8～12岁男孩的性激素与智力、人格的关系

Recently there emerged more and more researhes concerning about sex hormone-related cognitive ability and behaviours. Few were carried out in pre- to early adolescent children., and the objective of the current study is to investigate whether there are covariance between sex hormones, intelligence and personality in 232 pre- to early adolescent boys, including 62 gifted boys. Indexes of sex hormone levels were salivary testosterone and estradiol concentrations, the 2D:4D digit ratio ( a reliable pointer of prenatal sex hormone concentraions). The Cattell Culture Fair Intelligence Test and a Chinese version of Children’s Personality Questionaire was applied in the current study. The main findings are: 1) salivary sex hormone concentrations significantly positively correlated with intelligence performance in 10-year-old boys; 2) salivary testosterone negatively related to intelligence performance in 12-year-old boys; 3) gifted boys bears lower testosterone concentrations in both prenatal period and pre- to early adolescence; 4) for personality, higher salivary estradiol was related to extraversion and digit ratios correlated with several personality factors in 8-year-old boys. In conclusion, results in the current study suggested that for male early maturers, intelligence may be negatively influenced by early coming androgen surge. In contrast, male late matures may benefit from their lately and moderately increasing hormone. Besides, the results suggested that the relationship between 2D:4D digit ratio and personality may also be paid attention to.

5-9岁儿童对常见食物及其功能的认知发展

Research on naïve biology investigates children spontaneous understanding of biology objects, phenomena and function. Previous researches focus mostly on biology phenomena. Little has done on organism’s function, such as eating food. Many research in this field found that children were unable to categorize food by nutrition criterion, but rely on physical cues. In order to investigate the development of children’s naïve understanding of food and to find if they can classify food by nutrition criterion, three age groups (5-year-olds, 7-year-olds, and 9-year-olds) were included in this study. Varies experimental tasks were also used to explore the children’s understanding of food and its function. The results showed as the followings: 1) A few 5-year- old children can classify food by nutrition criterion when they take the spontaneous classification task. However, more and more children can realize what make a kind of food different from another can be the nutrition it contains. 2) Kindergarteners can find the relation between food and its output. When they become older, more and more children can explain the relation by consistent theory. It can be said that 9-year-old children have already have a profound understanding of nutrition. They gradually developed naive theory of biology on nutrition level. 3) Even kindergarteners can understand the concept of “food balance”. However, with development there was a significant age increase in food balance choice. 4) Children’s knowledge of food balance grows with age, but urban and rural educational background influence cognitive performance.

5-9岁儿童对常见病病因及其致病不确定性的认知发展

Research on children's naive concepts has previously tended to focus on the domains of physics and psychology, but more recently attention has turned to conceptual development in biology as a core domain of knowledge. Because of its familiarity, illness has been a popular topic for researchers in this domain. However, they have only studied the children’s understanding of its causes. Other aspects of illness, such as treatment and prognosis, have received little attention. This research addresses the development of 5- to 9-year-old children’s understanding of the causes of illness and their probabilities via open-ended and forced choice interviews. The results of this research are: 1) Most of the 5- to 7-year-old children used behavioral causes to explain illness, and the 9-year-old children primarily used biological causes to interpret illness. With age, more and more children selected psychological causes to explain illness. 2) Pre-school children did not over-generalize contagions to non-contagious illnesses. They used behavioral and biological causes to explain contagious illnesses. For non-contagious illnesses, they chose only behavioral causes. 3) Most of the children used only one kind of cause to explain illness. 4) Some preschool-aged children viewed outcomes of familiar causes of illness as probabilistic. With age, more and more could make uncertain predictions of illness. 5) The children’s understanding of the causes’ probabilities appeared to be based on naïve biology. 5- to 9-year-old children often made probabilistic predictions by analyzing a single cause of illness. 6) Children coming from higher educational backgrounds outperformed their counterparts coming from lower educational backgrounds with respect to understanding illness. 7) Specific knowledge acquired could generally improved the preschoolers’ understanding of causes of illness and their probabilities.

