It is no secret that parents and teachers impact children's lives. Some believe that their influences are distinct: parents are thought to take care of socializing children and teachers are assumed to be in charge of teaching kids academic skills. This somewhat crude meme illustrates this idea - but is it correct?
Could responding to your child's physical and emotional needs also influence his or her cognitive skills? A recent study by Bernier, Beauchamp, Carlson, and Lalonde (2015) supports this idea. The authors were interested if the type of attachment that children share with their mothers may relate to certain abilities that predict success in school.
You may recall that Mary Ainsworth and colleagues developed one way to study Attachment quality: briefly leaving toddlers in a Strange Situation and then reuniting them with their caregivers to observe how the children react. The majority of children got upset, but not hysterical, when left alone and were very glad when their caregiver returned: they ran to them; wanted to be held; and stopped crying almost immediately.
These children, like most American children, demonstrate a Secure Attachment relationship with their caregivers. This Secure style is associated with parents who notice when their children need something - physically or emotionally - and they respond to those needs in a prompt way. Children who share a Secure relationship learn to trust that their parents will come through for them.
In contrast, children may have an Insecure Avoidant relationship with parents who cannot be trusted to notice or take care of their needs. In this case the children don't want to be with the parents and do not rely on the parents for help.
Children can also share an Insecure Ambivalent relationship with parents who are unpredictable and unreliable at taking care of their needs. These children are always on edge because they don't know if today will be a good day or a bad day: they may be unusually clingy but also demonstrate a lot of anger toward their parents.
Finally, children raised in an abnormal environment of abuse and neglect, or by parents who are severely mentally ill, may just seem confused. This type of attachment relationship would be described as Insecure Disorganized.
We know that having a Secure Attachment relationship is associated with children demonstrating better social skills, emotional control, and improved behavior as they grow older. Bernier et al. hypothesized that this sort of attachment as a toddler would also be associated with better Executive Functioning skills during kindergarten. These Executive Functioning skills are largely regulated by the brain's prefrontal cortex and are very important for success in school. For example, relying on working memory, demonstrating the ability to plan and reach goals, and having control over your behavior are all requirements of kindergarten through college.
The authors considered 105 children who were tested at 15 months, two years, and when they were in kindergarten (age 5-6). At 15 months and age two, research assistants used a Q-Sort method to assess the attachment quality between the children and their mothers. The assistants came to each child's home and observed mother-child interactions. Based on those observations the assistants sorted 90 phrases into nine categories that ranged from "very unlike the child's behavior" to "very similar to the child's behavior." The resulting piles were compared with the piles we would expect from a Secure attachment relationship: if there was a strong match, the observed child would also have a Secure relationship with his or her mother. For example, children with Secure attachments would be rated as very similar to, "If held in mother's arms, child stops crying and quickly recovers after being frightened or upset," and rated as very unlike, "Child rarely asks mother for help" (p.1180).
At age 5 or 6, the same children were tested for general cognitive ability and specific Executive Functioning skills. General cognitive ability included an assessment with a delicious name, the Lollipop Test, which measures knowledge of colors and shapes, understanding of spatial relationships like "above" and "below," number knowledge, and letter knowledge.
Five assessments measured the children's Executive Functioning. Four of these directly tested the children's working memory, ability to follow rules, planning skills, and selective attention. Higher scores on these tests were associated with higher Executive Functioning skills. The children's kindergarten teachers completed the final assessment: they rated the children on 63 items related to problems with self-control, flexibility of thought, and metacognition (working memory combined with planning/organizational thinking). Thus, a low score on this rating was associated with higher Executive Functioning skills.
The results supported Bernier et al.'s hypothesis. Children who had earlier demonstrated Secure attachment relationships with their mothers scored higher on all of the Executive Functioning tests and received lower scores from teachers on problems with Executive Functioning. In other words, children whose parents had been responsive to their physical and emotional needs early in life were more likely to become kindergarten students with strong Executive Functioning skills. These skills in turn predict higher school success for these children.
Moreover, having a history of a Secure attachment was better at predicting good Executive Functioning skills than other factors known to have such influence. For example, attachment style predicted Executive Functioning skills better than predictions based on children's general cognitive ability scores. Likewise, attachment style's predictive powers trumped the children's ages, their families' income and education levels, and the amount of weeks that they had spent in kindergarten.
