Kids develop self-esteem even before age five

New York: Children may develop a sense of self-esteem even before they begin kindergarten, reveals an interesting research. "We found that by as young as five years of age, self-esteem is established strongly enough to be measured using sensitive techniques," said lead study author Dario Cvencek, research scientist at University of Washington. The study conducted in January 2016 used a newly developed test to assess implicit self-esteem in more than 200 children up to five-year-old. "Some scientists consider preschoolers too young to have developed a positive or negative sense about themselves," study co-author Andrew Meltzoff from University of Washington noted. Until now, no measurement tool has been able to detect self-esteem in preschool-aged children as the existing self-esteem tests require the cognitive or verbal talk. Researchers created a Preschool Implicit Association Test (PSIAT), to measure how strongly children feel positively about themselves. To make the task appropriate for preschoolers, a mix of 234 boys and girls of five-year-old from the Seattle area, replaced words related to the self ("me," "not me") with objects. They used small unfamiliar flags, and where told about "yours" and "not yours". Using buttons on a computer, children responded to a series of "me" and "not me" flags, using words and pressing the buttons. The results showed that the five-year-old associated themselves more with "good" than with "bad", and this was equally pronounced in both girls and boys. A gender identity task assessed the children's sense of whether they are a boy or a girl, called a "gender in-group preference". Children with high self-esteem and strong sense of gender identity showed preferences for members of their own gender. "Self-esteem appears to play a critical role in how children form various social identities. Our findings underscore the importance of the first five years as a foundation for life," Cvencek said. The study was published in the journal Experimental Social Psychology. —IANS. Source: Article

Read More........→November 17, 2015

Shhh! Your baby learning in sleep too

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London: While infants sleep, they are reprocessing what they have learnt during the day, a study has found. Working with researchers from the University of Tubingen, scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany discovered that babies of the age from nine to 16 months remember the names of objects better if they had a short nap. And only after sleeping can they transfer the learnt names to similar new objects. The infant brain thus forms general categories during sleep, converting experience into knowledge. The results show that sleep significantly affects memory organisation even in the infant brain - and at a time when memory is growing on a massive scale. "The waking infant brain quickly forgets newly-learnt names, but during sleep, words are more durably linked to objects and imprinted," said Angela Friederici, director at Max Planck Institute. The researchers also showed that the formation of categories is closely related to a typical rhythmic activity of the sleeping brain called "sleep spindles". Infants with high "sleep spindle" activity are particularly good at generalising their experiences and developing new knowledge while sleeping. In order to study the impact of sleep on infant memory, the team invited parents to attend a study with their nine to 16-month-old children. During the training session, the infants were repeatedly shown images of certain objects while hearing the fictitious names assigned to the objects. One group of infants spent the next one to two hours sleeping in their prams while the others remained awake. While the group who had stayed awake had forgotten the names of the individual objects, the children in the sleep group remembered the object-word mappings. "The infants who slept after the training session assigned new objects to the names of similar-looking objects," said Manuela Friedrich of the Max Planck Institute. They were not able to do that before their nap, and nor were the ones who stayed awake able to do it. "This means that the categories must have been formed during sleep," Friedrich noted. Source: ummid.com

Read More........→August 12, 2015