Attachment--and loss.

This article opens by noting that positive emotions do not fit existing models of emotions. Consequently, a new model is advanced to describe the form and function of a subset of positive emotions, including joy, interest, contentment, and love. This new model posits that these positive emotions serve to broaden an individual's momentary thought-action repertoire, which in turn has the effect of building that individual's physical, intellectual, and social resources. Empirical evidence to support this broadenand-build model of positive emotions is reviewed, and implications for emotion regulation and health promotion are discussed. Even though research on emotions has this new perspective are featured. My hope is flourished in recent years, investigations that that this article will unlock scientific curiosity expressly target positive emotions remain few and far between. Any review of the psychological literature on emotions will show that psychologists have typically favored negative emotions in theory building and hypothesis testing. In so doing, psychologists have inadvertently marginalized the emotions, such as joy, about positive emotions, not only to test the ideas presented here, but also to build other new models that might illuminate the nature and value of positive emotions. Psychology sorely needs more studies on positive emotions, not simply to level the uneven knowledge bases between negative and positive emotions, but interest, contentment, and love, that share a more critically, to guide applications and pleasant subjective feel. To date, then, psychology's knowledge base regarding positive emotions is so thin that satisfying answers to the question "What good are positive emotions?" have yet to be articulated. This is unfortunate. Experiences of positive emotion are central to human nature and contribute richly to the quality of people's lives (Diener & Larsen,

http://www.gruberpeplab.com/teaching/psych3131_spring2015/documents/15.1_Fredrickson1998_WhatGoodarePositiveEmotions.pdf

What Good Are Positive Emotions

BULLYING AMONG SCHOOL-AGED youth is increasingly being recognized as an important problem affecting well-being and social functioning. While a certain amount of conflict and harassment is typical of youth peer relations, bullying presents a potentially more serious threat to healthy youth development. The definition of bullying is widely agreed on in literature on bullying.1–4 Bullying is a specific type of aggression in which (1) the behavior is intended to harm or disturb, (2) the behavior occurs repeatedly over time, and (3) there is an imbalance of power, with a more powerful person or group attacking a less powerful one. This asymmetry of power may be physical or psychological, and the aggressive behavior may be verbal (eg, name-calling, threats), physical (eg, hitting), or psychological (eg, rumors, shunning/exclusion).

The majority of research on bullying has been conducted in Europe and Australia. Considerable variability among countries in the prevalence of bullying has been reported. In an international survey of adolescent health-related behaviors, the percentage of students who reported being bullied at least once during the current term ranged from a low of 15% to 20% in some countries to a high of 70% in others.5,6 Of particular concern is frequent bullying, typically defined as bullying that occurs once a week or more. The prevalence of frequent bullying reported internationally ranges from a low of 1.9% among 1 Irish sample to a high of 19% in a Malta study.1,7–12

Bullying takes many forms, and findings about the types of bullying that occur are fairly similar across countries. A British study involving 23 schools found that direct verbal aggression was the most common form of bullying, occurring with similar frequency in both sexes.13 Direct physical aggression was more common among boys, while indirect forms were more common among girls. Similarly, in a study of several middle schools in Rome, the most common types of bullying reported by boys were threats, physical harm, rejection, and name-calling.14 The most common forms for girls were name-calling, teasing, rumors, rejection, and taking of personal belongings.

Research examining characteristics of youth involved in bullying has consistently found that both bullies and those bullied demonstrate poorer psychosocial functioning than their noninvolved peers. Youth who bully others tend to demonstrate higher levels of conduct problems and dislike of school, whereas youth who are bullied generally show higher levels of insecurity, anxiety, depression, loneliness, unhappiness, physical and mental symptoms, and low self-esteem.1–4,8,15–25 Males who are bullied also tend to be physically weaker than males in general.2 The few studies that have examined the characteristics of youth who both bully and are bullied found that these individuals exhibit the poorest psychosocial functioning overall.15,17,19,26

The current research provides a foundation for an understanding of the bullying problem. However, it is insufficient to guide intervention and policy development. Moreover, little is known specifically about bullying among US youth.6 In one county-wide middle school survey, 24.1% of youth reported bullying others at least once in the past semester26; it is not known whether this is characteristic of the rest of the nation.

The purpose of this study was to report the prevalence of bullying in a nationally representative sample of US youth in grades 6 through 10, along with information on differences in the prevalence of bullying by sex, grade, and race. In addition, the relationships among bullying, being bullied, and psychosocial adjustment are explored for 3 distinct groups: bullies only, those bullied only, and those who both bully and are bullied.

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/articlepdf/193774/JOC01746.pdf

Bullying Behaviors Among US Youth: Prevalence and Association With Psychosocial Adjustment

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/5/110/206.full.pdf

The american psychological association.

