The relation of childhood personality types, or configurations of personality traits, to adolescent development was examined. Three personality types were identified in an inverse factor analysis of California Child Q-Sort data on 128 Icelandic 7-year-olds: resilient, overcontrolled, and undercontrolled. Growth curve analyses demonstrated that in comparison to children of the other 2 types, children of the resilient personality type had higher levels of academic achievement and lower levels of concentration problems throughout adolescence; resilient children also developed sophisticated friendship reasoning and an internal locus of control more quickly. Children of the overcontrolled type were found to be more prone to social withdrawal and low levels of self-esteem during adolescence than children of the other 2 types. In contrast to the other 2 types, children classified as undercontrolled showed an increase in aggressive behavior in adolescence. Implications of the findings for research on personality development are discussed.
Eighty-five Icelandic children (41 girls and 44 boys) participated in a study on the relations among attachment representations, self-confidence, and cognitive functioning in childhood and adolescence. Attachment representations and self-confidence were assessed at age 7 on the basis of children's responses to a separation story and observations made by independent observers. Cognitive functioning was measured at ages 7, 9, 12, 15, and 17 years based on a battery of Piagetian tasks assessing concrete and formal reasoning. Children with a secure attachment representation were favored in their cognitive performance in childhood and adolescence. Children with an insecuredisorganized attachment representation were particularly disadvantaged on deductive reasoning tasks. Self-confidence played a significant but varying role in mediating the effects of attachment representations on cognitive functioning. The study controlled for IQ and attention difficulties.
The study compares sociomoral reasoning of children and adolescents in Iceland, longitudinally assessed at ages 7, 9, 12, and 15 years (N = 97), and in China, cross-sectionally assessed at corresponding ages (N = 350). Participants reasoned about choices, motives, and moral justifications of a protagonist in a sociomoral dilemma. The dilemma allows persons to focus on different concerns (e.g., promise keeping or close friendship vs. self-interest or altruism toward a 3rd person). Overall, Icelandic participants referred more often to self-interest and contractual concerns, whereas Chinese participants focused on altruistic and relationship concerns. However, some cultural differences remained stable over time, whereas others decreased. In adolescence, close friendship became an equally important value in both cultures. The results indicate a complex interaction of culture and development in sociomoral reasoning.
The Present Crisis Calls for a Democratic SchoolA democratic school is not a luxury. Learning democracy is not just an extension of the serious business of learning for life. It is the serious business of learning for life and, as such, it must be a central goal of education in school.e jed_1463 127.. 137 The importance of learning democracy in school is linked to the present crisis, a crisis that presents the system in which we live with perilous challenges and risks, for which both governments and citizens in general are ill prepared. Beyond the recent crisis of the financial system that determines the present social and economic experience and the political disillusionment of millions worldwide, political scientists such as Herfried Münkler in Germany (Münkler & Wassermann 2008) and Colin Crouch in England (2004) have identified serious threats to the very foundations and basic components of democratic systems: the corrosion, as Münkler calls it, of the sociomoral resources of democracy. Among the universal and large scale processes that threaten to undermine these resources, he identifies individualism which threatens the social bond between people in relationships of reciprocal responsibility by the pervasive resurgence of selfinterest as the almost universally justified major motive for action. The second process that threatens the foundations of democracy according to Münkler is globalisation, because, with globalisation, policies and political decisions under democratic control within state boundaries have come to depend on highly complex transactions of international actors beyond democratic control. The development of a 'security (or surveillance) state' in response to the threat of international terrorism is but one salient feature of a process where the quest for state security claims obedience to authority rather than democratic self regulation. An even greater challenge is the ecological crisis crystallising in the issue of climate change, with the Copenhagen meeting in December 2009 of representatives of almost all the world's states being a paradigmatic example of failure to control transnational processes. That failure demonstrates, much as other endeavours to regulate recent crises have shown, that even international organisations and alliances are hard put to control critical processes and find politically negotiated solutions for them. The ecological crisis thus poses a threat of global chaos and ensuing dictatorial regulatory powers to face the crisis rather than democratic forms of regulation through negotiation supported by enlightened citizens.Colin Crouch (2004), in his analysis of what he calls post-democracy, pinpoints the erosion of trust in governmental institutions and the decay of the basic regulatory principles of equality, justice and fairness that are essential to democratic political empowerment which is increasingly devalued and dominated by the new economic and financial elites who redefine the rules and practices of governance worldwide in their favour.To the risk factors...
The relation of childhood personality to the development of friendship understanding and moral judgment in adolescence was considered in a longitudinal study. Personality at age 7, assessed with the California Child Q-Set, was characterized in terms of ego-resiliency and ego-control. IQ and social class were also measured. Friendship understanding was assessed when the participants were ages 7, 9, 12, 15, and 19, and moral judgment was elicited when the participants were 12, 15, and 19. Ego-resiliency was found to predict social-cognitive development in adolescence, even after the effects of IQ and childhood measures of social-cognitive development were controlled for. Analyses indicate that the effects of ego-resiliency on social-cognitive development are largely unmediated by the ability to focus attention or by social participation.
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