Understanding Children's Emotions

    Understanding the importance of emotions in children is crucial to understanding how emotions guide their thoughts and behaviors. Recent research has defined interest as a key emotion that may be the first to develop in infancy, then later stimulates children’s curiosity, motivating them to explore the world around them and to learn from their experiences.  Parents are encouraged to respond enthusiastically to their children’s interests, increasing opportunities for meaningful conversations which builds stronger family relationships.

     Although some children don’t show “typical” interests (e.g. reading or school work), parents are encouraged to determine what does interest their child, and to engage in their interests. Over time, parents can help their child turn theses interests into constructive projects, but parents must meet them half way through support and encouragement.

To read a more detailed article about this concept of understanding children's emotions, click on the following link: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kenneth-barish-phd/understanding-childrens-e_b_3594455.html .

What interests and activities do your children enjoy? How do you encourage your children to pursue their interests? Submit your comments below! 

Project Update!

The MSU Minds, Attitudes, and Parenting project is pleased to announce that we've reached the midpoint of our study, and have had a great turn out thus far! Over 65 children and their parents have participated in our study over the last six months. Interesting results between children's behaviors, their brain activity, and their parents' attitudes are beginning to emerge. We will be presenting some of these findings at the upcoming meetings of the Association for Psychological Science in San Francisco and at the Intellectual Humility conference in Saint Louis. We're very excited about the data we have collected already and are even more excited to see what the next six months will bring! Thank you to everyone who has already participated in this study and to those that have helped spread the word about our research! It has been a pleasure working with the families and we hope the results of our study will provide helpful information in return in the not too distant future. In the coming year, we hope to begin posting results from our study and, begin providing workshops and events to inform the public about our research. Until then, we are still looking for children and parents to participate over the next six months, so please continue spreading the word about the MSU MAP project. For more details about this research study, feel free to e-mail us at msukidlab@gmail.com or visit our website at www.msumap.org .

How much do you think you know?

Children and adults often think they know a great deal about how things work in the world around them. However, when asked to explain in detail how these things work (e.g. how a bicycle works), adults and children (especially) actually do not know as much as they initially stated. Children in particular lack the ability to understand what they know and what they don't know, as well as knowing when they learned something. Although the ability to understand one's own knowledge becomes more refined into adulthood, it is still a common difficulty found in adults. 

Please click on the link below to watch a fun video demonstrating children's intellectual humility and to read more about this process. 

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/developing-minds/201309/knowing-what-we-know

How to encourage good behavior in your child

Parents often resort to using bribes to encourage their children to engage in desired behaviors, but research shows that bribes do not work in the long run. What should parents use instead of bribes to encourage good behavior in their children? Here's a few take home messages from the New York Times article provided below:

•  Turn every task or behavior into a game
• Make it a challenge for your child to engage in a specific behavior or task
• Give prizes spontaneously
• Give your child a choice in what they'd like as a reward
• Use praise as a reward
• Focus on the process it took to achieve the desired behavior, don't focus on just the desired behavior

To read the full article, visit http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/13/fashion/modifying-a-

childs-behavior-without-resorting-to-bribes-this-life.html?pagewanted=1 .

How do we know what other people think?

A recent study found that reading fiction improved adults’ ability to figure out what other people are feeling. Knowing what other people feel or think is a skill psychologists call “theory of mind” and it turns out to be an important part of social interaction. Theory of mind begins developing in infancy, and it continues improving throughout childhood.

One of the goals of the MSU MAP project is to better understand how the development of theory of mind relates to children’s thinking about their own knowledge.

Although we don’t know whether reading fiction also improves children’s theory of mind, there is plenty of evidence that reading has other benefits for children thinking and reasoning skills. Looking for good books to read with your child? Check out the New York Public Library’s recent list of 100 great children’s books: http://www.nypl.org/childrens100

Comment below with some of your favorite children's books!

Picture of the Week!

Below is a picture of our child-friendly waiting room here at the KID Lab. 

Delayed Gratification

As children develop, their ability to wait longer for greater rewards increases. Older children are better able to resist having a smaller reward now to obtain a bigger reward later. This is called delayed gratification, and it’s a process that we often use throughout our daily lives. Specifically, the ways in which children think about the rewards and handle their desires become more sophisticated, allowing them to wait longer periods of time when faced with such choices.

The MSU MAP project looks at behaviors and thought processes similar to delayed gratification in children ages five to seven. We hope to better understand how such behaviors and thought processes develop, as well as how they’re related to parenting behaviors, patterns of brain activity, and a range of other factors. Understanding how children think and develop is important in order to create better learning environments to provide children with more positive outcomes throughout childhood and beyond.

Below is a fun video explaining the concept of delayed gratification.