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from the please-put-down-my-camera dept.
http://www.washington.edu/news/2014/10/07/toddlers-regulate-behavior-to-avoid-making-adults-angry/
Abstract: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0885201414000513
Researchers have found that toddlers as young as 15 months can detect anger from adults and regulate their behaviour accordingly.
Now researchers at the University of Washington have found that children as young as 15 months can detect anger when watching other people’s social interactions and then use that emotional information to guide their own behavior.
The study, published in the October/November issue of the journal Cognitive Development, is the first evidence that younger toddlers are capable of using multiple cues from emotions and vision to understand the motivations of the people around them.
“At 15 months of age, children are trying to understand their social world and how people will react,” said lead author Betty Repacholi, a faculty researcher at UW’s Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences and an associate professor of psychology. “In this study we found that toddlers who aren’t yet speaking can use visual and social cues to understand other people – that’s sophisticated cognitive skills for 15-month-olds.”
The findings also linked the toddlers’ impulsive tendencies with their tendency to ignore other people’s anger, suggesting an early indicator for children who may become less willing to abide by rules.
The abstract explains the process a little more:
Infants were bystanders to a social exchange in which an Experimenter performed actions on objects and an Emoter expressed anger, as if they were forbidden acts. Next, the Emoter became neutral and her visual access to the infant was experimentally manipulated. The Emoter either: (a) left the room, (b) turned her back, (c) faced the infant but looked down at a magazine, or (d) faced and looked toward the infant. Infants were then presented with the test objects. When the previously angry Emoter was facing them, infants were hesitant to imitate the demonstrated acts in comparison to the other conditions. We hypothesize that infants integrated the emotional and visual-perceptual cues to determine whether the Emoter would get angry at them, and then regulated their behavior accordingly.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Thursday October 09 2014, @12:13AM
Well, that depends on the adult. Some of us who have had children have seen what science is saying, and it agrees with what I, as a parent, saw in my own (now grown) kids. It's good to see scientific confirmation of what one knows from experience.
But yes, many adults think kids are stupid. Actually, you're born both as smart as you'll ever be and as ignorant as you'll ever be. You know absolutely nothing, but your capacity to learn will never be higher.
Carbon, The only element in the known universe to ever gain sentience
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 09 2014, @02:02AM
If you are really interested in what kids can sense (and not sense), this book gives the results from a great deal of direct research on infants,
http://articles.latimes.com/1988-04-03/books/bk-1110_1_baby-boom [latimes.com]
WORLD OF THE NEWBORN by Charles and Daphne Maurer
It's out of print, but there are used copies around at low cost.
From the review linked above:
No wonder babies bawl at birth. After surviving the journey from the weird and otherworldly environment of the womb, which sounds like a pulsating water pump working in tandem with a double bellows, infants are assaulted by a "sensual bouillabaisse" in which sights have sounds, feelings have tastes, and smells can cause dizziness. "The wildest of 1960s' psychedelia," the authors write, "could not begin to compare with the everyday experience of a baby's entry into the world." "The World of the Newborn" combines joyful, stylish writing with responsible reporting based on an impressive survey of medical literature written in English. The authors (Daphne is a psychologist, Charles, a writer and photographer) are scientifically conservative, wary of the wisdom spun at home during the baby boom.
The authors host a mirror of the original (longer) NY Times review,
http://www.maurer.ca/WorldOfTheNewborn/NYTimes.html [maurer.ca]