7-12岁儿童执行功能与智力的关系

The nature of individual differences among children is an important issue in the study of human intelligence. There are close relation between intelligence and executive functions. Traditional theories, which are based mainly on the factor analysis, approach the problem only from the perspective of psychometrics. However, they do not study the relation of cognition and neurobiology. Some researchers try to explore the essential differences in intelligence from the basic cognitive level, by studying the relationship between executive function and intelligence. The aim of this study was to do the followings 1) to delineate and separate the executive function in children into measurable constructs; 2) to establish the relationship between executive function and intelligence in children; 3) to find out the difference and its neural mechanism between intellectually-gifted and normal children’s executive function. The participants were 188 children aged 7-12 year old. There were 6 executive function tasks. The results were follows: 1) The latent variables analyses showed that there was no stable construct of executive function in 7-10 year old children. The executive function construct of 11-12 year old children could be separated into updating, inhibition and shifting. And they had grown to be more or less the same as adults in the executive function. There were only moderate correlations between the three types of executive function, but they were largely independent of each other. 2) The correlations between the indices of updating, inhibition, shifting and intelligence were different in 7-12 year old children. The older the age, the more the indices were related to intelligence. The updating and shifting were related to intelligence in 7-10 year old children. There were significant correlations between the updating, inhibition, shifting and intelligence in 11-12 year old children. The correlation between updating and intelligence was higher than the correlation between shifting and intelligence. Furthermore, in structural equation models controlling for the three executive functions correlations, updating was highly related to intelligence, but the relations of inhibition and shifting to intelligence were not significant. 3) Intellectually-gifted children performed better than normal children in executive function tasks. The neural mechanism differences between intellectually gifted and average children were indicated by ERP component P3. The present study helps us to understand the relationship between intelligence and executive function; and throws light on the issue of individual differences in intelligence. The present results can provide theoretical support for the development a culture-free intelligence test and a method to promote the development of intelligence. Our present study lends support to the neural efficient hypothesis.

10-14岁超常儿童的亲社会行为特点及影响因素

Is prosocial behavior of supernormal children distinguished from normal children? Is there any difference between the supernormal children’s prosocial behavior from different educational placement? What are the mechanisms underlying the difference? The aim of this study was to examine these issues. With multiple methods of prosocial behavior, including other-rating, self-rating and hypothetical dilemma, we investigated the 10 to 14 year-old children. Firstly, the development of prosocial behavior and its relationship with prosocial behavior was examined. Secondly, we investigated the features of supernormal children’s prosocial behavior and analysed its difference with normal children. Finally, we tried to find the difference of supernormal children’s prosocial behaviour from different educational placement, and the mechanisms underlying the difference, such as social value orientation and peer relation. The results are as follows: 1)The altruistic and compliant prosocial tendency of 14 year-old children was obviously lower than those younger children. Intelligence was positively related with altruistic and emotional prosocial tendency for 10 year-olds, and with prosocial behaviour of peer nominated for 12 year-olds. 2)There was no significant difference of prosocial behaviour between supernormal and normal children. The peer nominated prosocial behaviour of 12 year-old supernormal children was higher than of 11 and 13 years old supernormal children. In addition, girls’ other-rating prosocial behaviour was significantly higher than boys’, but no gender difference was detected in the prosocial behaviour of self-rating and hypothetical dilemma. 3)With regard to the supernormal children’s prosocial behaviour in different educational placement, we found that the prosocial degree of the supernormal children of homogeneous groups was higher than that of heterogeneous groups in the role-change of ultimatum game. 4)The supernormal children from different educational placement had different social value orientation. More supernormal children of homogeneous groups belonged to the type of group enhancement, while more supernormal children of heterogeneous groups belonged to the type of equality. The types of social value orientation did not have impact on the supernormal children’s prosocial behaviour from different educational placement. 5)Peer relation moderated the impact of different educational placement on supernormal children’s prosocial behaviour.