One of the major developments of the second year of human life is the emergence of the ability to pretend. A child's knowledge of a real situation is apparently contradicted and distorted by pretense. If, as generally assumed, the child is just beginning to construct a system for internally representing such knowledge, why is this system of representation not undermined by its use in both comprehending and producing pretense? In this article I present a theoretical analysis of the representational mechanism underlying this ability. This mechanism extends the power of the infant's existing capacity for (primary) representation, creating a capacity for metarepresentation. It is this, developing toward the end of infancy, that underlies the child's new abilities to pretend and to understand pretense in others. There is a striking isomorphism between the three fundamental forms of pretend play and three crucial logical properties of mental state expressions in language. This isomorphism points to a common underlying form of internal representation that is here called metarepresentation. A performance model, the decoupler, is outlined embodying ideas about how an infant might compute the complex function postulated to underlie pretend play. This model also reveals pretense as an early manifestation of the ability to understand mental states. Aspects of later preschool development, both normal and abnormal, are discussed in the light of the new model. This theory begins the task of characterizing the specific innate basis of our commonsense "theory of mind."

/pdf/pretense-and-representation-the-origins-of-theory-of-mind-456tcv8eet.pdf

Pretense and representation: The origins of "theory of mind."

This longitudinal, naturalistic study addressed behavioral and social cognitive processes implicated in preschool children's social dominance. In the first objective, we examined the degree to which peer aggression, affiliation, and postaggression reconciliation predicted social dominance across a school year. Consistent with predictions, all three predicted dominance early in the year while only affiliation predicted dominance later in the year, suggesting that aggression, affiliation, and reconciliation were used to establish social dominance where affiliation was used to maintain it. In the second, exploratory, objective we tested the relative importance of social dominance and reconciliation (the Machiavellian and Vygotskian intelligence hypotheses, respectively) in predicting theory of mind/false belief. Results indicated that social dominance accounted for significant variance, beyond that related to reconciliation and affiliation, in predicting theory of mind/false belief status. Results are discussed in terms of specific behavioral and social cognitive processes employed in establishing and maintaining social dominance. Aggr. Behav. Aggr. Behav. 37:248–257, 2011. © 2011 Wiley-Liss, Inc.

Behavioral and social cognitive processes in preschool children's social dominance.

Sociolinguistic contexts of the preschool

Children's play, language, and early literacy.

Evolutionary psychology is a relatively new discipline within psychology, growing out of the sociobiology movement of the 1970s and coming into its own in the 1990s (Buss, 1995; Tooby & Cosmides, 1992). However, developmental psychology had its origins in evolutionary thinking at the turn of the twentieth century (see Charlesworth, 1992), and many developmentalists, particularly those concerned with social development, have implicitly or explicitly incorporated the concepts of evolution into their theories (e.g., Bowlby, 1969; Hinde, 1980). Thus, the examination of social development from the perspective of the “new” discipline of evolutionary psychology should not involve a theoretical paradigm shift, as it seems to have required in “adult” psychology. In the sections below, we first describe briefly the conditions under which humans evolved, and then introduce the basic concepts of evolutionary developmental psychology, taking our examples from the arena of social development. We then examine the concept of fitness, specifically as it relates to the development of social behavior. We next examine several aspects of social development from an evolutionary perspective. In the final section, we discuss briefly the benefits of an evolutionary perspective for social development.

Evolutionary Perspectives on Social Development

disparity in the relative amount of space given to problems in comparison with their actual occurrence; for example, only 43 pages are devoted to respiratory disorders, whereas there are 107 pages on neurology. The chapters on small-for-dates infants, metabolism and its disorders, pharmacology, infections, renal disorders, and practical procedures are good, and there is a comprehensive list of normal values for the constituents of blood, urine, CSF, and faeces which might prove invaluable as these data are often not readily accessible. A short section on the perinatal necropsy could also be useful. The inclusion of a chapter on care in tropical countries is an excellent idea, though one questions whether this large and expensive book is the right place for it. Haematological disorders are well covered, especially disseminated intravascular coagulation, but the author, having sounded a warning note about the possible long-term ill-effects of phototherapy, immediately proceeds to advocate its use in all infants whose bilirubin rises above 10 mg/100 ml! The chapter on respiratory disorders is disappointing and there is a somewhat unfortunate separation between the section dealing with asphyxia and that concerned with immediate respiratory problems, such as hyaline membrane disease. The chapter on gastrointestinal diseases is insufficient; by contrast, the one on neurology seems too long. Photographs and x-rays are all together in one section. These are informative as far as they go but more x-rays might with advantage have been included. The index is adequate, but more cross-referencing in the text would have been desirable. This book deserves a place on the shelves of neonatal departments, but the would-be individual purchaser is advised to look at other books on neonatology before buying this one.

Anthony D. Pellegrini

Papers

Behavioral and social cognitive processes in preschool children's social dominance.

Sociolinguistic contexts of the preschool

Children's play, language, and early literacy.

Evolutionary Perspectives on Social Development

The child at school