Research Summaries | Early Cognition Lab

Select Snippets of Our Research

Thank you to Lin Zhan for curating these summaries!

Parenting: Harsh Parenting, Parenting by Lying, and Filial Piety

Physical Discipline as a Normative Childhood Experience in Singapore

This is the first study to investigate the prevalence and implications of physical discipline in Singapore.
There is a high prevalence of physical discipline in Singapore, with more than 80% of children experiencing at least one physical discipline at ages 4.5, 6, 9 and 11 years.
Contrary to previous literature’s findings that normative physical discipline experiences may be perceived by children as caring (e.g., Chao, 1994), we found that a higher frequency of paternal physical discipline was linked to more negative ratings of fathers’ parenting.
Altogether, these findings highlight the importance of examining the nature and outcomes of physical discipline in culture-specific contexts.

Parenting by Lying

Parenting by lying is a practice in which parents lie to influence their children’s emotions or behaviour.
One example of parenting by lying is “If you continue to mistreat your sister, I will call the police to put you in jail”.
Parenting by lying is a common practice, with past studies showing that approximately 78% of American parents and 98% of Chinese parents engage in it.
This review summarizes the factors predicting this practice and highlights its link with poorer psychosocial outcomes. It also proposes an integrated framework to investigate parenting by lying.

Parents with Greater Religiosity Lie Less to Their Children

The research extended the understudied phenomenon of parental lying to a new cultural context—Singapore. This is the first study to find that parents’ level of religiosity influences their lying behaviors.
More religious parents were found to use less instrumental lies (lies told to elicit child compliance).
Meanwhile, parents’ telling of white lies, which are told for children’s benefit to protect and enhance children’s feelings, were not related to parents’ levels of religiosity.

Early Exposure to Parenting by Lying is Associated with Worse Social-Emotional Wellbeing in Adulthood

This study dives into how parenting by lying impacts children later in life.
Young adults who remember being exposed to more parental lies when they were kids tend to lie more to their own parents as adults.
Young adults who lie more to their parents also have more issues with their mental and emotional well-being (e.g. rule breaking, anxiety, selfish and manipulative behaviours).
This study suggests that exposure to parenting by lying in childhood may have a lasting and adverse effect on children’s long-term psychosocial well-being.

Children’s Acquisition of the Gender-Brilliance Stereotype

The research provides valuable insights into the development and transmission of gender-brilliance stereotypes in society.
Specifically, our findings shed light on the developmental trajectory of the gender-brilliance stereotype formation, as well as the role of parental stereotypes in shaping children’s beliefs about gender brilliance.
Additionally, there is a complex interplay between race/ethnicity and the perpetuation of the gender-brilliance stereotype, suggesting that various factors may interact and influence how individuals form and maintain such beliefs.

Daily Interaction with Other-Race Nannies Reduces Explicit Racial Bias in Preschoolers

This is the first study to investigate the impact of extensive other-race contact on young children’s racial biases in a natural experiment, whereby children are often cared for by other-race nannies in Singapore.
This study reveals that it is not just the presence of other-race nannies but the depth and duration of the interactions that matter in reducing children’s explicit racial biases.

Toddlers Understands False Beliefs as Early as 2.5 Years Old

False-belief understanding is the recognition that the mind is representation, rather than direct reflections of reality and hence can be false.
This study found that toddlers can understand false beliefs about object location as early as 2.5 years old.
For example, when an agent’s apple is moved from location A to an undisclosed location in her absence, toddlers can understand that the agent falsely believes the apple is still in location A and will indicate that the agent will look for her apple in location A.
For toddlers to exhibit false-belief understanding, the substantial information-processing demands imposed on the toddlers needs to be reduced due to limited information-processing resources.

Young Infants Have Biological Expectations about Animals

This study explores the developmental origins of children’s concept of animal.
This is the first study to explore the developmental origins of children’s concept of animal through experimental research.
Findings indicate that infants expect animals to have insides. These young infants’ biological expectations about animals may lay a foundation for the development of more advanced biological knowledge.
The findings represent a breakthrough in the study of the foundations of human knowledge, demonstrating that abstract biological expectations about animals are present in the first year of life.