the Imagine Place group showed significantly higher discounting than the other two groups. In the real delay choice task, the Imagine Place group made significantly fewer delayed choices than the EFT group. However, the EFT group did not differ from the No Cue group in either task. The lack of a difference between the EFT and No Cue conditions supports previous findings suggesting children struggle to benefit from EFT cues. Poorer performance of the Imagine Place group suggests that cued imagination is cognitively taxing for children, using up cognitive resources required to delay gratification.

Relief in everyday life.

Despite being implicated in a wide range of psychological and behavioral phenomena, relief remains poorly understood from the perspective of psychological science. What complicates the study of relief is that people seem to use the term to describe an emotion that occurs in two distinct situations: when an unpleasant episode is over, or upon realizing that an outcome could have been worse. This study constitutes a detailed empirical investigation of people's reports of everyday episodes of relief. A set of four studies collected a large corpus (N = 1,835) of first-person reports of real-life episodes of relief and examined people's judgments about the antecedents of relief, its relation to counterfactual thoughts, and its subsequent effects on decision making. Some participants described relief experiences that had either purely temporal or purely counterfactual precursors. Nevertheless, the findings indicated that the prototypical instance of relief appears to be one in which both these elements are present. The results also suggest that, although relief is frequently experienced in situations in which people are not responsible for the relief-inducing event, nevertheless they typically report that the experience had a positive impact on subsequent decision making. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Children's understanding of counterfactual and temporal relief in others.

Developmentalists have investigated relief as a counterfactually mediated emotion, but not relief experienced when negative events end-so-called temporal relief. This study represents the first body of work to investigate the development of children's understanding of temporal relief and compare it with their understanding of counterfactual relief. Across four experiments (407 children aged 4-11 years and 60 adults; 52% female), we examined children's ability to attribute counterfactual and temporal relief to others. In Experiment 1, 7- to 10-year-olds typically judged that two characters would feel equally happy despite avoiding or enduring an event that was unpleasant for one character. Using forced-choice procedures, Experiments 2 to 4 showed that a fledgling ability to attribute relief to others emerges at 5 to 6 years of age and that the tendency to make these attributions increases with age. The experiments in this study provide the first positive evidence in the literature as to when children can begin to attribute both counterfactual and temporal instances of relief to others. Overall, there was little evidence for separate developmental trajectories for understanding counterfactual and temporal relief, although in Experiment 4 there was an indication that, under scaffolded contexts, some children find it easier to attribute counterfactual relief rather than temporal relief to others.

Toward an Account of Intuitive Time.

People hold intuitive theories of the physical world, such as theories of matter, energy, and motion, in the sense that they have a coherent conceptual structure supporting a network of beliefs about the domain. It is not yet clear whether people can also be said to hold a shared intuitive theory of time. Yet, philosophical debates about the metaphysical nature of time often revolve around the idea that people hold one or more "common sense" assumptions about time: that there is an objective "now"; that the past, present, and future are fundamentally different in nature; and that time passes or flows. We empirically explored the question of whether people indeed share some or all of these assumptions by asking adults to what extent they agreed with a set of brief statements about time. Across two analyses, subsets of people's beliefs about time were found consistently to covary in ways that suggested stable underlying conceptual dimensions related to aspects of the "common sense" assumptions described by philosophers. However, distinct subsets of participants showed three mutually incompatible profiles of response, the most frequent of which did not closely match all of philosophers' claims about common sense time. These exploratory studies provide a useful starting point in attempts to characterize intuitive theories of time.

Developmental differences in description-based versus experience-based decision making under risk in children.

The willingness to take a risk is shaped by temperaments and cognitive abilities, both of which develop rapidly during childhood. In the adult developmental literature, a distinction is drawn between description-based tasks, which provide explicit choice-reward information, and experience-based tasks, which require decisions from past experience, each emphasizing different cognitive demands. Although developmental trends have been investigated for both types of decisions, few studies have compared description-based and experience-based decision making in the same sample of children. In the current study, children (N = 112; 5-9 years of age) completed both description-based and experience-based decision tasks tailored for use with young children. Child temperament was reported by the children's primary teacher. Behavioral measures suggested that the willingness to take a risk in a description-based task increased with age, whereas it decreased in an experience-based task. However, computational modeling alongside further inspection of the behavioral data suggested that these opposite developmental trends across the two types of tasks both were associated with related capacities: older (vs. younger) children's higher sensitivity to experienced losses and higher outcome sensitivity to described rewards and losses. From the temperamental characteristics, higher attentional focusing was linked with a higher learning rate on the experience-based task and a bias to accept gambles in the gain domain on the description-based task. Our findings demonstrate the importance of comparing children's behavior across qualitatively different tasks rather than studying a single behavior in isolation.

