NEW YORK (Reuters Health)- Though there may be great advantages for precocious preschoolers who have a high level of mental, social and emotional understanding, there may be disadvantages as well, new study findings suggest. These youngsters may be more sencitive to critisism.
"Some 5-year-olds think everybody likes them, that they're doing terribly well in everything," Dr. Judy Dunn of Kings College London told Reuters Health. Those in the study who had great levels of understanding, however, were more sensitive to how others reacted to them and to people not liking them, she said.
"This is the first clear indication, to our knowledge, that there may be costs as well as benefits to understanding other people well, early in life," write Dunn and co-author Dr. Alexandra L. Cutting of the University of Reacing in UK.
Their findings are based on a study of 141 first-grade students, 113 of whom had also undergone tests of their understanding during preschool. Dunn and Cutting evaluated sensitivity to criticism using a puppet scenario in which a teacher criticized a child for making a mistake in his or her schoolwork.
Overall, all of the first-graders were sensitive to criticism and responded to failure more negatively when the failure was criticized than when it was not criticized, the investigators report in the October issue of the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry.
The 5-year-olds who showed a high level of mental and emotional understanding in preschool and in first grade, however, were the most sensitive to the teacher's criticism, study findings indicate. They also rated their own ability to perform a particular task as lower after they had been criticized and were more likely to say "the criticism made them feel that they were 'not good' at the task", the researchers report.
"Sometimes it's the children who are the most acute and mature who are more vulnerable to minor criticisms and failures," she added.
A grant from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development funded the study.
SOURCE: Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 2002, 43:849-860. |
