KJC Korea
Journal Central

This study examined whether there are differences in warmth and conflict of sibling relationships according to gender and constellation of siblings, whether there are any relations between the warmth and conflict of sibling relationships and Big Five personality characteristics and attachments to parents, and whether gender and constellaltion of siblings, personality characteristics and attachment to parents give any impacts on the warmth and conflict of sibling relationships with 492 college students. The results reveal female students have more conflicts with siblings than male ones and same sex siblings had more warmth than different sex ones. Warmth of siblings correlated significantly with five personality characteristics and conflict of siblings correlated significantly with agreeableness, conscientiousness and neuroticism. Also attachments to parents correlated positively with warmth and negatively with conflict of sibling relationships. In addition the person with same sex siblings, high extroversion and agreeableness and high attachment to mother had more warmth, while the women with low agreeableness and high openness to experience have more conflict with siblings.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationships of regret experiences, locus of control with subjective well-being in the aged. Face-to-face interview data was gathered from 104 participants who completed the questionnaire. The result was as follows: First, old people reported the most regrets on education-relevant domain of the 12 regret domains. Second, the aged reported more regretable omission than regretable commission. They also reported more wistful-emotions related with regretable omission. Fourth, they showed the more internal locus of control, the less regret experiences and the more subjective well-being. Finally, efforts to change regret experiences was found to directly influence participants' subjective well-being, whereas both regret intensity and regret frequency affected indirectly their subjective well-being mediated by regret-related emotions.

This study investigates the mediating effect of parental support and self-control on the relationships between adolescents' home-environment and juvenile delinquencies. Participants were 2,368 middle- and high-school students selected across the country by stratified multi-stage cluster sampling. The major findings were as follows. In general, boys tended to experience juvenile delinquencies more than girls except for excluding peers. Also, making a comparison among structural models, the linear model of home-environment→parental support→self-control→deviant behaviors indicated the best fit. It menas that parental support has the perfect mediating effect on the relationship between home-environment and self-control, and self-control has the perfect mediating effect on the relationship between parental support and juvenile delinquencies. However, The model varied with sex, that is, the girls group showed that stronger effect of self-control on juvenile delinquencies than the boy group did.

The present study examined preschoolers' understanding of the relationships among others' emotions, desires and prosocial behaviors. Adults and children(4-, 5-, 6-year-olds) were asked to indicate the protagonist's feelings(happy, sad, or "just okay") after listening to a series of six stories. The stories varied on (1) whether the protagonist's desire was fulfilled and (2) whether the protagonist shared a desired object with the other story character. Both adults and children reasoned that the protagonist would be happier when her/his desire was fulfilled than when her/his desire was not fulfilled. When the protagonist's desire was fulfilled, both adults and children attributed more positive emotions to the protagonist who shared her desired object with someone else than to the one who did not share her desired object. When the main character's desire was not fulfilled, children, but not adults, fail to reason that sharing behaviors could be related to feeling less of negative emotions. The results demonstrate children's understanding that others' emotions can be affected by others' prosocial behaviors as well as others' desires.

This study focuses on the theoretical debate on whether children treat labels as category markers or as features of objects when they perform induction task. We investigated whether the phonological similarity and familiarity of labels contribute to the induction of properties and tested the prediction of the similarity-based model in the induction of properties. 100 4-year-olds performed the induction of properties according to phonological similarity and familarity of labels. The results indicate that phonological similarity affects the induction of properties and support the prediction of similarity- based model. Overall, the results support the idea that young children consider labels as properties of objects, while challenging the idea that children have a prior knowledge that labels are symbols denoting categories.

Preschool-aged children show unique interpretation errors in processing a simple sentence unlike their adult counterparts. These errors appeared related to children's reliance on the information that occurs early in a sentence (verb in English &. case-marker in Korean). The present study examined whether such processing difficulty can be attributed to the child's executive functioning(EF) abilities. Children aged 4-5 years from the US and Korea acted out sentences that varied in the distribution of information (i.e., verb/case-marker information appearing at the beginning or the end). These children also completed an EF task to see if their EF abilities relate to their sentence interpretation error rates. The results demonstrated that both groups of children were less likely to commit to interpretation errors when the error-inducing source of information was delayed to the end of the sentence, suggesting that the child's difficulty in sentence processing relate to their EF abilities.

According to the syntactic bootstrapping hypothesis, children can use syntactic cues to figure out the meaning of novel verbs. The current research examined whether Korean-learning 2-year-old children use case markers to learn the meaning of novel verbs. Participants watched a pair of videos and heard sentences including one noun phrase and a novel verb. The noun phrase was followed by either a nominative(-ka/-i) or an accusative(-lul/-ul) case marker. They were asked to point to the scene which matched the sentence they heard. The children interpreted the meaning of novel verbs differently depending on the case marker they heard. When the noun phrase was marked by an accusative case marker, the children were more likely to interpret the verb as referring to a caused-action than the noun phrase was by a nominative marker. The results suggest that 2-year-old Korean children can use morphological cues to figure out the meaning of verbs and the syntactic information that children use during verb learning can be language-specific depending on the particular grammar.

This research examines relationship between the joint attention attention during infancy and understanding of other person's mind at early childhood. Sixty-one children participated at 9, 12, 15, 18 months of age and at the age four. The amount of joint attention was measured using the attention state coding scheme developed by Adamson, Bakeman, Russel & Deckner(1998) and children's ability to understand other person's mind was measured using theory of mind scale devised by Liu and Wellman (2004). Our results reveal that proportional amount of joint attention during infancy was significantly related to their later theory of mind. In addition, this longitudinal association was still significant after children's verbal comprehension score was controlled.