The link between mind wandering and learning in children.

Mind wandering is a common everyday experience during which attention shifts from the here and now; in adults and adolescents, it is associated with poorer performance in educationally significant tasks. This study is the first to directly assess the impact of mind wandering on memory retention in children before the adolescent period. A sample of 97 children aged 6-11 years engaged in a listening activity, and the frequency of mind wandering was measured using intermittent thought probes. Participants then completed a memory retention test. Children reported mind wandering on ∼25% of the thought probes, and frequency did not increase with age. When controlling for the impact of age and vocabulary skills, mind wandering frequency accounted for a large and significant portion of variance in memory scores. Mind wandering frequency also mediated the relation between children's ratings of topic interest and memory scores. The results indicate that mind wandering can be reliably measured in children and is of educational significance.

Human Vision Reconstructs Time to Satisfy Causal Constraints.

The goal of perception is to infer the most plausible source of sensory stimulation. Unisensory perception of temporal order, however, appears to require no inference, because the order of events can be uniquely determined from the order in which sensory signals arrive. Here, we demonstrate a novel perceptual illusion that casts doubt on this intuition: In three experiments (N = 607), the experienced event timings were determined by causality in real time. Adult participants viewed a simple three-item sequence, ACB, which is typically remembered as ABC in line with principles of causality. When asked to indicate the time at which events B and C occurred, participants' points of subjective simultaneity shifted so that the assumed cause B appeared earlier and the assumed effect C later, despite participants' full attention and repeated viewings. This first demonstration of causality reversing perceived temporal order cannot be explained by postperceptual distortion, lapsed attention, or saccades.

The effects of cueing episodic future thinking on delay discounting in children, adolescents, and adults.

Discounting the value of delayed rewards such that even a relatively small, immediately available reward is preferred to a larger delayed reward is a commonly observed human trait. Children are particularly steep discounters of delayed rewards as evidenced by delay of gratification studies. In recent years, however, a growing literature indicates that cueing individuals to imagine personal future events attenuates their discounting of delayed rewards. The present studies extend this literature by examining whether cueing future thinking promotes patient choices in children and adolescents. In Experiment 1 we found that cueing future thinking had no effect on 8-11-year-olds' (n = 177) delay discounting of either real or hypothetical rewards. In Experiment 2 we found that cueing adolescents (12-14-year-olds, n = 126) and adults (n = 122) to think about personal future events decreased their discounting of delayed rewards relative to three other conditions: a no cue control, an episodic memory condition and a novel 'future other' condition in which individuals imagine future events that might happen to a significant other person in their life. Cueing adults and adolescents to think about personal future events did not however affect how connected they felt to their future selves or their subjective sense of how close future time points felt to them - two constructs that have previously been shown to be related to delay discounting.

The effect of episodic future thinking on young children's future-oriented decision making.

We investigated whether the developmental emergence of episodic future thinking (EFT) is associated with performance on a type of delay of gratification task: a delay choice task that involved choosing between a small reward now or a larger reward the next day. In Study 1, 4- to 5-year-olds' (N = 99) EFT as measured by a tool saving task was significantly associated with performance on the delay choice task, but this was not the case for other EFT measures. Study 2 compared the performance of 4- to 5-year-olds (N = 130) on the delay choice task when cued to think about either a future, past, or habitual event versus a no-cue baseline. Overall, cuing impaired performance on the delay choice task. Although EFT does show a relation to performance in a delay choice task in preschoolers, deliberately engaging in thought about future events may be too taxing in young children to reliably enhance the ability to make future-oriented decisions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

More Later: Delay of Gratification and Thought About the Future in Children.

We investigated whether individual differences in future time perception and the detail with which future events are imagined are related to children's delay of gratification. We administered a delay choice task (real rewards), a delay discounting task (hypothetical rewards), a novel future time perception measure, an episodic future thinking (EFT) interview and IQ measures to a sample of 7- to 11-year-olds (N = 132) drawn from a urban predominately white population in N. Ireland. We found a strong correlation between delay choice and delay discounting. Future time perception and EFT were related to delay discounting, however only the relation with future time perception survived controlling for age and IQ. Children who showed greater compression of future time periods were the steepest discounters.

Pain in the Past and Pleasure in the Future: The Development of Past-Future Preferences for Hedonic Goods.

