No description available.

Preschool children's prosocial behavior and resistance to temptation were examined in relation to maternal childbearing practices. Forty-seven children and their mothers participated in the study. At a play session at the child's day care center, each child was given opportunities to behave prosocially, i.e., to help, share, teach, or exhibit sympathy, and to resist temptation, i.e., refrain from playing with an attractive but forbidden toy. Mothers of these children were individually interviewed and given a questionnaire developed for this study.

The mother of 1 grade school child and 2 sets of parents of 2 preschool children were trained in the home to use behavior modification techniques to reduce the undesirable behaviors of their children. Generalization from the home to the school setting was investigated. There was no support for or against changes in the homes generalizing to the classrooms. The mother of a 7-year-old girl with borderline intelligence used "time out" to curb the child's failure to follow instructions, tendency to be argumentative, and tendency to tantrum. The hyperactivity of a 41/2-year old girl was diminished. in part by changes in the parents' contingent behavior. A 4-year.-old boy's stubborn refusal to obey instructions h'as extinguished by "time out" and praise as positive reinforcement for desirable behavior. The behaviors were counted in 10 sec. intervals for 5 hrs. for each child at each measurement, baseline1, post instruction conditioning, baseline2, and post instruction-conditioning2 in the home and baseline1 and post instruction-conditioning1 in the school. Contingency reversible periods were included in the home to show a relationship between the use of behavior modification techniques and the changes in behavior.

The purpose of this study is to present the responses of children to one hundred thirty-seven visual items developed under the direction of the present writer specifically for this purpose. The items are pen and ink sketches of situations, actions and objects which any child might find in his daily living or about which he might fantasy. The subject matter of the items can be best be determined by direct reference to them as they are presented in Chapter III of this thesis. They represent many types of situations and objects with no intention of including or evaluating any specific content that might be found in a child's life. It was the hope of the writer that by presenting these items to a large number of children some definite pattern of acceptance-rejection responses might be discerned. In the case of each child to whom the pictures were presented the responses were recorded in terms of his either liking or disliking each individual picture. Since each child was one of a group, the responses of the various groups of children are combined and presented in this thesis in graphs. In order to determine whether there is a significant differences in the acceptance-rejection patterns of the different groups of children.

<p>Evidence suggests that children's pre-linguistic conceptual knowledge significantly influences the course of language acquisition. In a series of nine experiments we investigate this influence. We begin with two experiments using adult human subjects, in which we develop an analogue of children's early sensorimotor semantic representations and demonstrate that we have captured important aspects of meaning. We then use these sensorimotor semantic representations in simulation experiments using neural network models of language acquisition. First, we provide evidence that having these sensorimotor representations improves grammatical learning. Then we demonstrate that with these rich semantic representations there are strong correlations between the time course of lexical and grammatical learning analogous to those found in children. We suggest that this supports the position that grammar emerges from the formation of a rich lexicon. Finally, we show that it is not necessary to provide these sensorimotor representations for all words. We provide evidence that, given a directly grounded foundation of children's earliest words, the model can indirectly acquire grounded, embodied semantic representations for novel ungrounded words. Our results thus provide evidence that the initial structure of children's conceptual or semantic 'space' provides an important constraining and simplifying foundation that influences the course of later language acquisition.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

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Call number: LD2668 .T4 1979 H67 / Master of Science

Some investigators have proposed that concept learning in humans can best be explained in terms of internalized processes mediating between the external stimulus and overt response. This approach contrasts with "single-unit" theory, emphasizing direct association between stimulus and response. Some psychologists advocate the developmental hypothesis that single-unit theory applies to lower organisms but that mediational theory holds for advanced organisms. Comparative psychological studies have yielded inconclusive findings with respect to this hypothesis. Some investigators have tried to experimentally influence the hypothesized mediating process by teaching subjects verbalizations which could serve as mediating responses. In general, findings suggest that older children utilize verbal mediators more readily than younger children. The current investigation stems from interest in whether young children have a specific inability to mediate verbally or a more general deficiency in mediation. Are mediating processes in young children possible on a “sensori-motor” level? The purpose of the present research is to compare younger and older children in their use of perceptual cues as a basis for mediation and in their preferences for perceptual versus verbal cues when these are in conflict. Fifty nursery-school children and seventy-five second-grade children learned two successive discriminations. The stimuli, cylinders varying in size (large-small) and brightness (black-white), were arranged on a tray before a vertical clown's face. The child put one of two stimuli taken from the tray into the clown's mouth and was rewarded, when correct, by the clown's nose blinking, an edible item, and praise. In the first discrimination a large, black cylinder was positive; in the second task the "small" object was rewarded, regardless of brightness. Since the first discrimination was solvable on the basis of either size or brightness (or both), the experimenter could attempt to influence the subject to make a mediating response to a particular dimension. The major experimental variables manipulated for this purpose during the initial discrimination were (1) kind of object arrangement on the tray, and (2) kind of verbal label children applied to the stimuli. The size arrangement, for example, had same-sized objects in proximity; but brightness was randomly distributed. In the size verbalization condition the child was instructed to precede his choices with the appropriate size label, i.e., "big" or "little." Independent groups received the following treatments at each age level: (1) size arrangement, (2) brightness arrangement, (3) size arrangement and brightness verbalization, simultaneously,(4) brightness arrangement and size verbalization, simultaneously, and (5) random arrangement, no verbalization (control). The major dependent variable was the mean number of trials to criterion on the second task, as it was assumed that ease of learning the "small" concept was an index of availability of the size dimension relative to the brightness dimension. The results indicated that both younger and older children responded in a mediational manner to the perceptual arrangements, suggesting that previous findings regarding lack of verbal mediation in young children should not be generalized to include other modes of mediation. The interfering effect of perceptually emphasizing an irrelevant dimension was stronger for younger children than for older children. Older children were more influenced than the younger children by relevant verbal cues. When relevant verbal cues were pitted against irrelevant perceptual cues, the former dominated with older children, but the latter with younger children. Younger children, however, were not influenced as predicted by relevant perceptual cues nor older children by irrelevant verbal cues . These discrepancies were discussed in terms of the nature of the experimental manipulations. It was tentatively concluded, subject to further verification, that younger children favor perceptual mediation and older children verbal mediation. / This thesis was digitized as part of a project begun in 2014 to increase the number of Duke psychology theses available online. The digitization project was spearheaded by Ciara Healy.

