A new study indicates that early experiences of environmental harshness, in combination with a child's temperament, can influence later problem-solving abilities.
Following early exposure to harsh environments, children with higher levels of hawk traits at age 2 - meaning that they exhibited heightened levels of aggressiveness, boldness, activity, and approach - developed enhanced problem-solving for rewards by age 4. Furthermore, these children displayed worse performance on a standardized visual problem-solving task with low motivational significance, regardless of environmental harshness.
"Our study's findings provide support for emerging views that early environmental experiences in combination with temperament characteristics shape children's cognitive functioning towards what is most salient in their environments," said Jennifer Suor, lead author of the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry study. "Moreover, our findings illustrate how evolutionary approaches to child development might offer important insights into the functional significance behind developmental adaptations in cognition, and furthermore, emphasize how standardized cognitive assessments, which often lack direct ecological and motivational significance, may not be able to fully capture the specialized repertoire of cognitive skills children develop in stressful environments."
Article: A life history approach to delineating how harsh environments and hawk temperament traits differentially shape children's problem-solving skills, Jennifer H. Suor, Melissa L. Sturge-Apple, Patrick T. Davies, Dante Cicchetti, Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, doi: 10.1111/jcpp.12718, published online 22 March 2017.
Contact our news editors
For any corrections of factual information, or to contact our editorial team, please see our contact page.
Please note: Any medical information published on this website is not intended as a substitute for informed medical advice and you should not take any action before consulting with a health care professional. For more information, please read our terms of use.
Copyright Medical News Today: Excluding email/sharing services explicitly offered on this website, material published on Medical News Today may not be reproduced, or distributed without the prior written permission of Medilexicon International Ltd. Please contact us for further details.
All Hypnosis Feeds
via Psychology / Psychiatry News From Medical News Today http://ift.tt/O45xlc
March 27, 2017 at 09:15PM
No comments:
Post a Comment