Suchergebnisse

There is increasing interest in understanding how relationships promote children's understanding of their own and others' thoughts and feelings. A key question in this research is whether children's ability and motivation to represent and nderstand anothers' thoughts and feelings is a function of the quality of the relationship with that individual or, alternatively, a more general characteristic of the child that is similarly expressed across relationship contexts. The current study sought to extend previous research by assessing mentalising behaviour in early adolescence and examining intra‐individual differences in adolescents' mentalising behaviour about self and other in different relationships. The research design exploited the natural experiment of the secondary school, in which children develop very diverse relationships with different teachers. In the spring of the academic year, a vignette‐based, semi‐structured interview was administered, and students' understanding and attributions of mental states of their most and least liked teachers were coded using a newly developed system. Results indicated that there were significant intra‐individual differences in adolescents' mentalising; the psychological sophistication with which adolescents understood and described another's behaviour was predicted from the affective quality of the relationship. In addition, there was significantly less incongruity or distortion in adolescents' mentalising about their most liked teacher compared with their least liked teacher, highlighting the need to consider not only the presence but also the 'accuracy' of mentalising.

AbstractFollowing parental separation, children's closeness to grandparents has been reported to be linked to their family situation and differences in adjustment. This relationship has not been investigated longitudinally. This study investigated children's relationships with grandparents over time in different family settings, and associations with intergenerational relationships. Data from 385 children, with longitudinal analyses on 140, were collected at two time points over a five‐year period. Associations between closeness of the child–grandparent relationship and adjustment were not found at the later time point. There was a mean drop in frequency of contact over time, but not in closeness. However, there was stability of individual differences in both frequency of contact and closeness; closeness to the maternal grandmother was particularly stable for children living with a single mother. Intergenerational links were found with the mother's own childhood experiences, particularly in single‐mother families. Following parental separation, the matrifocal bias in kinship patterns was accentuated.

Differences in mothers' parenting behaviors toward their identical twin preschoolers were examined to identify nonshared environmental processes in social‐emotional development. The study included 62 pairs of 3½‐year‐old same‐sex identical twins. Indicators of each child's social‐emotional development (temperament, prosocial behavior, behavior problems and noncompliance) and parenting environment (warmth and negativity, positive and negative control, responsiveness) were assessed using observers', interviewers', and parents' ratings. Mothers treated their identical twins differently, and this differential treatment covaried in expected ways with identical twin differences in social‐emotional adjustment. The twin who received more supportive and less punitive forms of parenting was also higher in positive mood and prosocial behaviors and lower in negative mood and behavior problems when compared to her or his twin.