Social wariness, preference for solitude, and peer difficulties in middle childhood: A longitudinal family-informed study.

The present study examined, within a longitudinal family-informed design and across middle childhood, the predictive associations between preference for solitude and social wariness, two forms of social withdrawal, and peer difficulties. Specifically, preference for solitude, rather than social wariness, was expected to predict peer victimization and rejection, two aspects of peer difficulties. A total of 1041 children from the Quebec Newborn Twin Study were assessed by teachers and peers at ages 6, 7, and 10 years. Multi-level analyses conducted across three levels, between-family, within-family, and within-person, revealed that preference for solitude, rather than social wariness, increased the risk for peer difficulties in terms of both peer victimization and peer rejection. Specifically, preference for solitude was systematically associated with peer rejection starting at age 6 years and became progressively associated with peer victimization over time. This pattern was found both between and within families. In addition, the predictive association with peer rejection was found within genetically identical, monozygotic twin pairs, suggesting that this predictive association existed after taking into account genetic vulnerabilities. Social wariness was systematically unrelated to peer difficulties. These findings suggest that preference for solitude, rather than social wariness, is a risk factor for peer difficulties. They underscore the relevance of distinguishing these dimensions of social withdrawal and illustrate the usefulness of a family-informed design to document the processes underlying childhood social adjustment.

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Joining New Families: A Study of Adoption and Fostering in Middle Childhood. By D. Quinton, A. Rushton, C. Dance, & D. Mayes. Wiley, Chichester, 1998. pp. 266. £15.99 (pb).

Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry ◽

10.1017/s0021963099244174 ◽

1999 ◽

Vol 40 (7) ◽

pp. 1141-1142

Author(s):

Maurice Place

Keyword(s):

Middle Childhood

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Yes I Can!

Social Psychology ◽

10.1027/1864-9335/a000229 ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 46 (2) ◽

pp. 76-92 ◽

Cited By ~ 15

Author(s):

Dries Vervecken ◽

Bettina Hannover

Keyword(s):

Middle Childhood ◽

Gender Stereotypes ◽

Self Efficacy ◽

Vocational Interests ◽

Primary School Students ◽

School Students ◽

Employment Goals ◽

Linguistic Intervention ◽

Male Occupations ◽

Linguistic Backgrounds

Many countries face the problem of skill shortage in traditionally male occupations. Individuals’ development of vocational interests and employment goals starts as early as in middle childhood and is strongly influenced by perceptions of job accessibility (status and difficulty) and self-efficacy beliefs. In this study, we tested a linguistic intervention to strengthen children’s self-efficacy toward stereotypically male occupations. Two classroom experiments with 591 primary school students from two different linguistic backgrounds (Dutch or German) showed that the presentation of occupational titles in pair forms (e.g., Ingenieurinnen und Ingenieure, female and male engineers), rather than in generic masculine forms (Ingenieure, plural for engineers), boosted children’s self-efficacy with regard to traditionally male occupations, with the effect fully being mediated by perceptions that the jobs are not as difficult as gender stereotypes suggest. The discussion focuses on linguistic interventions as a means to increase children’s self-efficacy toward traditionally male occupations.

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Memorial Consequences of Environmental Context Change in Children and Adults

Experimental Psychology (formerly Zeitschrift für Experimentelle Psychologie) ◽

10.1027/1618-3169/a000056 ◽

2010 ◽

Vol 57 (6) ◽

pp. 455-461 ◽

Cited By ~ 5

Author(s):

Alp Aslan ◽

Anuscheh Samenieh ◽

Tobias Staudigl ◽

Karl-Heinz T. Bäuml

Keyword(s):

Elementary School ◽

Young Adults ◽

Episodic Memory ◽

Middle Childhood ◽

First Graders ◽

Fourth Graders ◽

Environmental Context ◽

Context Change ◽

Context Dependent

Changing environmental context during encoding can influence episodic memory. This study examined the memorial consequences of environmental context change in children. Kindergartners, first and fourth graders, and young adults studied two lists of items, either in the same room (no context change) or in two different rooms (context change), and subsequently were tested on the two lists in the room in which the second list was encoded. As expected, in adults, the context change impaired recall of the first list and improved recall of the second. Whereas fourth graders showed the same pattern of results as adults, in both kindergartners and first graders no memorial effects of the context change arose. The results indicate that the two effects of environmental context change develop contemporaneously over middle childhood and reach maturity at the end of the elementary school days. The findings are discussed in light of both retrieval-based and encoding-based accounts of context-dependent memory.

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