How we raise young children is one of today's most highly personalized and sharply politicized issues, in part because each of us can claim some level of "expertise." The debate has intensified as discoveries about our development-in the womb and in the first months and years-have reached the popular media. How can we use our burgeoning knowledge to assure the well-being of all young children, for their own sake as well as for the sake of our nation? Drawing from new findings, this book presents important conclusions about nature-versus-nurture, the impact of being born into a working family, the effect of politics on programs for children, the costs and benefits of intervention, and other issues. The committee issues a series of challenges to decision makers regarding the quality of child care, issues of racial and ethnic diversity, the integration of children's cognitive and emotional development, and more. Authoritative yet accessible, From Neurons to Neighborhoods presents the evidence about "brain wiring" and how kids learn to speak, think, and regulate their behavior. It examines the effect of the climate-family, child care, community-within which the child grows.

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From Neurons to Neighborhoods: The Science of Early Childhood Development

We propose that the crucial difference between human cognition and that of other species is the ability to participate with others in collaborative activities with shared goals and intentions: shared intentionality. Participation in such activities requires not only especially powerful forms of intention reading and cultural learning, but also a unique motivation to share psychological states with oth- ers and unique forms of cognitive representation for doing so. The result of participating in these activities is species-unique forms of cultural cognition and evolution, enabling everything from the creation and use of linguistic symbols to the construction of social norms and individual beliefs to the establishment of social institutions. In support of this proposal we argue and present evidence that great apes (and some children with autism) understand the basics of intentional action, but they still do not participate in activities involving joint intentions and attention (shared intentionality). Human children's skills of shared intentionality develop gradually during the first 14 months of life as two ontogenetic pathways intertwine: (1) the general ape line of understanding others as animate, goal-directed, and intentional agents; and (2) a species-unique motivation to share emotions, experience, and activities with other persons. The develop- mental outcome is children's ability to construct dialogic cognitive representations, which enable them to participate in earnest in the collectivity that is human cognition.

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Understanding and sharing intentions: The origins of cultural cognition

There is disagreement in the literature about the exact nature of the phenomenon of empathy. There are emotional, cogni- tive, and conditioning views, applying in varying degrees across species. An adequate description of the ultimate and proximate mecha- nism can integrate these views. Proximately, the perception of an object's state activates the subject's corresponding representations, which in turn activate somatic and autonomic responses. This mechanism supports basic behaviors (e.g., alarm, social facilitation, vicar- iousness of emotions, mother-infant responsiveness, and the modeling of competitors and predators) that are crucial for the reproduc- tive success of animals living in groups. The Perception-Action Model (PAM), together with an understanding of how representations change with experience, can explain the major empirical effects in the literature (similarity, familiarity, past experience, explicit teach- ing, and salience). It can also predict a variety of empathy disorders. The interaction between the PAM and prefrontal functioning can also explain different levels of empathy across species and age groups. This view can advance our evolutionary understanding of empa- thy beyond inclusive fitness and reciprocal altruism and can explain different levels of empathy across individuals, species, stages of de- velopment, and situations.

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Empathy: Its ultimate and proximate bases.

Empathy accounts for the naturally occurring subjective experience of similarity between the feelings expressed by self and others without loosing sight of whose feelings belong to whom. Empathy involves not only the affective experience of the other person’s actual or inferred emotional state but also some minimal recognition and understanding of another’s emotional state. In light of multiple levels of analysis ranging from developmental psychology, social psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and clinical neuropsychology, this article proposes a model of empathy that involves parallel and distributed processing in a number of dissociable computational mechanisms. Shared neural representations, self-awareness, mental flexibility, and emotion regulation constitute the basic macrocomponents of empathy, which are underpinned by specific neural systems. This functional model may be used to make specific predictions about the various empathy deficits that can be encountered in different forms of social and neu...

The functional architecture of human empathy

The mentalizing (theory of mind) system of the brain is probably in operation from ca. 18 months of age, allowing implicit attribution of intentions and other mental states. Between the ages of 4 and 6 years explicit mentalizing becomes possible, and from this age children are able to explain the misleading reasons that have given rise to a false belief. Neuroimaging studies of mentalizing have so far only been carried out in adults. They reveal a system with three components consistently activated during both implicit and explicit mentalizing tasks: medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC), temporal poles and posterior superior temporal sulcus (STS). The functions of these components can be elucidated, to some extent, from their role in other tasks used in neuroimaging studies. Thus, the MPFC region is probably the basis of the decoupling mechanism that distinguishes mental state representations from physical state representations; the STS region is probably the basis of the detection of agency, and the temporal poles might be involved in access to social knowledge in the form of scripts. The activation of these components in concert appears to be critical to mentalizing.

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Development and neurophysiology of mentalizing.

Although there is substantial evidence that 30-month-old children can reason about other people's desires, little is known about the developmental antecedents of this ability. A food-request procedure was devised to explore this understanding in 14- and 18-month-olds. Children observed an experimenter expressing disgust as she tasted 1 type of food and happiness as she tasted another type of food. They were then required to predict which food the experimenter would subsequently desire. The 14-month-olds responded egocentrically, offering whichever food they themselves preferred. However, 18-month-olds correctly inferred that the experimenter wanted the food associated with her prior positive affect. They were able to make this inference even when the experimenter's desires differed from their own. These data constitute the first empirical evidence that 18-month-olds are able to engage in some form of desire reasoning. Children not only inferred that another person held a desire, but also recognized how desires are related to emotions and understood something about

Early reasoning about desires: Evidence from 14- and 18-month-olds.