Although we cannot take these correlational results to mean that being a responsive parent or sharing a Secure Attachment relationship causes children to be primed for school success, they do imply that these things are likely to hang together. Returning to our meme, this research suggests that it is not solely the teacher's actions that will help children in school. If children are successful with the demands of kindergarten we can infer that they likely have a history of parents who wiped their noses, soothed their fears, and helped them regulate their emotions.
Further Reading:
The Bernier et al. (2015) journal article in Developmental Psychology can be accessed through your local college library.
If you are concerned that a child in your life has problems with Executive Functioning skills. Here is a resource from Understood.org: Understanding Executive Functioning Issues.
The Extension office at Purdue University offers concrete examples of parenting that are associated with Secure and Insecure Attachment relationships. The good news is that Insecure relationships can become Secure ones if parents change their behaviors.
For most of us, when we make plans we take into consideration a small number of logical problems that might occur. In this case, a little bit of anxiety helps us make logical choices to keep ourselves safe. For example, if you are planning a road trip it is a good idea to use Google maps or your GPS to navigate without getting lost.
For some individuals who struggle with anxiety that list of possible problems would not only be lengthy, it might also include some very unlikely and illogical problems. For example, if the weather report predicts sunny skies and you are very worried about a million things - including that you will have to drive through massive thunderstorms - this is probably a sign of an anxiety disorder. Even worse, when your friend tells you that you don't need to worry, you are still convinced that your concern is based in reality.
Our meme uses a good key word to help you understand one aspect of anxiety disorders: catastrophically. Catastrophic thinking is a cognitive bias that is associated with anxiety disorders. It causes people to generate and fear many possible, even if unlikely, worst case scenarios. This might lead a person who fails one exam to believe, "I am going to fail out of school and be homeless;" a person who has a sore throat would think, "I am going to die from throat cancer;" and a person going through a break-up could fear, "I am going to die alone because nobody will ever want me."
In addition to worrying about themselves, people who are very anxious may also worry about catastrophes that could occur in others' lives. Based on this, Lester, Field, & Cartwright-Hatton (2012) wanted to clarify the relationship between anxiety and catastrophic thinking as they relate to mothers. This is very sensible as parents are charged with protecting their children from harm and teaching children how to be careful: all parents are expected to envision what could go wrong for their kids.
As well, we know that anxiety disorders are caused by an interplay of genetic and environmental influences. If parents model catastrophic thinking it may be that their children will start to have the same cognitive bias.
In the study, 300 English mothers of elementary school children were tested for their baseline level of anxiety, or trait anxiety. Overall, they were not particularly anxious - only 5% or so were anxious enough to meet the criteria for Generalized Anxiety Disorder - but there were some moms who scored higher than others.
Next, the mothers were interviewed to measure their tendencies toward catastrophic thinking, or catastrophic processing. Almost 200 of the moms were asked to imagine that a person doing something dangerous was their own child; about 100 of the moms were instead asked to imagine themselves as the person doing the dangerous thing. For example (p. 759), the participants were asked to imagine their child or themselves as the man standing atop this high column.
They were then asked to state what worried them about that situation. The interviewer continued with follow-up questions based on these answers to generate a list of possible worst case scenarios. The mothers who came up with more of these had a larger bias toward catastrophic thinking.
All of the mothers participated in another test to see if they were simply biased to see danger in general. They read 20 descriptions of ambiguous situations - situations that could be interpreted as being dangerous or safe. Examples are not given in the Lester at al. article, but I can imagine a situation like, "Walking alone to a friend's house." Half of the situations were described as applying to them (my version: "You are walking alone to a friend's house....") and the other half were described as applying to the participants' children (my version: "Your child is walking alone to a friend's house....").
Bias toward seeing danger was assessed through a test of recognition memory. Recognition memory is what you use to complete multiple choice exams: you simply pick out the choice that matches what you remember. In this case the mothers' memories for the 20 situations were tested: for each one they had to choose between a version that was dangerous and a version that was safe. So if we use my made-up example of "walking alone to a friend's house" the choices might include:
a) ...walking alone to a friend's house and a man jumps out of a car with a knife...
b) ...walking alone to a friend's house and a rabbit jumps out from behind a bush...
Having a bias toward seeing danger would lead participants to choose the memory that depicted a threat as the correct answer.
