Mechanisms of Learning and Acculturation Mental Representation in

Mechanisms of Learning and Acculturation: Mental Representation in Social Development

Social Development • Cognitive and language development: When and how do children master skills? • Social development: Many possible outcomes. What are the routes to these outcomes? • Why do children (even with seemingly similar experience) turn out to be different?

Traditional Social Development • Seeks to understand the impact of experience on children’s outcomes • Without examining mental representations or cognitive mechanisms

Example of Typical Social Developmental Approach Trajectories of Physical Aggression From Toddlerhood to Middle Childhood NICHD Early Child Care Research Network

Trajectories, cont’d • 1, 195 children • Followed from birth to 3 rd grade • Measures of maternal, child, and family characteristics • Measures of child-care quality • DV: Emergence of aggression over time

23 more tables…

Conclusions • Linear relationship between sociodemographic and family risk variables and children’s aggression trajectories. Those with lower family incomes, lower maternal education, more maternal depression, etc. had high aggression trajectories. • Boys were more likely than girls to be on higheraggression trajectories. • So what?

Authors’ Own Lament • Results reported in an earlier paper from the same study using different data analyses: More hours in child care, more aggression

Authors’ Own Lament • Results reported in an earlier paper from the same study using different data analyses: More hours in child care, more aggression • In these new analyses, did not find a relation between # of hours in child care and aggressive behavior. *Children in the highest aggression trajectory were not in more child care than others *In some analyses, more hours in care--> lower aggr. • My view: This is not OK.

Traditional Social Development • Seeks to understand the impact of antecedents on child outcomes • Without examining mental representations or cognitive mechanisms • Limitations?

Traditional Social Development Limitations Little attention to mechanism-> • Obvious or erroneous conclusions • Leads people to question imp. of experience (e. g. , Judith Harris) • Links to other areas (cog dev, soc psych)

Social-Cognitive Development Brings together interest in: • Environment-outcome relations • Cognitive mechanisms, representations By doing so, gives unique insight into: • More on-line processes • Socialization and interventions

Attributions • Explanations, Interpretations of Events Attributions for others’ behavior Attributions for own events or outcomes

Dodge & Frame, 1982 Attributions in Aggressive Children • Rejected, aggressive boys (K-5 th) identified a) Sociometric nominations (like most/least) b) Name students who fit aggr. descrip. c) T rating of aggressiveness Ps: Low liking + Hi aggression • Scenarios of ambiguous provocation • Hostile attributional bias Study 2: naturalistic setting

Dodge, Pettit, Bates, & Valente (1995) Physical Abuse and Conduct Problems • 584 kindergarten children followed through grade 4 • 12% classified as abused • Measures of “processing variables” for children 24 filmed vignettes

Dodge, Pettit, Bates, & Valente (1995) Physical Abuse and Conduct Problems Processing Variables • Interpretations/Attributions: Do they encode intention? Biased or accurate? • Accessing of responses: What reactions are considered? • Evaluation of responses: Is aggr. seen as positive? D. V. : Teachers ratings of conduct problems

Dodge, et al. , cont. Results • Abused group scored substantially higher in conduct problems: 28% had clinically deviant conduct problems vs. 6% of controls--even when controlling for SES, family stressors, difficult temperament, preschool conduct, etc. • Abuse predicted later processing patterns. • Did processing variables mediate aggression? Yes, partially. Reduced the direct effect of abuse on conduct problems by 33%.