No description available.

In Study One, hypothetical scenarios of distribution tasks were used to investigate the development of children's concept of distributive justice. Forty-two 5, 7 and 9-year-old children were asked to firstly complete the distribution tasks in seven scenarios during which distribution behavior and verbal explanation were recorded. They were then invited to complete the judgment task by imagining themselves as a judge who had to evaluate the appropriateness of a child's distributions in the seven scenarios. After malting their judgment, the children received a feedback on the appropriate distributions in the seven scenarios which was presented in picture form as the decisions of a large group of judges. Subsequent to reading this series of pictures in their own pace, the children completed another set of distribution tasks in seven similar scenarios. As predicted, children's performance on distribution behavior (level-I) was significantly higher than their performance on verbal explanation (level-E2/3), indicating a difference between the implicit and explicit representation of children's concept of justice. Children's performance on the judgment task (level-E1) was significantly higher than their performance on verbal explanation (level-E2/3), showing a difference between the representations of level-E1 and level-E2/3. However, participants' performance on the judgment task (level-E1) was significantly higher than their performance on the distribution behavior (level-I). Analysis on the subconcepts of distributive justice revealed that there was no significant difference between children' performance on the judgment task and the distribution behavior regarding the concepts of "equality", "equity", "need" and "mixed sense of justice". Only in the case of the concept of "distribution based on empathy", the performance on judgment was significantly higher than that of distribution behavior. / In Study Two, a real-life group distribution activity was designed to investigate the development of children's concepts of procedural and distributive justice, as well as the role of empathy in the process and outcome of the distribution. Ten groups of 5-, 7- and 9-yeat-old children (four in a group, two boys and two girls) were asked to distribute four kinds of gifts including a piece of cake, a set of 12 crayons, 4 pieces of chocolate and 4 cartoon pins. In the condition without empathetic arousal, the groups freely discussed how to distribute the four kinds of gifts and then distributed among themselves. After distributing all the gifts, the children were asked to respond to a series of questions individually and collectively, through which chances for them to make verbal explanations on the concepts of procedural and distributive justice were provided. Aweek later, the groups received a feedback on just procedures and then completed a similar group distribution task. In the empathetic arousal condition, a volunteer in the group was invited to report a recent event that made him or her sad. After listening to the story, the group of four children continued the group distribution task. Unlike the condition without empathetic arousal, no further feedback was provided, nor was there a second round distribution task. / Investigating the development of children's concept of justice from the implicit-explicit dimension, the present study introduced a new theoretical and methodological perspective into the concerned topic area. With such a new perspective, rich forms of implicit representations of children's concept of justice were found, and refined analyses of the developmental patterns of children's subconcepts of justice were made possible. Taking consideration of the effects of the feedback on the development of children's concept of justice, this study throws light on the practice of moral education in which children may acquire implicit understanding without educators' explicit verbal explanation. There were drawbacks in the design of the judgment task (for exploring the level-E1 in Study One) and in the manipulation of empathetic arousal, which call for an improvement in further research. Developmental studies on the concept of justice could extend their age group below five and beyond nine, with a view to exploring the earlier representation of the implicit level on one hand, and the more mature representation of the explicit level on the other. (Abstract shortened by UMI.) / The present study investigated the development of children's concept of distributive and procedural justice from the implicit-explicit dimension on the basis of Karmiloff-Smith's Representational Redescription model (1992). The role of empathy in the development of children's concept of justice was also examined. / 徐华女. / Adviser: Wan-chi Wong. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 73-03, Section: B, page: . / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2010. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 301-314). / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Electronic reproduction. [Ann Arbor, MI] : ProQuest Information and Learning, [201-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Abstracts in Chinese and English. / Xu Huanü.