The results confirmed that mothers who are higher in trait anxiety generated more possible worst case scenarios: anxious mothers were more likely to demonstrate catastrophic thinking. This was equally true regardless if they were asked to envision outcomes for their children or for themselves. This suggests that anxious mothers may generalize their own anxiety to their children's experiences.
Likewise, Lester et al. found that mothers who are higher in trait anxiety were more likely to remember ambiguous situations as including threats: they were biased to see danger. This was especially true when they were asked to imagine themselves in those ambiguous situations; it was true to a lesser extent when they were asked to imagine their children in the situations. Some further analyses led to the suggestion that higher trait anxiety leads to a bias of seeing danger as it might affect you personally; this self-directed bias in turn increases your likelihood to imagine danger for your child.
Lester at al. were careful to point out that their methods do not allow them to state that these biases cause children of anxious parents to become anxious themselves. However they raise the possibility that kids could be at risk of anxiety if they grow up with parents who engage in catastrophic thinking and who are led to envision danger in their children's lives. The authors also offer another possibility based on their results: parents of anxious children may develop these cognitive biases, such as catastrophic thinking, as a result of raising their fearful offspring. Talk about an ambiguous situation!
Further Reading:
The Lester et al. (2012) article can be accessed through your local college library.
For a humorous look at worst case scenarios and parenting, try this book by Piven, Borgenicht, & Jordan (2003). You can find an excerpt from the chapter on "long car journeys" here.
If you are concerned about your anxiety or the anxiety of your mother a loved one, the Anxiety and Depression Association of America offers good information on treatment. This includes a podcast about Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, a common treatment to combat irrational thoughts, including a bias toward catastrophic thinking.
Because of our parenting practices, long periods of crying are considered a normal part of infancy in Western cultures. When babies cry they are communicating that something feels bad: they may have pain; be frightened or lonely; feel uncomfortable; or be absolutely starving. In addition to the compassion that crying evokes, hearing a baby cry is simply unpleasant - we react to it physiologically and are motivated to do whatever it takes to stop it. We pick up our babies, inspect them, rock them, sing to them, offer them food, or grab a favorite toy to distract them...
In B.F. Skinner's theory of Operant Conditioning the reaction, or reinforcement,
after a behavior happens is what encourages or discourages it from
happening again. This meme is an example of two kinds of conditioning, or training, that encourage behaviors to continue: negative and positive reinforcement. Without meaning to, both the child and the mother are training each other to keep doing these things.
The child is using negative reinforcement to to train his mother to continue giving him a teddy bear. In negative reinforcement there is something that is ongoing and unpleasant - in this case crying - and it is removed only when the trainee does what she is supposed to do - give a teddy bear. Negative reinforcement encourages a trained behavior to continue in the future, so the little boy is increasing the likeliness of getting his teddy bear in the future.
The mother is using positive reinforcement, or reward, to train her child to cry. In positive reinforcement once the trainee does what he is supposed to do - in this case crying - he gets something pleasant as a reward - the teddy bear. Positive reinforcement also encourages a trained behavior to continue in the future, so the mother is increasing the likeliness of having her son cry in the future.
Skinner, like the other Behaviorists, was not interested in thoughts or feelings because those are not observable actions. Instead he saw this type of training as reflexive: contrary to our meme, the boy and his mother are not planning these behaviors instead they are reacting to the situation. Even so, their reactions increase the likelihood of the situation occurring again.
Operant Conditioning is a very old theory, but it still can be applied to parenting today. For example, Thompson, Bruzek, and Cotnoir-Bichelman (2011) designed a small experiment to examine how infant cries may negatively reinforce caregivers and train them to perform comforting behaviors. The authors were also interested in what happens when that training has occurred but none of the comforting behaviors works to stop inconsolable crying.
Thompson et al. had a very small sample size: eight female and three male undergraduates were observed as they interacted with a baby doll under directions to, "...do what comes naturally" (p. 297). Eight of the participants were asked if they had prior experience with babies and all of them did; the other three were not asked. Even with this curiously missing information, we know that the majority of participants had real life experience "doing what comes naturally" with an infant.
