Most adolescents are concerned about climate change. What helps them to act on their concerns? This preregistered randomized experiment tested whether adolescents' pro-environmental behavior can be promoted by framing the behavior as compatible with their autonomy motive. Dutch adolescents (N = 319, ages 12-17, 57.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Climate anxiety is increasingly prevalent among adolescents worldwide. Are climate-anxious adolescents prone to engage in pro-environmental behavior? Or might the association between climate anxiety and pro-environmental be curvilinear, such that high levels of climate anxiety become 'paralyzing'? And do these associations depend on whether adolescents believe that, with effort, the worst impacts of climate change can still be prevented?
Methods: We addressed these questions in three studies (two preregistered; combined N = 2,211), conducted across two countries. We used cross-sectional and longitudinal methods, and various measures of climate anxiety and pro-environmental behavior.
Background: We examined the implementation and potential effectiveness of a school-based targeted prevention programme addressing behaviour problems, adapted for children with mild intellectual disabilities or borderline intellectual functioning.
Method: Thirteen children participated. The intervention was implemented in schools.
Child Adolesc Psychiatry Ment Health
April 2024
Oppositional defiant problems are among the most prevalent psychological problems among children and adolescents from China and across the world. Still little is understood about how self-esteem, in conjunction with parenting experiences, develops in children with oppositional defiant problems. We addressed this gap of knowledge in a two-year longitudinal study.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFChildren tend to overestimate their performance on a variety of tasks and activities. The present meta-analysis examines the specificity of this phenomenon across age, tasks, and more than five decades of historical time (1968-2021). Self-overestimation was operationalized as the ratio between children's prospective self-estimates of task performance and their actual (i.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFParental tradition transfer to children is pivotal for their socialization, identity formation, and culture perpetuation. But what motivates parents to transfer traditions to their children? We hypothesized that nostalgia, an emotion strengthening interpersonal bonds, would promote tradition transfer through parent-child relationship closeness. We tested these hypotheses using cross-sectional (Studies 1 and 4), cross-lagged (Study 2 and preregistered Study 5), and experimental (Studies 3 and 6) designs.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMindsets of ability (i.e., "fixed" and "growth" mindsets) play a pivotal role in students' academic trajectories.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Exp Child Psychol
February 2023
Young children are generally overconfident in their abilities and performances, but the reasons that underlie such self-overestimation are unclear. The current cross-cultural experiment aimed to address this issue, testing the possibility that young children's overconfidence in task performance is, at least in part, motivated. We tested 89 Chinese children (49 % girls) and 104 Dutch children (50 % girls) aged 4 and 5 years and asked them to estimate how well they would perform on both a motor test and a memory task.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFChildren with aggressive behavior problems may aggress for different reasons, requiring tailored assessment and treatment. The aim of this study was to test whether it is possible to detect distinct social information processing (SIP) profiles among boys with aggressive behavior problems. We therefore conducted Latent Profile Analyses on boys' SIP patterns assessed in interactive virtual reality.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWestern literature suggests that young children overestimate their performance across a range of tasks. Research in non-Western cultures, however, is lacking. In 2019, 101 Chinese (52% girls) and 98 Dutch (49% girls) children, ages 4 and 5, were asked to estimate how well they would perform on both a motor and a memory task.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPeople who pursue approach goals (i.e., desired outcomes to be reached) tend to be more likely to achieve their goals than people who pursue avoidance goals (i.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThere is a growing body of research showing the crucial role that students' versus have in their school achievement, enjoyment, and resilience. The overwhelming majority of this research adopts a variable-oriented approach. As a result, little is known about how teachers and students coregulate each other's mindsets within classroom interactions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInt J Environ Res Public Health
July 2020
This study contributes to the literature on the parental correlates of children's narcissism. It addresses whether parental overvaluation may drive the putative link between parents' narcissism and children's narcissism and self-esteem. The cross-sectional design involved a community sample of 519 school-age children (age ranging from 9 to 11 years old) and their parents from an Italian urban context.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Children's self-views encompass two independent dimensions: self-esteem and narcissism, which recently have received growing attention from researchers and clinicians. The current study sought to test whether these dimensions might predict the developmental course of children with Oppositional Defiant Disorder diagnosis.
Method: The sample (N = 64, M age = 10.
Children with negative competence beliefs often achieve below their potential in school. This randomized field experiment tested whether engaging in positive self-talk may benefit these children's mathematics performance. Participants (N = 212, Grades 4-6, M = 10.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHow do children with aggressive behavior problems view themselves? The present research seeks to answer this question by examining the self-views (i.e., self-esteem and narcissism) of boys referred for disruptive behavior problems.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Abnorm Child Psychol
June 2019
Two experiments tested an intervention approach to reduce young children's hostile attribution bias and aggression: self-persuasion. Children with high levels of hostile attribution bias recorded a video-message advocating to peers why story characters who caused a negative outcome may have had nonhostile intentions (self-persuasion condition), or they simply described the stories (control condition). Before and after the manipulation, hostile attribution bias was assessed using vignettes of ambiguous provocations.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFConditional regard refers to regard dependent upon the receiver's fulfillment of certain expectations. Using an experimental design, we examined the effect of conditional negative and positive regard on well-being and eagerness to learn in university freshmen ( = 131). Participants experienced either failure or success followed by conditional vs.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Several studies have investigated relationships between narcissism, self-esteem and behavioral problems in children. Most of these studies have been conducted in community samples, rather than in clinical referred samples. This field of research is clinically important, because data on community samples suggest that narcissism is a significant risk factor for children's behavioral problems.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTwo studies investigated whether parent-child discussion of peer provocations reduces young children's hostile attributional bias. Study 1 (N = 109, age 4-7)-an observational study-showed that parent-child discussion of nonhostile attributions (when reading a picture book) predicted reductions in children's hostile attributional bias from pre- to postdiscussion. Study 2 (N = 160, age 4-6)-an experimental study-showed that stimulating parents to discuss either nonhostile attributions or normative beliefs (vs.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe young field of research on dark personality traits (i.e., socially aversive traits such as psychopathy, narcissism, and Machiavellianism) is gaining momentum.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAs they grow up, children construct views of themselves and their place in the world, known as their self-concept. This topic has often been addressed by social psychologists (studying how the self-concept is influenced by social contexts) and developmental psychologists (studying how the self-concept changes over time). Yet, relatively little is known about the origins of the self-concept.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWestern parents often give children overly positive, inflated praise. One perspective holds that inflated praise sets unattainable standards for children, eventually lowering children's self-esteem (self-deflation hypothesis). Another perspective holds that children internalize inflated praise to form narcissistic self-views (self-inflation hypothesis).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis research aimed to examine whether and why children hold favorable self-conceptions (total N = 882 Dutch children, ages 8-12). Surveys (Studies 1-2) showed that children report strongly favorable self-conceptions. For example, when describing themselves on an open-ended measure, children mainly provided positive self-conceptions-about four times more than neutral self-conceptions, and about 11 times more than negative self-conceptions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAdolescents have a strong desire to "be themselves." How does experiencing authenticity-the sense of being one's true self-influence subjective well-being? What allows adolescents to experience authenticity? This research tests a working model of how authenticity is implicated in adolescents' well-being. Using survey, diary, and experimental methodologies, four studies (total N = 759, age range = 12-17) supported the main tenets of the model.
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