Salutogenesis: Sense of Coherence in Childhood and Families

In this chapter on salutogenesis and sense of coherence (SOC) in families and children, the authors deal with the contributions of children’s environments to the adjustment of children with typical development, and the development of children with special needs. The authors report on their comprehensive literature review covering 20 years of research and 44 studies from 15 countries, including children from infants and toddlers through preschool to school-aged children up to 12 years of age.

Factors Facilitating Early Emotion Understanding Development: Contributions to Individual Differences

Children’s emotion understanding is crucial for healthy social and academic development. The behaviors influenced by emotion understanding in childhood have received much attention, but less focus has been placed on factors that may predict individual differences in emotion understanding, the principal issue addressed in the current review. A more thorough understanding of the developmental underpinnings of this skill may allow for better prediction of emotion understanding, and for interventions to improve emotion understanding early in development. Here, we present theoretical arguments for the substantial roles of three aspects of children’s environments in the development of emotion understanding: family expressiveness, discussions about emotions, and language development, and we discuss how these are interrelated. Ultimately, this may aid in predicting the effects of environmental influences on the development of emotion understanding more broadly and the mechanisms by which they do so.

The moral barrier effect: Real and imagined barriers can reduce cheating

This research presents a nudge-based approach to promoting honest behavior. Specifically, we introduce the moral barrier hypothesis, which posits that moral violations can be inhibited by the introduction of spatial boundaries, including ones that do not physically impede the act of transgressing. We found that, as compared to a no barrier condition, children cheated significantly less often when a barrier was strategically placed to divide the space where children were seated from a place that was associated with cheating. This effect was seen both when the barrier took a physical form and when it was purely symbolic. However, the mere presence of a barrier did not reduce cheating: if it failed to separate children from a space that was associated with cheating, children cheated as much as when there was no barrier at all. Taken together, these findings support the moral barrier hypothesis and show that even seemingly unremarkable features of children’s environments can nudge them to act honestly.