Toy stories: Children's use of gender stereotypes in making social judgments.

Young children tend to categorize people and objects to understand their environments, but under certain circumstances, they can also appreciate individual differences. Three studies investigated how young children use categorical and individuating information to make social judgments. In Study 1, 3- to 5-year-old children (N = 33; 18 boys, 15 girls) predicted hypothetical peers' preferences for toys along a spectrum from highly stereotyped for girls to neutral to highly stereotyped for boys. Hypothetical peers were described by gender and as enjoying activities that were stereotypical, counter-stereotypical, or unrelated to gender. Children's choices were consistent with use of the provided individuating information rather than gender alone. In Studies 2 and 3, we retested these ideas with preschool samples from the United States (N = 44) and China (N = 21) respectively and also asked children about their toy, playmate, and activity preferences. For both samples, responses followed the same pattern as Study 1 for social judgments and were characterized by preferences for same-gender peers and neutral or gender-typed toys and activities, particularly in girls. While young children express preferences consistent with gender identity, they process and use individuating information in making social judgments, a capacity that could be targeted by interventions designed to reduce the development of gender-based bias.

Pretend play as abstraction: Implications for early development and beyond.

Humans are the only species that engages in sustained, complex pretend play. As pretend play is practically ubiquitous across cultures, it might support or afford a context for developmental advances during the juvenile period that have implications for functioning in adulthood. Early in development, learning to separate our thoughts from reality is practiced in pretend play and is associated with changes not just in cognition, but in emotional and social domains as well. Specifically, pretend play affords opportunities to engage in abstractions that could support abilities such as perspective-taking, emotion recognition and regulation, and cooperation and negotiation in childhood. In turn, the abstraction skills promoted by early pretend play might underlie creativity, innovation, and our capacity to feel empathy and moral obligation to others in later childhood and adulthood. In fact, because pretend play affords sharing our abstractions with others, it might be an early context for behaviors that ultimately promote the shared abstractions of human culture itself.

Opportunities for free play and young children's autonomic regulation.

Aspects of the social environment have been linked to the physiological mechanisms underlying behavioral self-regulation. Play, a behavior connected to regulatory behaviors such as delay of gratification and regulation of emotions, might be an aspect of social environments that is supportive of healthy physiological adaptation. We examined whether opportunities for social free play with peers, as reported by mothers, would predict children's autonomic regulation (via respiratory sinus arrhythmia; RSA) in a sample of 78 five-year-old children. As a proxy for play experience generally, frequency of social free play in the past week predicted higher levels of RSA functioning across both baseline and stress conditions, but did not account for physiological rate of change between conditions. Thus, frequent social free play opportunities might be a general positive influence on children's autonomic regulation by supporting increased parasympathetic activation but not a significant influence on children's response to stress in the moment. Attention to the role of play in autonomic regulation is critical, as children's free play opportunities might be declining.

The importance of early life touch for psychosocial and moral development.

One of the primary means of communicating with a baby is through touch. Nurturing physical touch promotes healthy physiological development in social mammals, including humans. Physiology influences wellbeing and psychosocial functioning. The purpose of this paper is to explore the connections among early life positive and negative touch and wellbeing and sociomoral development. In study 1, mothers of preschoolers (n = 156) reported their attitudes toward positive/negative touch and on their children's wellbeing and sociomoral outcomes, illustrating moderate to strong positive correlations between positive touch attitudes and children's sociomoral capacities and orientations and negative correlations with psychopathology. In study 2, we used an existing longitudinal dataset, with at-risk mothers (n = 682) and their children to test touch effects on moral capacities and social behaviors in early life. Results demonstrated moderate to strong relationships between positive/negative touch and concurrent child behavioral regulation and positive correlations between low corporal punishment and child sociomoral outcomes. In a third study with adults (n = 607), we found significant mediation processes connecting retrospective reports of childhood touch to adult moral orientation through attachment security, mental health, and moral capacities. In general across studies, more affectionate touch and less punishing touch were positively associated with wellbeing and development of moral capacities and engaged moral orientation.

The importance of early life touch for psychosocial and moral development

One of the primary means of communicating with a baby is through touch. Nurturing physical touch promotes healthy physiological development in social mammals, including humans. Physiology influences wellbeing and psychosocial functioning. The purpose of this paper is to explore the connections among early life positive and negative touch and wellbeing and sociomoral development. In study 1, mothers of preschoolers (n = 156) reported their attitudes toward positive/negative touch and on their children's wellbeing and sociomoral outcomes, illustrating moderate to strong positive correlations between positive touch attitudes and children's sociomoral capacities and orientations and negative correlations with psychopathology. In study 2, we used an existing longitudinal dataset, with at-risk mothers (n = 682) and their children to test touch effects on moral capacities and social behaviors in early life. Results demonstrated moderate to strong relationships between positive/negative touch and concurrent child behavioral regulation and positive correlations between low corporal punishment and child sociomoral outcomes. In a third study with adults (n = 607), we found significant mediation processes connecting retrospective reports of childhood touch to adult moral orientation through attachment security, mental health, and moral capacities. In general across studies, more affectionate touch and less punishing touch were positively associated with wellbeing and development of moral capacities and engaged moral orientation. (AU)

The psychological significance of play with imaginary companions in early childhood.