教养方式、亲子关系对青少年给予母亲情感支持的影响

Emotional support, as an important form of social supports, has great impact on the life of both caregivers and receivers. Many studies on adult children and old parents indicate that emotional support is closely related to parents’ well-being, and the relation quality between old parents and adult children is one of the factors influencing adult children’s support offering. However, the study on adolescents’ emotional support to their parents is quite rare. What’s more, it has been found that emotional support skills children have learnt at home have life-time influence on children’s response to other’s emotional needs. It is assumed that to some extent the emotional support styles between parents and adolescents are relatively stable, and they are related to the care children give to their parents after they advance to old age. Hence, it is necessary to study the emotional support of adolescent in order to at last improve the well-being of old parents. Totally speaking, the aim of this study is to explore the relation between parenting styles and adolescents’ emotional support offering, as well as the effects of mother-child relationships. In addition, culture is a factor having impact on parenting styles, parent-child relationships and emotional support. So we have designed this cross-cultural study to explore cultural differences. The results are as follows: (1) As to Chinese and Indonesian mothers, their Acceptance of adolescents’ behaviors has significant positive predictive effect on children’s emotional support. Besides, the Intimacy and Approval dimensions of mother-child relationships partially mediate the path from parenting styles to emotional support offering, and those effects have no significant difference in China and Indonesia. (2) Chinese and Indonesian mother’s Rejection to adolescents has significant positive predictive effect on Conflict between mothers and adolescents, but has no direct effect on adolescents’ emotional support offering. (3) Adolescents’ support offering has no significant predictive effect on their willingness to help their parents. (4) Adolescents’ support offering has significant predictive effect on their motivation to provide emotional support to their parents. However, the relation between adolescents’ support offering and the willingness to help their parents is not clear. (5) Adolescents have scored high in Acceptance parenting style dimension and relatively low in Rejection dimension, which indicate that mothers in China and Indonesia adopt positive parenting styles. Both Chinese and Indonesian mother-child relationships are good. However, Indonesian adolescents have perceived more Intimacy and Approval from mothers, and there is no significant difference between Chinese and Indonesian adolescents and mothers in the dimension of Conflict.

儿童社会价值取向的发展及其对合作行为的影响

Cooperation is a typical prosocial behavior, and social psychologists have traditionally used sociometric methods to measure cooperation. This research is aimed to explore the development of children’s social value orientation and its impact on cooperation. Study 1 used two-choice decomposed games to measure the social value orientation of 9- , 11-, to 14-year-old children and adults. Results indicated that most 9-, 11-, 14-year-old children are classified as proselfs, and most adults are classified as prosocials. Compared to 9 years, there are more prosocial orientations and less competitive orientations among 11 years. But compared to 11 years, there are less prosocial orientations and more competitive orientations among 14 years. Study 2 used prisoner’s dilemma to assess cooperative behavior, thus investigated the impact of social value orientation on cooperative decision-making. Results indicated that, on one hand, children of prosocial orientation expected no more cooperation from others, but adults of prosocial orientation expected more cooperation from others. On the other hand, prosocials make more cooperative choices than proselfs, and they show more reciprocity towards cooperative others and more altruism towards non-cooperative others.

不同智力水平儿童的自我调控特点

Self-regulation has recently become an important topic in cognitive and developmental domain. According to previous theories and experimental studies, it is shown that self-regulation consist of both a personality (or social) aspect and a behavioral cognitive aspect of psychology. Self-regulation can be divided into self-regulation personality and self-regulation ability. In the present study researches have been carried out from two perspectives: child development and individual differences. We are eager to explore the characteristics of self-regulation in terms of human cognitive development. In the present study, we chose two groups of early adolescences one with high intelligence and the other with normal intelligence. In Study One Questionnaires were used to compare whether the highly intelligent group had had better self-regulation personality than the normal group. In Study Two experimental psychology tasks were used to compare whether highly intelligent children had had better self-regulation cognitive abilities than their normal peers. Finally, in Study Three we combined the results of Study One and Study Two to further explore the neural mechanisms for highly intelligent children with respect to their good self-regulation abilities. Some main results and conclusions are as follows: (1) Questionnaire results showed that highly intelligent children had better self-regulation personalities, and they got higher scores on the personalities related to self-regulation such as, self-reliance, stability, rule-consciousness. They also got higher scores on self-consciousness which meant that they could know their own self better than the normal children. (2) Among the three levels of cognitive difficulties in self-regulation abilities, the highly intelligent children had faster reaction speed than normal children in the primary self-regulation tasks. In the intermediate self-regulation tasks, highly intelligent children’s inhibition processing and executive processing were both better than their normal peers. In the advanced self-regulation tasks, highly intelligent children again had faster reaction speed and more reaction accuracy than their normal peers when facing with conflict and inconsistency experimental conditions,. Regression model’s results showed that primary and advanced self-regulation abilites had larger predictive power than intermediate self-regualation ability. (3) Our neural experiments showed that highly intelligent children had more efficient neural automatic processing ability than normal children. They also had better, faster and larger neural reaction to novel stimuli under pre-attentional condition which made good and firm neural basis for self-regualation. Highly intelligent children had more mature frontal lobe and pariental functions for inhibition processing and executive processing. P3 component in ERP was closely related to executive processing which mainly activated pariental function. There were two time-periods for inhibition processing—first it was the pariental function and later it was the coordination function of frontal and pariental lobes. While conflict control task had pariental N2 and frontal-pariental P3 neural sources, highly intelligent children had much smaller N2 and shorter P3 latency than normal children. Inconsistency conditions induced larger N2 than conditions without inconsistency, and conditions without inconsistency (or Conflict) induced higher P3 amplitudes than with Inconsistency (or Conflict) conditions. In conclusion, the healthy development of self-regulation was very important for children’s personality and cognition maturity, and self-regulation had its own specific characteristics in ways of presentation and ways of development. Better understanding of self-regulation can further help the exploration of the nature of human intelligence and consciousness.

