This study explored the development of understanding of death in a sample of 4- to 11-year-old British children and adults (N=136). It also investigated four sets of possible influences on this development: parents' religion and spiritual beliefs, cognitive ability, socioeconomic status, and experience of illness and death. Participants were interviewed using the "death concept" interview that explores understanding of the subcomponents of inevitability, universality, irreversibility, cessation, and causality of death. Children understood key aspects of death from as early as 4 or 5years, and with age their explanations of inevitability, universality, and causality became increasingly biological. Understanding of irreversibility and the cessation of mental and physical processes also emerged during early childhood, but by 10years many children's explanations reflected not an improved biological understanding but rather the coexistence of apparently contradictory biological and supernatural ideas-religious, spiritual, or metaphysical. Evidence for these coexistent beliefs was more prevalent in older children than in younger children and was associated with their parents' religious and spiritual beliefs. Socioeconomic status was partly related to children's biological ideas, whereas cognitive ability and experience of illness and death played less important roles. There was no evidence for coexistent thinking among adults, only a clear distinction between biological explanations about death and supernatural explanations about the afterlife.
An adult with autism and a mild intellectual disability participated in a 0-s delayed matching-tosample task. In each trial, two sample stimuli were presented together until the participant completed an observing-response requirement consisting of 1 or 10 mouse clicks in the baseline and experimental phases, respectively. One of the two sample stimuli then appeared randomly as a comparison stimulus (S+), along with two other comparison stimuli (S2). Higher levels of correct responding occurred under the larger observing-response requirement, and the proportion of errors related to one of the two sample stimuli decreased. Thus, stimulus overselectivity was reduced without requiring differential observing responses.
One important socio-cultural medium through which young children's moral understanding is cultivated is parent/child discourse. Of particular interest to us was young children's use of basic ('thin') evaluative concepts (good, bad, right and wrong), which are ubiquitous in everyday discourse and serve as a potential bridge from the nonmoral to the moral domain. We investigated 14 2-5-year-old children's (and their parents') use of thin evaluative concepts and found that while they frequently used good and bad to morally evaluate other people's and their own psychological/dispositional states and behaviors-as well as, less frequently, to highlight relevant standards, expectations and rules-they did not use right and wrong. In contrast, a sample of US written and spoken public conversation revealed that adults did. Reasons for this are discussed, along with the frequency of different types of moral evaluations, differences between children and their parents, and age-related trends.
It was my second shift on an acute under-12s' children's ward. Handover began and I could tell by the look on the night shift nurse's face that it had been difficult.
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