Children's supernatural thinking as a signalling behaviour in early childhood

Abstract

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Voices as Cues to Children’s Needs for Caregiving

“…We also measured their reactions times in doing so. We predicted, consistent with previous research examining the effect of children’s immature thinking on adult perceptions (e.g., Bjorklund et al, 2010 ; Hernández Blasi et al, 2015 , 2017 ), that children with immature voices would be selected more frequently for positive affect and rated as being more helpless than children with mature voices, and that maturity of children’s voices would have no effect on negative-affect ratings. We were less certain about which children would be deemed as more intelligent.…”

“…With respect to the second hypothesis, decision-making on the Negative-Affect items was significantly the most time consuming, as predicted, reflecting the difficulty participants have making attributions of negative traits with respect to children (cf. Hernández Blasi et al, 2017).…”

“…Second, we anticipated longer reaction times for the Negative-Affect items than for the other trait dimensions given that, as shown in previous research (e.g., Hernández Blasi et al, 2017), adults have more difficulty (i.e., take longer to make a decision) when having to assess children on negative as opposed to positive items. We did not make any predictions about which trait dimension (Positive Affect, Intelligence, Helpless), if any, would likely be the easiest for participants in terms of speed of decision-making.…”

“…The order of presentation of the 14 adjectives or short statements was systematically and automatically counterbalanced by the computer program. These 14 adjectives and short statements have been used in previous research (e.g., Bjorklund et al, 2010;Hernández Blasi et al, 2017) and constitute a selection of traits that are potentially meaningful in understanding interactions between adults and young children. Based on principal component analyses performed in these previous studies, we grouped the items into four factors or trait dimensions: Positive Affect (cute, friendly, nice, likeable), Negative Affect (sneaky, likely to lie, feel more irritated with, feel more angry with), Intelligence (smart, intelligent), and Helpless (helpless, feel more protective towards, feel like helping).…”

“…In this vein, children who verbalize certain types of immature explanations of ordinary phenomena (what has been called “supernatural thinking”: e.g., “The sun’s not out today because it’s mad,” “The big peak is for long walks, and the small peak is for short walks”) are perceived more positively and helpless by both adults and older adolescents (14 to 17 years old) than children verbalizing more mature, adult-like explanations of the same phenomena (e.g., “The sun’s not out today because the clouds are blocking it”) (Bjorklund et al, 2010 ; Periss et al, 2012 ). In addition, these cues of immature thinking have been shown to prevail over physical cues (e.g., faces) in both adults and older adolescents when both are available (Hernández Blasi & Bjorklund, 2018 ; Hernández Blasi et al, 2015 , 2017 ). However, little is known yet, to our knowledge, about the potential role of the voice (vocal cues) as a cue for the need for careging during early childhood, and this is the main purpose of the present study.…”