Although social play is common to many species, humans are unique in their ability to extract some of the benefits of social play through imagination. For example, in play with imaginary companions (ICs), children often practice skills that might be useful for later adaptive social, relational, and emotional functioning. While play with ICs does not provide the same immediate feedback that play with real others affords, this imagined, quasisocial context allows children to experiment with or rehearse events that might occur in real relationships. This symbolic enactment of social relationships might afford opportunities to experience not just social situations but all manner of positive and negative emotions in a risk-free way. In addition, children's interactions with real others around their ICs allow for negotiation of social roles in real relationships. ICs also provide a forum for psychological distance that might help young children manage their real relationships and engage in processes such as negotiation and cooperation, which are needed for successful social adaptation. Although play with ICs is clearly not of adaptive value in an evolutionary sense, for the children who create them, ICs might hold psychological significance for adaptive social development.

Parasocial Interactions and Relationships in Early Adolescence.

Parasocial interactions and relationships, one-sided connections imagined with celebrities and media figures, are common in adolescence and might play a role in adolescent identity formation and autonomy development. We asked 151 early adolescents (Mage = 14.8 years) to identify a famous individual of whom they are fond; we examined the type of celebrities chosen and why they admired them, and the relationships imagined with these figures across the entire sample and by gender. Adolescents emphasized highly salient media figures, such as actors, for parasocial attention. While different categories of celebrities were appreciated equally for their talent and personality, actors/singers were endorsed for their attractiveness more so than other celebrity types. Most adolescents (61.1%) thought of their favorite media figures as relationship partners, and those who did reported more parasocial involvement and emotional intensity than those who did not. Gender differences emerged in that boys chose more athletes than girls and were more likely to imagine celebrities as authority figures or mentors than friends. Celebrities afforded friendship for girls, who overwhelmingly focused on actresses. Hierarchical parasocial relationships may be linked to processes of identity formation as adolescents, particularly boys, imagine media figures as role models. In contrast, egalitarian parasocial relationships might be associated with autonomy development via an imagined affiliation with an attractive and admirable media figure.

Adolescent girls' parasocial interactions with media figures.

We examined aspects of adolescent girls' parasocial interactions in the context of typical development. Parasocial interactions are defined as symbolic, one-sided quasi-interactions between a viewer and a media figure. In total, 107 adolescent girls were examined; 94% reported engaging in parasocial interactions to some degree. Preoccupied attachment style predicted the degree of involvement in and emotional intensity of parasocial interactions. Results suggest that parasocial interactions are characteristic of girls with preoccupied attachment, but are also part of normative development.

Perceived vulnerability: a comparison of parents and children.

This study examined the agreement between parents' and children's perceptions of children's vulnerability to illness. While extreme perceptions of vulnerability, such as vulnerable child syndrome, are described as disorders of the parent-child relationship, children's health-related cognitions have not been examined as part of this process. The self-perceptions of health of 47 pre-school-aged children and their parents were evaluated through an interview and a survey respectively. Risk factors for vulnerable child syndrome predicted elevated perceptions of vulnerability for parents but not for children. Agreement on the child's level of vulnerability to illness was high, except that only one-third of the children whose parents classified them as more vulnerable relative to their peers classified themselves in this way. The results suggest that children's perceptions of their health status should be incorporated into therapeutic work with families in which children are perceived as medically vulnerable.

Social provisions of real and imaginary relationships in early childhood.

Preschool-aged children's perceptions of their social relationships were examined, including those with parents, best friends, siblings, and imaginary companions. Sixty 4-year-old children participated in an interview designed to measure perceptions of the degree of conflict, nurturance, instrumental help, and power available in their relationships. Three groups were compared: children with (a) invisible friends, (b) companions who were personified objects (e.g., dolls), and (c) no imaginary companion. Results indicated that children differentiated the relationships in their social networks according to provisions. Parent-child relationships afforded instrumental help and siblings were associated with conflict. Provisions of real and imaginary friendships were similar, although imaginary friends were preferred as objects of nurturance. Results imply that 4-year-old children have developed differentiated relationship schemas and that those of children with invisible friends may be particularly distinct.