Proposal view
| Proposal Type: | Individual Thematic Poster |
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| Domain: | Developmental Aspects of Instruction |
| SIG: | Conceptual Change |
| Equipment |
PC and projector |
| Paper Details |
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| Title | Young Children's Understanding of illness Causality: A Role of Vital Power in Recovery from Illness |
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| Abstract | The present study examined young children's and adults' understanding of recovery from the common cold from a vitalistic biological perspective. Twenty-four 4-year-olds (Mean age, 4; 10) and 24 5-year-olds (5; 9) and 24 college students were presented with two sick protagonists, who were allegedly different in terms of biological (e.g., eats a lot of vegetables vs. few vegetables), psychological/sympathetic (e.g., receives visits from healthy friends for encouragement vs. receives no visits from friends), or moral (e.g., lies often vs. does not lies) factors in their daily activities, including the time they fell ill, and were asked which of the two would recover more quickly from the illness. Next, the participants were asked to indicate the relative importance to a quicker recovery of the biological vs. psychological/sympathetic factors, the biological vs. moral factors, and the psychological/sympathetic vs. the moral. The results indicated that, like adults, the children recognized that not only biological vital power but also "psychological" vital power plays a role in the recovery from illness, and that the morally good behaviors are less important than the other two. |
| Summary | Children's conception of illness has practical significance for medical treatments and health education, in addition to shedding light on the issue of mind-body interdependence. In recent years a number of studies have investigated children's understanding of illness from perspectives other than germ theory. One such study has dealt with children's understanding of illness from a vitalistic biological perspective (e.g., Inagaki & Hatano, 2002). The vitalistic conception of illness assumes that children are likely to recognize intuitively that "bad things" (germ) invading the body tend to disturb a person’s bodily functions, but if the body has been guarded by a stored vital power that can win over the bad things, s/he will not become ill or will recover quickly if s/he is taken ill. This conception also assumes that vital power, which is characterized as unspecified substance, energy, or information, has to be taken in from the outside, and its sources are primarily food and water, but some additional sources like air and other people’s vital power (obtained through sympathetic encouragement) are also included in some cases. The present study investigated young children's and adults' understanding of recovery from illness from this vitalistic biological perspective. Specifically, we examined whether children and adults would recognize that not only the vital power stored as a result of a balanced diet but also other people's vital power obtained through their sympathetic encouragement would contribute to a quicker recovery from the common cold, and whether they would recognize that obtaining other people’s vital power is more important than one’s moral behavior for recovery. Twenty-four 4-year-olds (Mean age, 4; 10) and 24 5-year-olds (5; 9) were individually interviewed, and 24 college students were given questionnaires in written form. There were two tasks, one choice, and one conflict. In the choice task, which consisted of 6 items, the children were presented with two sick protagonists, who were allegedly different in terms of biological (e.g., eats a lot of vegetables vs. few vegetables), psychological/sympathetic (e.g., receives visits from healthy friends for encouragement vs. receives no visits from friends), or moral factors (e.g., lies often vs. does not lie) in their daily activities, including the time during which they fell ill. The children were then asked which of the two would recover more quickly from the illness. In the conflict task the participants were asked to choose the relative importance to a quick recovery of the biological vs. psychological/sympathetic factors (4 items), the biological vs. moral factors (4 items), and the psychological/sympathetic vs. the moral factors (4 items); “equally likely” was an acceptable response. For example, an item comparing psychological/sympathetic vs. moral factors is, "Which of the two will recover from a cold more quickly, a boy who receives visits from his friends for encouragement or a boy who doesn't lie?" As shown in Table 1, almost all the 4- and 5-year-olds chose, as having a quicker recovery, not only the character who engaged in biologically healthy activities such as eating a lot of vegetables, but also the character who received positive encouragement from other people. In addition, a majority of the adults showed almost the same tendency as the children. A small number of the children gave reasons for their answers. For the biological items, about half the 5-year-olds gave reasons referring to nutriment, and some of them paraphrased it in their own words as representing vital power, such as, "It's what makes us strong." For the psychological/sympathetic items one of the 5-year-olds explicitly stated, "(Because) friends give him vigorous power." The adults gave reasons for psychological/sympathetic items, such as, "Illness originates in the mind, and so the character will become psychologically vigorous because of the visit from friends," "The character will be given strength by his healthy friends' visit," or "Something mental will contribute to the character’s recovery from the cold." Although almost all the adults considered the individual's moral behavior to be irrelevant to the quickness of his or her recovery (i.e., they chose the equally-likely response), a great majority of the children regarded morally good behaviors as contributors to a quicker recovery. However, when they were asked to choose between biological and moral factors, they chose the former as being more important for the character's recovery; this tendency was marked among the 5-year-olds. For the biological vs. psychological/sympathetic items, both the 4- and 5-year-olds considered the biological factors more important for recovery, and for the psychological/sympathetic vs. the moral items, they regarded psychological/sympathetic factors as more important (see Table 2). The results showed that children aged 4 and 5 years, like the adults, believed biological factors to be the most important, then psychological/sympathetic factors, and the moral factors as the least important for recovery; however, unlike the adults, the children tended to think that morally good behaviors make some additional contribution to recovery from illness. The above results were consistent with the predictions that young children would recognize that not only biological vital power but also a type of "psychological" vital power plays a role in the recovery from illness, with both being more important than personal morality. These findings suggest that young children consider the mind and the body as not totally independent but interdependent to some degree. The results also suggest that young children's "sophisticated" understanding of illness can be used to encourage them to engage in health-maintaining practices. |
| Keywords | Causal thought Child development Cognitive processes/development |
| Appendices | EARLI_Tables.doc |
| Authors | ||||||
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| Name | Surname | Institution | Country | EARLI Number | Presenting | |
| Kayoko | Inagaki | Chiba University | Japan | kayoko-i@pb3.so-net.ne.jp | * | |
| Yoko | Oura | Niigata University | Japan | oura@ed.niigata-u.ac.jp | ||
