Co-authored by film education practitioners and developmental psychologists, this article seeks to establish an interdisciplinary dialogue between the emergent discourses of film education and developmental psychology. In particular, it explores the possible implications for our understandings of film education of recent psychological research…

Many young people are inclined toward risk taking and also toward helping other people. "Prosocial risk taking" is a term that can describe different ways that youth provide significant instrumental and emotional support to family members, friends, and strangers, even when it involves a personal risk. In this article, we review research…

Studies of children's developing social identification often focus on individual forms of identity. Yet, everyone has multiple potential identities. Here we investigated whether making children aware of their multifaceted identities--effectively seeing themselves from multiple angles--would promote their flexible thinking. In Experiment 1, 6- to…

Developmental research has long sought to understand children's social ideas, and particularly how those ideas influence their judgments and behaviors toward other people. We examine the idea of "common humanity," a social idea that has been investigated historically and philosophically, to re-consider what is already known about…

Self-recognition emerges during the second year of life and represents the emergence of a reflective self, a metacognition which underlies self-conscious emotions such as embarrassment and shame, perspective taking, and emotional knowledge of others. In a longitudinal study of 171 children, two major questions were explored from an extant…

Theories of social-cognitive development have attributed a foundational role to declarative joint attention. The present longitudinal study of 83 children, who were assessed on a battery of social-cognitive tasks at multiple measurement points from the age of 12 to 50 months, tested a predictive model of theory of mind (false-belief…

The purpose of this study is to analyze the ability of preschool children to take on a perspective, based on their self-perception and gender. A relational survey method was used, with 124 children between ages 5 and 6 participating--74 girls (59.7%) and 50 boys (40.3%). The Self-Perception Scale for Children and Perspective-Taking Test was…

Young children's ability to learn something new from a third-party interaction may be related to the ability to imagine themselves in the third-party interaction. This imaginative ability presupposes an understanding of self-other equivalence, which is manifested in an objective understanding of the self and an understanding of others' subjective…

Classic theories of self-development suggest people define themselves in part through internalized perceptions of other people's beliefs about them, known as reflected self-appraisals. This study uses functional magnetic resonance imaging to compare the neural correlates of direct and reflected self-appraisals in adolescence (N = 12, ages 11-14…

A review of the development of self and empathy in infancy in general is followed by discussion of atypical development, noting that autistic children have a general deficit in development of empathic capacity and physical and representational sense of self. Specific interventions to enhance the development of both sense of self and empathic…

The family system--a primary locus in the formation of meaning for children--should encourage the healthy construction of communicative roles. What children learn about interaction is contingent on two processes, both central to the symbolic interaction perspective: role-taking and role-making. Role-taking is the ability to transcend an egocentric…

In Latin America and the Caribbean, poverty is not merely a problem of marginalized communities. It is the situation in which 240 million people--50 percent of the population--are living. This report describes research undertaken by the Quality of Life Project, which aims to improve the situation of children in these disadvantaged communities. The…