Hudley & Graham, 1993 Changing the Representation Aggressive, rejected boys identified: peer ratings, teacher ratings Dodge & Frame measure of hostile attributions Three groups: 1) Attribution retraining (AR) 2) Training on non-social problem-solving skills 3) No treatment

Hudley & Graham, cont. • Treatment groups met twice a week for 6 weeks • Groups contained 4 aggr. & 2 non-aggr children • Experimental group learned: 1) How to detect intention 2) To attribute non-hostile intention when ambiguous

Hudley & Graham, Results • Measure 1: Response to hypothetical peer provocation 1. Attribution of intent 2. Anger 3. Behavioral response • Result: AR group similar to non-aggressive children

Hudley & Graham, Results • Measure 2: Analog task 1 month later Child and peer communicate instructions to each other • Result: When peer (inevitably) gave poor instructions, children in AR group a) less likely to attribute hostile intent b) trend toward less anger c) less criticism and fewer insults

Hudley & Graham, Results • Measure 3: Teacher ratings of aggression • Result: AR group rated less aggressive than the two control groups

Self-Attributions and Self-Blame How Children Interpret Self-Related Events • Internal, stable attributions (i. e. , not smart, bad person) lead to helpless responses • Unstable (e. g. , effort) attributions or external (e. g. , luck) attributions can lead to more mastery-oriented responses • Is the impact of negative events mediated by self-attributions? • Negative life events--> depression • Parental violence--> depression • Sexual abuse--> depression, self-esteem

Nolen-Hoeksema, Girgus, & Seligman, 1992 Life Events, Attributions, & Depression • 508 3 rd graders assessed every 6 mos. for 5 years • Life events questionnaire • Children’s attributional style questionnaire • Children’s depression inventory • Teacher ratings of academic and social helplessness

Nolen-Hoeksema et al. , 1992 • Life events: Your parents got divorced, a grandparent died, parents fighting, you and your parents fought more, parent lost a job, other children have been less friendly • Attributional Style: You get a poor grade on a test: internal vs. external; stable vs. unstable • Helplessness Behaviors (teacher rated): when child encounters an obstacle, gives up and stops trying; withdraws and sulks when shunned by classmates.

Nolen-Hoeksema, et al. Results • Early on (3 rd & 4 th grade) Only life events predicted subsequent depression and helplessness ( although attributions correl. with contemporaneous depression/helplessness) • However, in later years: Attributions (or attributions + life events) predicted depression and helplessness. Life events alone fell out of the picture.

Feiring, Taska, & Lewis (2002) Attributions & Adjustment Following Sexual Abuse • Past literature: CSA is associated with later behavior problems, but Victims vary widely in their adjustment Weak relation between severity and adjustment • Can attributions help explain variations in outcome? • After CSA discovery and one year later, measured Attributional style: Internal, stable attribution for abuse Depression Self-Esteem

Feiring, Taska, & Lewis, cont. Results • Predicting from T 1 measures to T 2 depression and self-esteem: 1. In contrast to abuse severity, attributional style accounted for significant variation in adjustment at T 2 (controlling for Time 1) 2. Improvement in attributional style was related to improvement in depression and self-esteem

Dweck, 1975 Changing the Representation • • Helpless children identified Two groups: Attribution Retraining and Success Only 25 sessions of training Assessments at mid-training and post-training: Helpless responses to failure Teacher assessments

Dweck, cont. Results • Attribution Retraining group showed: 1. Improvement at mid-training 2. Marked improvement by post-training 3. Teacher reports of initiative and persistence Whereas. .

Dweck, cont. Results • Attribution Retraining group showed: 1. Improvement at mid-training 2. Marked improvement by post-training 3. Teacher reports of initiative and persistence • Success Only had no positive effect on reactions to failure or teacher assessments

Conclusions • Experiences leave their residue in mental representations • Effects of experience, to a great degree, depend on how they are represented and carried forward to new situations • Unique implications for socialization and intervention

Social-Cognitive Development • (1) Identify and measure a mental representation or cognitive process and observe its relation to outcomes of interest • (2) Manipulate the mental representation and observe its impact on outcomes of interest • (3) Investigate the relationship between the mental representation of interest and antecedents of that variable • (4) Compare how the mental representation operates in the laboratory and in the real world.

Next Time • Read carefully: Tomasello, Meltzoff • Foundations of early social knowledge, learning • Appreciation and critique of each • Can you use Meltzoff’s “Like Me” hypothesis to account for Tomasello’s findings?