UNDERSTANDING CHILDREN'S BEHAVIOUR

Understanding Children's Behaviour

Table of Content

Introduction3

Children's interpretive understanding and pro- and antisocial behaviour4

Interpretive understanding, moral judgments, and emotion attributions6

Children's moral judgments, emotion attributions, and pro and antisocial behaviour9

Method10

Participants10

Measures11

Interpretive understanding11

Moral development13

Language Ability18

Results19

Descriptive analysis19

Relations between moral judgments, emotion attributions, and interpretive understanding20

Relations of social behaviour with interpretive understanding, moral judgment, and emotion attributions21

Discussion and Conclusion25

References31

Understanding Children's Behaviour

Introduction

Is children's developing understanding of another's mind a sufficient facilitator of their social behaviour? Or do children's moral judgments and caring about another's welfare serve as a developmental impetus for pro-social behaviour and impede antisocial behaviour? Throughout history, narratives on antisocial leaders indicate that an advanced understanding of how others think and feel - sometimes even including highly differentiated moral judgment skills - can serve selfish, antisocial ends. In contrast, pro-social leaders such as Mahatma Gandhi have been frequently characterized by an exceptionally strong inclination to care about others' welfare. These are certainly telling historical typologies. Nevertheless, the complexities inherent in the developmental relations between young children's emerging understanding of another's mind, morality, and social behaviour still present a challenge to developmental psychologists and clinicians.

This study aimed to contribute to this complex research field. We investigated the relations between aspects of children's social understanding (i.e., interpretive understanding), the different components of morality (i.e., moral judgments and emotion attributions), and social behaviour (i.e., pro- and antisocial conduct) in a sample of 5-, 7-, and 9-year-old children. Previous research has provided insights into various aspects of these relationships, such as the relation between social and moral understanding. Nevertheless, past studies have rarely addressed explicitly the relative contributions of interpretive understanding and the different indicators of morality to children's pro- and antisocial behaviour across different age groups. The present research, thus contributes to filling some of the research gaps regarding children's descriptive (i.e., factual) and prescriptive (i.e., evaluative or moral) understanding of social relationships, and the relation of this understanding to social behaviour (Geake, 2009). Such knowledge can be useful in guiding educational efforts to promote the development of children's social competence.

Children's interpretive understanding and pro- and antisocial behaviour

In this study, we focused on an aspect of children's social understanding or theory of the mind, dealing with their knowledge of interpretation, i.e., interpretive understanding. Children with interpretive understanding not only recognize that others sometimes construct false representations of the world, but that they may also actively re-construct situations that can be understood in different ways and are therefore open to subjective interpretation. From a constructivist perspective, measures of interpretive understanding place children's understanding of beliefs in a fuller social-developmental context than the common false-belief tasks meant to uncover consistencies in epistemic development (Holzhauser, 2008). As many social and moral situations involve conflicting perspectives in everyday social interactions and are inherently ambiguous, interpretive understanding is well suited to investigating the links of understanding another's mind to children's moral and social development.

Indicators of understanding of the other's mind, such as interpretive or false-belief understanding, are acknowledged to play a role in children's social ...