Attitudes toward children: Distinguishing affection and stress

BACKGROUND

Adults' views and behaviors toward children can vary from being supportive to shockingly abusive, and there are significant unanswered questions about the psychological factors underpinning this variability.

OBJECTIVE

The present research examined the content of adults' attitudes toward children to address these questions.

METHOD

Ten studies (N = 4702) identified the factor structure of adults' descriptions of babies, toddlers, and school-age children and examined how the resulting factors related to a range of external variables.

RESULTS

Two factors emerged-affection toward children and stress elicited by them-and this factor structure was invariant across the United Kingdom, the United States, and South Africa. Affection uniquely captures emotional approach tendencies, concern for others, and broad positivity in evaluations, experiences, motivations, and donation behavior. Stress relates to emotional instability, emotional avoidance, and concern about disruptions to a self-oriented, structured life. The factors also predict distinct experiences in a challenging situation-home-parenting during COVID-19 lockdown-with affection explaining greater enjoyment and stress explaining greater perceived difficulty. Affection further predicts mentally visualizing children as pleasant and confident, whereas stress predicts mentally visualizing children as less innocent.

CONCLUSIONS

These findings offer fundamental new insights about social cognitive processes in adults that impact adult-child relationships and children's well-being.

Physician-patient racial concordance and disparities in birthing mortality for newborns

Recent work has emphasized the benefits of patient-physician concordance on clinical care outcomes for underrepresented minorities, arguing it can ameliorate outgroup biases, boost communication, and increase trust. We explore concordance in a setting where racial disparities are particularly severe: childbirth. In the United States, Black newborns die at three times the rate of White newborns. Results examining 1.8 million hospital births in the state of Florida between 1992 and 2015 suggest that newborn-physician racial concordance is associated with a significant improvement in mortality for Black infants. Results further suggest that these benefits manifest during more challenging births and in hospitals that deliver more Black babies. We find no significant improvement in maternal mortality when birthing mothers share race with their physician.