Cumulative Contextual Risk, Maternal Responsivity, and Social Cognition at 18 Months

• Main Author: Wade, Mark
• Other Authors: Jenkins, Jennifer M.
• Language: en_ca
• Published: 2012
• Subjects: social cognition; social disadvantage; parenting; cumulative risk; 0620
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/1807/33679

By 18 months children demonstrate a range of social-cognitive skills that reflect their emerging capacity to understand and engage in intentional relations with others. Intention understanding is a critical component of children’s social cognition at this age. Although individual differences in social cognition have been linked to neurocognitive maturation, socio-cultural models of development suggest that environmental influences operate in the development of intention understanding, with distal factors operating through proximal processes. In the current study of 501 children and their mothers, we tested and found support for a model in which an accumulation of distal environmental risks was associated with lower maternal responsivity, which was in turn associated with lower social-cognitive competency at 18 months. In addition, part of this effect operated through children’s concurrent language ability. Findings are discussed with respect to the Vygotskian themes of internalization and semiotic mediation.