This study of 62 low-income families examined the relation between maternal and infant measures assessed at 18 months infant age and child behavior problems at age 5 as rated by preschool teachers. The infancy assessments included measures of mother-infant interaction, maternal psychosocial problems, infant cognitive development, and infant attachment security, including the disorganized/disoriented classification. The strongest single predictor of deviant levels of hostile behavior toward peers in the classroom was earlier disorganized/disoriented attachment status, with 71% of hostile preschoolers classified as disorganized in their attachment relationships in infancy. Maternal psychosocial problems independently predicted hostile aggression in preschool and combined additively with infant attachment security in prediction. Results are discussed in relation to the asymmetry of forward and backward prediction that characterized the findings and in relation to the potential significance of disorganized attachment behavior as a precursor to later maladaptation.

Disorganized infant attachment classification and maternal psychosocial problems as predictors of hostile-aggressive behavior in the preschool classroom.

Introduction. V. Slaughter, B. Repacholi, Individual Differences in Theory of Mind: What Are We Investigating? J.W. Astington, Sometimes Necessary, Never Sufficient: False-belief Understanding and Social Competence. D. McIlwain, Bypassing Empathy: A Machiavellian Theory of Mind and Sneaky Power. B. Repacholi, V. Slaughter, M. Pritchard, V. Gibbs, Theory of Mind, Machiavellianism, and Social Functioning in Childhood. J. Sutton, Tom Goes to School: Social Cognition and Social Values in Bullying. T. Keenan, Individual Differences in Theory of Mind: The Preschool Years and Beyond. R.J.R. Blair, Did Cain Fail to Represent the Thoughts of Abel before He Killed Him? The Relationship between Theory of Mind and Aggression. C.C. Peterson, The Social Face of Theory of Mind: The Development of Concepts of Emotion, Desire, Visual Perspective and False Belief in Deaf and Hearing Children. H. Tager-Flusberg, Exploring the Relationships between Theory of Mind and Social-Communicative Functioning in Children with Autism. C. Dissanayake, K. Macintosh, Mind Reading and Social Functioning in Children with Autistic Disorder and Asperger's Disorder. R. Langdon, Poor Mindreading and Delusions: Psychotic Solipsism versus Autistic Asociality. P. Gerrans, V. McGeer, Theory of Mind in Autism and Schizophrenia. Synthesis. M. Davies, T. Stone, Psychological Understanding and Social Skills.

Individual Differences in Theory of Mind : Implications for Typical and Atypical Development

This study of 71 low-income mothers and infants examined whether the disorganized/disoriented (D) infant attachment classification is best viewed as a single category or whether at least two subgroups exist, corresponding to the forced-secure and forced-insecure alternate classifications. Correlates of the D classification as a whole, and of the two subtypes of disorganized behavior, were examined in five domains, including 6-month stability, maternal childhood history of loss, severity of maternal psychosocial risk, maternal behavior toward the infant at home, and infant mental development. Results indicated that the two subtypes of disorganized infant attachment behavior differed in age of emergence, maternal childhood history, severity of associated family risk factors, and the extent of the mother's lack of involvement with the infant at home. Across both D subtypes, disorganization of attachment strategies was associated with less optimal maternal behavior at home and with decreased mental development scores at 18 months. Results are discussed in relation to Main and Hesse's (1990) theory of the role of fear-inducing parental behavior in the genesis of disorganized infant attachment behavior and in relation to Aber, Allen, Carlson, and Cicchetti's (1989) concept of secure readiness to learn.

Disorganized attachment behavior in infancy: Short-term stability, maternal and infant correlates, and risk-related subtypes.

This study explored 14- and 18-month-old infants' ability to identify the target of an emotional display. In the visual task, infants were presented with 2 boxes. Each box contained an object that could be identified by opening the box lid and looking inside. In the tactile task, the objects had to be pulled out of the boxes before they could be seen. An experimenter expressed happiness as she looked or put her hand inside one box, and disgust as she repeated this action with the other box. Infants were then allowed to explore the boxes. Infants touched both boxes but preferred to search for the happy object. Thus, regardless of age or task, infants identified the target of each emotional display as something inside a box and not the box itself. Infants appeared to use the experimenter's attentional cues (gaze and action) to interpret her emotional signals and behaved as if they understood that she was communicating about the objects.

Betty M. Repacholi

Papers

Early reasoning about desires: Evidence from 14- and 18-month-olds.

Disorganized infant attachment classification and maternal psychosocial problems as predictors of hostile-aggressive behavior in the preschool classroom.

Individual Differences in Theory of Mind : Implications for Typical and Atypical Development

Disorganized attachment behavior in infancy: Short-term stability, maternal and infant correlates, and risk-related subtypes.

Infants' Use of Attentional Cues to Identify the Referent of Another Person's Emotional Expression