Key Terms

• Industry: work hard in order to master the academic and interpersonal tasks that middle childhood sets forth

• Intentionality: behaving in ways suggesting that we understand what others are trying to do. Appears at 9 months old

• Inferiority: falling behind or finishing low down in the standings

• Narcissism: excessive self-love, self-centeredness, arrogance, excessively high self-esteem

• Self-efficacy: a person's belief that they can execute goal-directed behaviour in a successful manner, especially under challenging or stressful circumstances

• False-belief task: taking into consideration another person’s mind → difficult for 2 /3 years old but becomes feasible for 5 /6 years old

• Virtuous character: when a person engages in rational and deliberative choice and then acts upon that choice

• Self-esteem: the overall evaluation (from highly positive to highly negative) that a person makes of the self

• Joint attention: when infants visually follow a caregiver's pointing finger to find the object to which the caregiver is calling attention, then turn back to the caregiver to confirm that they are indeed looking at the intended object

• Concrete operations: ability to think about the concrete world as a logically organized, rule-governed reality

• Human agency: intention, volition, will, purpose, choice, deliberative planning, and personal control

• Theory of mind: common-sense that most human beings have about why people do what they do

• Superego: the rudimentary conscience most children develop by age 5

• Preconventional stage: 1st stage of moral reasoning in which children determine what is good or bad exclusively in terms of the effects of an action upon the self. Moral reasoning = self-centred

• Conventional stage: older children rely on a broader consideration of interpersonal and societal standards to determine what a moral person should do

• High self-esteem: greater initiative in the pursuit of goals and greater enjoyment of success in goal attainment

• Low self-esteem: fear of failure, higher levels of internal conflicts, and cautious/prevention-focused orientation toward life's challenges

• Grandiosity: feature of narcissism linked to self-importance

• Sense of entitlement: feature of narcissism linked to the expectation that they are entitled to the admiration of others

• Age 5-7 shift: moment when children experience many cognitive and social changes in middle childhood that result in a newfound sense of maturity and rationality

• Theory of mind: agents pursue goals in order to satisfy their desires and in accord with what they believe to be true

Researchers - Theories

• Albert Bandura: invented the concept of self-efficacy

• Aristotle: believed that socialization and education for virtue require extensive practice

• Piaget: invented the stage of concrete operations in children’s development

• Erick Erickson: invented the model of psychosocial development and argued that 4 of the 8 stages in the life cycle are during middle childhood

• William James: believed that self-esteem is success ÷ pretensions (goals/values/expectations)

Experiments

• 9 month-olds express more impatience when an adult is unwilling to give them a toy than when the adult is simply unable to give it to them, showing they understand intentionality

• Children develop a theory of mind more quickly if they also show high levels of EC, have parents who engage them in conversations that make repeated reference to mental/emotional states, have older siblings, have more experience with children’s storybooks, and are rated as more sociable and less aggressive by their preschool children

• Autistic children often perform poorly on theory-of-mind tasks and sometimes lack personal agency

• Prosocial behaviours are correlated with highly developed abilities to assume and understand the perspectives of others

• Children who pursued social development goals tend to engage in more prosocial behaviour and to be seen by their peers as nice

• Children who pursued demonstration-approach goals were most popular and displayed more aggression

• Children who pursued demonstration-avoid goals were the least popular

• Popularity is linked to some aggressive behaviour, social dominance, athleticism, and physical attractiveness

• Relative judgments of physical attractiveness play into self-esteem especially for girls

• Warm and supportive parenting tends to predict high self-esteem in children

• Americans report unrealistically high levels of self-esteem compared to other countries

• Manifest narcissism is often linked to social problems

• Narcissists are charming and attractive at first and attain high levels of popularity in the short term

• Narcissists are rated as more physically attractive

• People who score high on narcissism fantasize more about power and status

Examples

• McAdams was named as a representative for the Student Council in second grade

• Societies around the world start giving children their 1st responsibilities around the age of 6/7 years old

• Before age 8, children tend to show high levels of self-esteem

• The age 5-7 shift is driven by biological/maturational changes and by the social conventions of society and schooling

• Motivated agency emerges during the age 5-7 shift

• Most human beings much of the time believe they do have some degree of agency

• Human beings learned how to think of themselves as motivated agents sometime during the millennium before Christ

• Stephen Wiltshire: had extraordinary artistic talents but never seemed to develop a sense of personal agency

• Habits pave the way for the eventual development of character

• EC and the development of empathy in the preschool years contribute to the development of a conscience

• 7 years old children attain the stage of concrete operations

• McAdams became fascinated with baseball when he was young

• By age 7-8, children recognize that even when different people have the same information, they may still see the world in different conflicting ways

• Children’s most important goals for social adjustment in school and interpersonal relationships are affiliation and power

• From grade school, girls care more about affiliation goals and boys about power goals

• Self-esteem may be domain-specific (child feels good about himself in sports but inferior in schoolwork)

• Girls in general show lower self-esteem than boys

• Children from East Asian societies show lower self-esteem than American societies

• Self-esteem peaks at 60 years old and starts declining at 70 years old

• In the long run, narcissism can lead to social rejection

• Steve Jobs: an asshole, narcissist

• Narcissists are often high on E and low on A

Tables/Figures

Table 5.1