Subjects: Psychology >> Social Psychology submitted time 2023-03-28 Cooperative journals: 《心理科学进展》
Abstract： Marital relationship is one of the core relationships in family. The conflict in marital relationship is recognized as a factor in accounting for adverse effect on child development. The primary objective of the current review was to provide a comprehensive overview of the effect of parental marital conflict on child development and its mechanism. Furthermore, crucial future direction in this field was proposed based on the existing studies. Parental marital conflict had been established as a risk factor for child cognitive and socioemotional development in both theoretical and empirical studies. Specifically, parental marital conflict may lead to poor executive functioning and academic achievement. Moreover, children who experienced parental marital conflict were more likely to show more problem behavior (i.e., internalizing and externalizing problem behavior; the effect on internalizing problem behavior was larger than that on externalizing problem behavior) and social maladjustment (e.g., poor parent-child, sibling, peer, teacher-student, and even adulthood intimate relationship). It should be noted that parental marital conflict had a short-term and long-term effect on children’s cognitive and socioemotional development, and the increasing parental marital conflict may have a more significant effect. Guided by process-oriented approach, researchers began to focus on how parental marital conflict affected child development. Children’s cognitive and emotional process and family process were described to clarify the pathways by which parental marital conflict influenced child development. As for children’s cognitive and emotional process, cognitive-contextual framework emphasized the crucial role of children’s cognitive appraisal toward parental marital conflict. Children who viewed parental marital conflict as threatening to themselves or the well-being of family, felt that they were responsible for the conflict, and/or had inadequate skills for successfully coping with the conflict were likely to experience maladjustment. Emotional security theory posited that parental marital conflict undermined children’s emotional security and further development. As for family process, according to family systems theory, parental marital conflict was often accompanied by negative emotion and behavior, which may spillover into parent-child interactions, resulting in ineffective parenting, disagreement over child-rearing, and parent-child triangulation. These negative interactions may carry detrimental consequences for children. Moreover, child and environmental factors may moderate the association between parental marital conflict and child development. Specifically, child age and gender may play a moderating role in this association, but the evidence was somewhat mixed. Guided by the biopsychosocial model, the autonomic nervous system functioning in children also served as a moderator of the association between parental marital conflict and child development. Previous studies shed light on the joint action of the two branches of the autonomic nervous system, the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS) and sympathetic nervous system (SNS), and revealed that opposing action of the PNS and SNS (i.e., coactivation and coinhibition) operated as a vulnerability factor for child development in the context of parental marital conflict, whereas reciprocal action of the PNS and SNS (i.e., reciprocal parasympathetic activation and reciprocal sympathetic activation) operated as a protective factor. As with child age and gender, the evidence for reciprocal parasympathetic activation was also mixed. In addition, the ecological systems theory emphasizes that environmental factors (e.g., family socioeconomic status, social support, and cultural values) may also moderate the effect of parental marital conflict on child development. A high level of family socioeconomic status and social support may buffer the negative effect of parental marital conflict on child development. However, culture value that emphasized family and social harmony may intensify the negative effect. Future studies should use individual-centered approaches to examine the effects of different types of parental marital conflict on child development in multiple aspects simultaneously and integrate the multi-mechanism of parental marital conflict on child development. Cross-cultural studies should be carried out to further examine the role of culture in the effect of marital conflict on child development. Additionally, future studies should further examine the cyclical bidirectional association between parental marital conflict and child development.
Subjects: Psychology >> Developmental Psychology submitted time 2022-01-21
Abstract：
Anxiety is an aversive emotional and motivational state occurring in threatening circumstances, mainly including general anxiety and separation anxiety in early childhood. General anxiety is a kind of trait anxiety relating to general susceptibility to anxiety, while separation anxiety belongs to the state anxiety determined interactively by trait and situational stress. Previous studies have demonstrated the negative effects of anxiety on creativity, but less is known about the mechanisms of these effect, particular the longitudinal effects of anxiety on creativity from toddlerhood to preschool period. Processing Efficiency Theory and Attentional Control Theory explained the effect of anxiety on cognition from the perspective of cognitive processing. Moreover, childhood anxiety may longitudinally affect later development of creativity through neuroendocrine system. That is, anxiety activates the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis (HPA axis) with releasing glucocorticoids, which are associated with the development of higher-order cognitive function. Thus, we assumed that anxiety in early childhood had a longitudinal adverse effect on later development of creativity. Further, the present study explored the mechanisms between early childhood anxiety and creativity in preschool period. The general cognitive ability, a foundamental component of creativity, and motivation may be candidate mediated variables. According to Piaget’s cognitive development theory, a necessary precondition for the development from one cognitive stage to a higher stage is that the individual encounters with discrepancies between the previous schema and the current stimulus, which lead to the motivation to achieve a new cognitive balance. These views suggested that cognition and motivation may be two closely intertwined processes, and general cognitive functions play a decisive role in motivation activation. For younger children, the motivation is reflected in the persistence on objects and people and so on, namely mastery motivation. Accordingly, a longitudinal study was designed to examine the relation between anxiety of toddlers and their creativity when they were 5 years old, and investigate the underlying mechanism by chain mediation effects of general cognitive function and mastery motivation.
96 families (42 boys and 54 girls) were recruited from the local communities and child care clinics in urban areas of Beijing. At 14 and 25 months, infants’ general anxiety and
Subjects: Psychology >> Developmental Psychology submitted time 2020-11-23
Abstract： The negative effect of parental marital conflict on child development had been well documented in both theoretical and empirical studies. Specifically, parental marital conflict had a short- and long-term effect on children’s cognitive development and socioemotional development. Cognitive and emotional process and family process were described to clarify how parental marital conflict affected child development. In addition, child and environmental factors may moderate the association between parental marital conflict and child development. Future studies should examine the effects of parental marital conflict on child development in multiple aspects simultaneously and integrate the multi-mechanism of parental marital conflict on child development.
Peer Review Status:
Awaiting Review
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