COMMENTARY: WHAT HEALS AND WHY? CHILDREN'S UNDERSTANDING OF MEDICAL TREATMENTS

Young infants' expectations about a self-propelled agent's body

What intuitive biological understandings do infants have? Recent work reports that 8-month-olds seem to identify self-propelled agents as animals and expect them to have a closed body. The present study examined a group of 6.5-month-old infants' (N = 50, 52% female, 84% White) biological expectations. The infants seemed to grasp the causal link between a novel self-propelled box agent's functioning and its body because they expected a temporary operation (i.e., an experimenter opening the box, exposing its insides, and closing it) to impair its ability to move. Further, infants accepted what was shown inside the box during the operation; whether it had an internal cuboid did not affect the results. Together, this suggests that infants at this young age appear to recognize the importance of having an intact body to a novel self-propelled agent's mobility but have no specific knowledge about what should be inside such an entity. These findings thus shed new light on the developmental origins of biological understandings.

Development of Implicit Links Between Effort, Pain, and Recovery

This article describes three studies that examined Japanese children's and adults' intuitive perceptions regarding the links between pain, effort, and healing. A total of 79 six-year-olds, 81 nine-year-olds, 74 twelve-year-olds, and 66 adults were presented with scenarios involving modern and traditional medical interventions and were examined with regard to how the level of pain and effort presented in the scenarios influenced their views of healing. It was consequently found that the 6-year-olds tended to judge painful interventions as aversive, while adults considered them to be effective. Furthermore, overall, effortful interventions were believed to be more efficacious than painful ones. The children and adults appeared to assume that people who have tried hard and expended considerable effort deserve to be healed quickly. These results are in accord with the coexistence model, which posits that an individual can have coexisting scientific and folk beliefs across his/her life course.