Proactive help-seeking: Preschoolers know when they need help, but do not always ask for it

The effects of maternal competence and situational stress level on children's help-seeking expectations across 4 to 6 years of age

Help-seeking is a crucial problem-solving strategy for young children. However, it is not yet clear how children weigh different cues to make help-seeking decisions across preschool years, especially in caregiver-child interactions. The current study used a social expectation task to examine the effects of maternal competence and situational stress level on 4- to 6-year-old children's help-seeking expectations from a third-party perspective. Children's expectations of whether to seek help were measured. A total fo 135 Han Chinese children aged 4 to 6 years from an eastern city of China participated in this study. We found that 4- to 6-year-olds expected to seek more help from a competent mother than from an incompetent mother in low-stress conditions. When the stress level was high, however, they expected to seek help regardless of maternal competence levels. These results suggest that the interaction between the situational stress level and maternal competence determines young children's help-seeking expectations across preschool years. They further suggest that young children seek help from mothers in an active and discriminatory way.

Relationship between Social Skills and Happiness: Differences by Gender

This study examines the relationship between social skills and happiness in 1st-year Teaching School students, as well as possible gender differences. The sample comprised 243 Teaching School students (Primary Education) in Zaragoza, including 110 men (45.27%) and 133 women (54.73%), aged 18–25 (average age 20.23 years; s.d. = 1.586). In order to analyse the relationship between social skills and subjective happiness, the Scale of Social Skills and Subjective Happiness Scale were used. While men scored higher in all social skills-related factors, women scored higher in all factors related to happiness. The study shows that factors such as self-expression in social settings and the ability to say no and cut off social interactions have a direct and significant effect on happiness among men, while self-expression in social settings and the ability to express anger led to a higher perception of happiness among women. Similarly, situations such as asking for and defending rights have an indirect and significant effect in men, reducing their levels of happiness. In the case of women, no social skills factors were found that led to lower happiness. It may be concluded that significant gender differences exist, although broader and lateral studies are needed in order to examine the relationship between gender identities, social skills and subjective happiness more in depth, and thus, understand the effect of these constructs in the development of personality.

Competence-based helping: Children's consideration of need when providing others with help

When and how other people's needs influence children's helping is poorly understood. Here we focused on whether children use information about other people's competence in their helping. In Study 1 (N = 128 4- to 8-year-old children), children could provide help to both an incompetent target and a competent target by pushing levers. Whereas older children helped incompetent targets more than competent targets, younger children (<5 years) helped both targets equally. Two further experiments (N = 20 and N = 28) revealed that 4-year-olds understood that the incompetent person needed more help and also understood how they could help. Thus, young children do not, like older children, give more help to those who need it the most. We discuss potential developmental changes toward competence-based helping.

An Illusion of Self-Sufficiency for Learning About Artifacts in Scaffolded Learners, But Not Observers

Two studies ask whether scaffolded children (n = 243, 5-6 years and 9-10 years) recognize that assistance is needed to learn to use complex artifacts. In Study 1, children were asked to learn to use a toy pantograph. While children recognized the need for assistance for indirect knowledge, 70% of scaffolded children claimed that they would have learned to use the artifact without assistance, even though 0% of children actually succeeded without assistance. In Study 2, this illusion of self-sufficiency was significantly attenuated when observing another learner being scaffolded. Learners may fail to appreciate artifacts' opacity because self-directed exploration can be partially informative, such that learning to use artifacts is typically scaffolded instead of taught explicitly.

Young children consider the expected utility of others' learning to decide what to teach

Direct instruction facilitates learning without the costs of exploration, yet teachers must be selective because not everything can nor needs to be taught. How do we decide what to teach and what to leave for learners to discover? Here we investigate the cognitive underpinnings of the human ability to prioritize what to teach. We present a computational model that decides what to teach by maximizing the learner's expected utility of learning from instruction and from exploration, and we show that children (aged 5-7 years) make decisions that are consistent with the model's predictions (that is, minimizing the learner's costs and maximizing the rewards). Children flexibly considered either the learner's utility or their own, depending on the context, and even considered costs they had not personally experienced, to decide what to teach. These results suggest that utility-based reasoning may play an important role in curating cultural knowledge by supporting selective transmission of high-utility information.

The relationship of internalizing problems with emotional intelligence and social skills in secondary education students: gender differences

Internalizing problems (depression, anxiety, social anxiety, somatic complaints, post-traumatic symptoms, and obsession-compulsion) are very important in adolescents’ development. These problems can be related with people who lack social skills and poorly handle their emotions. This study assessed 1358 secondary education students (12–17 years) to analyze the relationship linking internalizing problems, emotional intelligence, and social skills. The results showed not only how these constructs were related, but how students’ internalizing problems varied according to their emotional intelligence and social skills. They also indicated that two in every three males, and just over one in every two females, obtained high scores for internalizing problems. The model showed a good fit: χ²(85) = 201.161 p < 0.001; χ²/gl = 2.367; CFI = 0.919; NFI = 0.869; TLI = 0.900; RMSEA = 0.075, IC 95% (0.062–0.089). Finally, gender influenced the way that internalizing problems, emotional intelligence, and social skills were related, and an inverse relation appeared to link internalizing problems, emotional intelligence (r = − .77), and social skills (r = − .52) for females, while this relationship was poorer for males. By way of conclusion, we state that internalizing problems are related with emotional intelligence and social skills in secondary education students, but this relationship differs according to gender.