CHYS 2P10 lecture 8 Flashcards
Selman’s Role-Taking Theory
- – Ability to understand other person’s perspective develops
- – Presented interpersonal dilemmas with multiple characters to children
Selman’s Stages
- Egocentric or undifferentiated
- Social-informational role taking
- Self-reflective role taking
- Mutual role taking
- Societal role taking
- Theory of mind
Selmon draws Understanding that human action is motivated by underlying mental states that are:
– Intentions, beliefs, emotions, desires – Social development – Moral judgments, empathy, conduct disorder – Cognitive development – Reasoning about representations
Animacy
-IQ and Animacy
-Based on an evolutionary perspective
-Theory-of-mind reasoning is “domain-specific”
• Relies on special neuro-cognitive computations
-Can be impaired by injury or abnormal development.
-Autistic children do well on false photograph, terrible false belief. Can’t imagine minds - what other people are thinking
Bear/Dragon Test
• Methods • Participants – 95 Children (ages 3;2 to 4;11, M = 4;0) • Representation Tasks: – 2 False belief tasks – 2 False photo tasks • Executive function (inhibitory control): – whisper, gift delay, bear-dragon
Chinese preschoolers, possible advanced emergence of frontal function?
– AD/HD, Frontal Functioning, & DRD4 7-repeat allele
– DRD4 7-repeat very rare in Asian populations (never been seen in Han Chinese).
Chinese/ American children experiment
Chinese outperform U.S. preschoolers on Executive functioning
No cross-cultural differences in theory-of-mind
Executive functioning and theory-of-mind relation is robust across cultures
So why don’t Chinese outperform U.S. on theory-of-mind?
Theory of mind?
-you understand that other people have different thoughts than you do)
False Beliefs
can’t follow others perspectives
Dissociation in Development
- Shape game/ color game- mind can’t get used to rules, first one is remembered
- Children follow logic, last step they get lost – who took the muffins
- Sticker, mean monkey takes sticker the kid wants. Around 6 they figure out that people are thinking different than them, and thus try to think how others are thinking so they can trick them
Why do Chinese not have theory of mind?
1• Siblings
– Number of older siblings predicts emergence of theory-of-mind reasoning (Perner et al., 1996)
– Clear differences with Chinese
2• Parent-child Conversations
– Talk about mental states promotes theory-of-mind development (Ruffman, Slade & Crowe, 2002).
– Possible differences with Chinese
• High theory of mind equates to better inabition
General summary:
- Reasoning about beliefs is associated with “special” neuro-cognitive requirements
- maturation and experience play a role in development of theory of mind
- Performance on marker tasks of frontal lobe functioning correlate with theory-of-mind development
- Seems likely that maturation and experience each play a crucial role in theory-of-mind development
Six Basic Emotions in Infancy
- They are all rooted in our evolutionary heritage, make their appearance early in infancy, and have a rapid, automatic onset
- They have distinct, universally-recognized facial patterns
- They are believed to be innate and hardwired into the subcortical motor areas of the brain
the six emotions are:
- joy
- suprse
- anger
- sadness
- disgust
- fear
Joy?
- Endogenous smiles appear in newborns
• Typically during sleep, associated with low levels of brain activity (asocial)
• Duchenne smiles are the first genuine social smiles, occur at 1 month
• Smiles become increasingly selective (informed) with age
• Smiling is a very powerful emotional signal that may serve to initiate and maintain social interactions with adults
• Laughter plays a similar role, and also becomes increasingly social & selective with age (at around 8 months)
Surprise (Interest)
• Surprise and interest represent two different emotions
• Surprise is dependent on, and helps further develop, cognitive development
• Not observable until infants begin to form cognitive expectations (book says 5-7, I say 3 or fewer months)
• Surprise is accompanied by regular physiological responses such as:
– Heightened sensory sensitivity
– Orienting towards stimulus
– Rapid inhibition of unrelated behaviors
– General fight or flight response
Anger
- Initial emotion is distress/upset
- During early months, anger is secondary to pain/distress signals
- This changes with age, with anger becoming the dominant signal
- Appears to be due to a shift in self-reliance
- Anger appears to be directed more towards events that the infant can potentially control/influence, particularly in goal-oriented actions (frustration)
- Anger can serve as an adaptive motivational tool for overcoming obstacles