Tested one at a time, all of the participants experienced several Negative Reinforcement conditions: a recording of an infant crying played until the participant engaged in the desired behavior with the doll. These behaviors ranged from rocking, bottle feeding, and offering a toy. All of the participants showed signs of training: they learned to do the desired behavior to stop the recorded crying.
Eventually the participants were each placed into an Extinction condition: this time no matter what comforting behavior they tried, the recorded crying would not stop. The participants all tried the behavior that had previously worked to stop the crying in the earlier conditions. When it did not work nine of these undergraduates showed extinction of that training: they gave up trying to get the crying to stop. Two of the participants did not show an extinction: they persisted with the trained comforting behavior for 30 minutes as the crying recording played the entire time. Perhaps these participants had real-life experience with their own colicky babies and their behavior in the Extinction condition mirrored what they did for their own children: persisted in giving care.
The results support the notion that negative reinforcement teaches parents which comforting behaviors work to stop their babies' crying and thus encourages these behaviors to continue in the future. The results may also demonstrate how some parents could give up and stop any attempt to comfort their babies when inconsolable crying occurs. In the worst case, these parents might engage in neglect or abuse of these infants. The authors did note that these findings and their implications would be stronger with a larger sample and a more realistic test situation.
In addition, I would caution that we should not interpret this to mean that babies consciously manipulate their caregivers. To manipulate another person is a very advanced cognitive ability. It implies that one person is going to fake a behavior to trick another person into doing something that he or she really does not want to do. Young infants do not possess the ability to do this: instead they simply cry when they feel bad. As well, most parents want to care for their babies and are motivated to reduce their babies' distress - they do not need to be tricked into these behaviors. In the ideal situation babies learn that if they cry a parent will help them feel better, and parents learn how to best calm their babies' distress - or even better, how to avoid that distress in the first place.
Further Reading:
A pdf of the Thompson et al. article, published in the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, can be accessed for free online.
Here are some good ideas for comforting a baby who is crying inconsolably from Ask Dr. Sears. Dr. Harvey Karp has a combination of five comforting behaviors that can help even colicky babies stop crying: here is a video of that technique on WebMD.
In addition to learning their babies' early cues of distress, parents can REDUCE crying by carrying their babies MORE often. An article by Hunziker and Barr (1986), published in Pediatrics, supports this idea.
In college I double majored in Psychology and French, so I am fluent in French to this day. A few years ago my family and I spent a year in Denmark so I started to learn Danish. To my horror when I would try to speak Danish, French words would pop into my mind. More recently, I have been learning German. It is so frustrating to only find Danish words when I am searching my brain for German vocabulary! If you have ever tried to learn a foreign language this week's meme should be relatable:
If we assume that the Most Interesting Man in the World learned French first and it is making German hard for him to learn, then this is an example of proactive interference. Proactive interference is the situation when prior knowledge interrupts the learning of new information.
How can we overcome this? Past research suggests that people learning a second language have to inhibit their original languages to produce the new one. So my stories and our meme represent failures in this inhibition.
An article by Declerck, Thoma, Koch, and Philipp (2015) supports the idea that people who are fluent in multiple languages also must use inhibition. Declerck et al. tested 18 German young adults who grew up speaking both Turkish and German as part of their everyday lives. These individuals also started to learn English in school around age ten, so they were fluent in this third language, although these skills were not as strong as their Turkish and German abilities.
In their experiment, the participants were shown slides depicting a number (1-9) and a symbol. If they saw a square they should say the number in Turkish; if they saw a diamond they should say the number in German; if they saw a triangle they should say the number in English. Each participant experienced 107 trials of this test. For some trials two cued languages alternated in sets of three (for example, German-Turkish-German) and for an equal amount of trials all three of the the cued languages cycled in sets of three (for example, German-Turkish-English). For all trials the speed and accuracy of the answers were recorded: a longer hesitation before saying the number indicated more inhibition of the previously cued language.
Participants hesitated milliseconds more when two cued languages alternated, as compared to when all three cued languages cycled. This finding supports past research: alternating back and forth between two languages is most likely to increase the difficulty of suppressing one of the languages when using the other. This difficulty increases the response time.
All three languages created these tiny delays for speaking the next cued language, but the participants' dominant languages, Turkish and German, did this more than English. This also supports the idea of inhibition: a language that is stronger in your mind will take more effort to suppress which will slow down your response.