It seems self-evident that people prefer painful experiences to be in the past and pleasurable experiences to lie in the future. Indeed, it has been claimed that, for hedonic goods, this preference is absolute (Sullivan, 2018). Yet very little is known about the extent to which people demonstrate explicit preferences regarding the temporal location of hedonic experiences, about the developmental trajectory of such preferences, and about whether such preferences are impervious to differences in the quantity of envisaged past and future pain or pleasure. We find consistent evidence that, all else being equal, adults and children aged 7 and over prefer pleasure to lie in the future and pain in the past and believe that other people will, too. They also predict that other people will be happier when pleasure is in the future rather than the past but sadder when pain is in the future rather than the past. Younger children have the same temporal preferences as adults for their own painful experiences, but they prefer their pleasure to lie in the past and do not predict that others' levels of happiness or sadness vary dependent on whether experiences lie in the past or the future. However, from the age of 7, temporal preferences were typically abandoned at the earliest opportunity when the quantity of past pain or pleasure was greater than the quantity located in the future. Past-future preferences for hedonic goods emerge early developmentally but are surprisingly flexible.

Temporal Binding, Causation, and Agency: Developing a New Theoretical Framework.

In temporal binding, the temporal interval between one event and another, occurring some time later, is subjectively compressed. We discuss two ways in which temporal binding has been conceptualized. In studies showing temporal binding between a voluntary action and its causal consequences, such binding is typically interpreted as providing a measure of an implicit or pre-reflective "sense of agency." However, temporal binding has also been observed in contexts not involving voluntary action, but only the passive observation of a cause-effect sequence. In those contexts, it has been interpreted as a top-down effect on perception reflecting a belief in causality. These two views need not be in conflict with one another, if one thinks of them as concerning two separate mechanisms through which temporal binding can occur. In this paper, we explore an alternative possibility: that there is a unitary way of explaining temporal binding both within and outside the context of voluntary action as a top-down effect on perception reflecting a belief in causality. Any such explanation needs to account for ways in which agency, and factors connected with agency, has been shown to affect the strength of temporal binding. We show that principles of causal inference and causal selection already familiar from the literature on causal learning have the potential to explain why the strength of people's causal beliefs can be affected by the extent to which they are themselves actively involved in bringing about events, thus in turn affecting binding.

The developmental profile of temporal binding: From childhood to adulthood.

Temporal binding refers to a phenomenon whereby the time interval between a cause and its effect is perceived as shorter than the same interval separating two unrelated events. We examined the developmental profile of this phenomenon by comparing the performance of groups of children (aged 6-7, 7-8, and 9-10 years) and adults on a novel interval estimation task. In Experiment 1, participants made judgements about the time interval between (a) their button press and a rocket launch, and (b) a non-causal predictive signal and rocket launch. In Experiment 2, an additional causal condition was included in which participants made judgements about the interval between an experimenter's button press and the launch of a rocket. Temporal binding was demonstrated consistently and did not change in magnitude with age: estimates of delay were shorter in causal contexts for both adults and children. In addition, the magnitude of the binding effect was greater when participants themselves were the cause of an outcome compared with when they were mere spectators. This suggests that although causality underlies the binding effect, intentional action may modulate its magnitude. Again, this was true of both adults and children. Taken together, these results are the first to suggest that the binding effect is present and developmentally constant from childhood into adulthood.

Children's future-oriented cognition.

Children's future-oriented cognition has become a well-established area of research over the last decade. Future-oriented cognition encompasses a range of processes, including those involved in conceiving the future, imagining and preparing for future events, and making decisions that will affect how the future unfolds. We consider recent empirical advances in the study of such processes by outlining key findings that have yielded a clearer picture of how future thinking emerges and changes over childhood. Our interest in future thinking stems from a broader interest in temporal cognition, and we argue that a consideration of developmental changes in how children understand and represent time itself provides a valuable framework in which to study future-oriented cognition.

Causality influences children's and adults' experience of temporal order.

Although it has long been known that time is a cue to causation, recent work with adults has demonstrated that causality can also influence the experience of time. In causal reordering (Bechlivanidis & Lagnado, 2013, 2016) adults tend to report the causally consistent order of events rather than the correct temporal order. However, the effect has yet to be demonstrated in children. Across four preregistered experiments, 4- to 10-year-old children (N = 813) and adults (N = 178) watched a 3-object Michotte-style "pseudocollision." While in the canonical version of the clip, object A collided with B, which then collided with object C (order: ABC), the pseudocollision involved the same spatial array of objects but featured object C moving before object B (order: ACB), with no collision between B and C. Participants were asked to judge the temporal order of events and whether object B collided with C. Across all age groups, participants were significantly more likely to judge that B collided with C in the 3-object pseudocollision than in a 2-object control clip (where clear causal direction was lacking), despite the spatiotemporal relations between B and C being identical in the two clips (Experiments 1-3). Collision judgments and temporal order judgments were not entirely consistent, with some participants-particularly in the younger age range-basing their temporal order judgments on spatial rather than temporal information (Experiment 4). We conclude that in both children and adults, rather than causal impressions being determined only by the basic spatial-temporal properties of object movement, schemata are used in a top-down manner when interpreting perceptual displays. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).