What children learn from adults’ utterances: an ephemeral lexical boost and persistent syntactic priming in adult–child dialogue

We show that children’s syntactic production is immediately affected by individual experiences of structures and verb–structure pairings within a dialogue, but that these effects have different timecourses. In a picture-matching game, three- to four-year-olds were more likely to describe a transitive action using a passive immediately after hearing the experimenter produce a passive than an active (abstract priming), and this tendency was stronger when the verb was repeated (lexical boost). The lexical boost disappeared after two intervening utterances, but the abstract priming effect persisted. This pattern did not differ significantly from control adults. Children also showed a cumulative priming effect. Our results suggest that whereas the same mechanism may underlie children’s immediate syntactic priming and long-term syntactic learning, different mechanisms underlie the lexical boost versus long-term learning of verb–structure links. They also suggest broad continuity of syntactic processing in production between this age group and adults.

Dziecko przedszkolne i wczesnoszkolne wobec literatury i sztuki. Programy, praktyki, propozycje

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A influência do nível socioeconómico na leitura

Trabalho apresentado à Universidade Fernando Pessoa como parte dos requisitos para obtenção do grau de Licenciada em Terapêutica da Fala

Hiperplasia gengival medicamentosa em Odontopediatria

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Era uma vez dentro de nós!

Dissertação apresentada à Universidade Fernando Pessoa como parte dos requisitos para obtenção do grau de Mestre em Criatividade e Inovação

Practice links [Issue 38, June 2010]

Practice Links is a free e-publication for practitioners working in Irish social services, voluntary and nongovernmental sectors. Practice Links was created to enable practitioners to keep up-to-date with new publications, electronic resources and conference opportunities. Issue 38 contains the text for a proposed constitutional amendment on children’s rights

Peanut Allergen Threshold Study (PATS): validation of eliciting doses using a novel single-dose challenge protocol

Background: The eliciting dose (ED) for a peanut allergic reaction in 5% of the peanut allergic population, the ED05, is 1.5 mg of peanut protein. This ED05 was derived from oral food challenges (OFC) that use graded, incremental doses administered at fixed time intervals. Individual patients’ threshold doses were used to generate population dose-distribution curves using probability distributions from which the ED05 was then determined. It is important to clinically validate that this dose is predictive of the allergenic response in a further unselected group of peanut-allergic individuals. Methods/Aims: This is a multi-centre study involving three national level referral and teaching centres. (Cork University Hospital, Ireland, Royal Children’s Hospital Melbourne, Australia and Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, U.S.A.) The study is now in process and will continue to run until all centres have recruited 125 participates in each respective centre. A total of 375 participants, aged 1–18 years will be recruited during routine Allergy appointments in the centres. The aim is to assess the precision of the predicted ED05 using a single dose (6 mg peanut = 1.5 mg of peanut protein) in the form of a cookie. Validated Food Allergy related Quality of Life Questionnaires-(FAQLQ) will be self-administered prior to OFC and 1 month after challenge to assess the impact of a single dose OFC on FAQL. Serological and cell based in vitro studies will be performed. Conclusion: The validation of the ED05 threshold for allergic reactions in peanut allergic subjects has potential value for public health measures. The single dose OFC, based upon the statistical dose-distribution analysis of past challenge trials, promises an efficient approach to identify the most highly sensitive patients within any given food-allergic population.