On the other hand, participants were most accurate in naming the numbers when cued to do so in English. In this case more mistakes were made when they had to speak their two strongest languages! The authors explain this counter-intuitive finding by pointing out that a person who is very strong in two languages (Turkish and German) will likely view this experiment as a test of the language that has weaker fluency (English). It is as if the participants were not so worried about being accurate in Turkish or German because those are easy-peasy for them; instead they were worried about goofing up in English so they tried harder when English was cued. This activation of English would decrease response time and also increase accuracy of naming numbers in that language.
This should make us all of us aspiring polyglots feel better. For second-language learners, don't be too hard on yourself if words from your native language pop out of your mouth in a foreign language class. This is just a problem of proactive interference and a failure of inhibition. For multilingual people, don't feel bad if you catch yourself hesitating ever so slightly as you switch between your languages. This only shows that your brain is working hard to inhibit the languages that you don't need at that moment. Moreover, the situation is going to play a role by activating a specific language which should increase your accuracy.
Further Reading:
You can access the Declerck et al. (2015) article at your local college library.
If you feel inspired to brush up on an old language or to learn a new one, two FREE apps that use cognitive psychological research for language learning are Memrise and Duolingo.
A Radiolab episode on Translation. Featuring Indiana University's Dr. Douglas Hofstadter attempts to translate a French poem into English, and other examples of how ideas can get lost, or changed, in translation.
Trigger warning: spiders; itching; psychology.
The creepy-crawlies. The heeby-jeebies. Makes my skin crawl. Many of us have these reactions when we see spiders:
Logically we know that spiders are unlikely to hurt us - in fact we can kill them quite easily - and that spiders are important parts of the ecosystem. Illogically we fear them and may be gripped with an illusory sensation that they are crawling upon us...producing itching that is very real. Why is this?
Some suggest that we may be evolutionarily wired to notice spiders and perceive them as a threat. New and German (2015) asked undergraduate students to perform a perceptual task: indicate if two crossed lines were equal or unequal in size each time they were briefly flashed on a screen. For most of the trials all that appeared on the screen were two lines in a cross shape, but for one trial another image was sneaked in next to the cross. This other image was either: a spider or a spider-like shape; a housefly or a fly-like shape; a hypodermic needle or a shape that was similar to a hypodermic needle. This is an "inattentional blindness" test because the participants have not been instructed to look for these things: their attention has only been directed to the lines so they should be "blind" or not notice other things. If participants do notice the other images, we can know that those images really stood out to grab their attention.
New and German found that the participants were much more likely to notice the spider or spider-like shapes than the other options. This was true even of participants who reported low fear of spiders and participants who reported high fear of needles. The authors believe that this represents an evolutionary wariness of spiders that has been passed down from our earliest ancestors in Africa where venomous spiders likely posed daily threats. In our modern world we are more likely to feel pain from an injection than truly be at risk from a dangerous spider bite - yet, spiders grab our attention more than needles.
If spiders grab our attention and make our skin crawl, when are we most likely to start scratching that imaginary itch? Llyod, Hall, Hall, and McGlone (2012) showed female undergraduates images related to itching, such as insects and skin rashes, and itch-neutral images, such as flying birds. As predicted, when participants viewed the itch-related images their self-reported levels of itchiness were significantly higher.
In addition to the self-reports, Lloyd et al. observed the participants' own scratching behavior and noted any scratching movement that lasted for more than one second. Out of all of the itch-related images, the photographs that included a person scratching him- or herself were associated with the most scratching from the participants. The authors suggest that feeling itch may be automatic but a scratching response may be triggered by a social situation that activates mirror neurons: brain cells that react the same to doing or watching a behavior.
When we put this all together, we know that your eyes are likely to be drawn to this guy if he is hanging out in your living room:
If your skin starts to crawl, you are normal: seeing insects and spiders makes us feel itchy. But you are most likely to scratch if you see your friends start scratching.
Further reading:
The New and German (2015) article is published in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior but is available online in draft form; the Lloyd et al. (2012) article can be accessed through your local college library.
Some individuals suffer from chronic, not just creepy-crawlies-induced itching. You can read more about recent findings related to this debilitating condition in this National Institute of Health article.
If you are thoroughly creeped out and itchy from reading this post, here is a totally unrelated video of a baby laughing to cleanse your palate. You are welcome.
