Middle Childhood II: Self, Emotional Development, Peer Sociability, and Aggression

Comprehensive vocabulary flashcards reviewing key psychological concepts of middle childhood, including self-concept, self-esteem, social comparison, moral and mixed emotions, display rules, sociometric statuses, prosocial behavior, and aggression trends.

Person Perception (Ages 6 to 9)

The developmental transition in how children perceive others and themselves, shifting from behavioral descriptions to stable psychological dispositions.

Realistic Competency Appraisals

Self-evaluations emerging around age 8 that become more realistic by closely reflecting other people's actual evaluations rather than idealized views.

Harter's Model of Self-Esteem (2005)

The theory that children's self-esteem depends both on how they believe others evaluate them and on how they choose to evaluate themselves, particularly in self-involved contexts.

Core Domains of Self-Esteem

The three foundational areas on which middle childhood self-esteem is evaluated: academic competencies, physical competencies, and social competencies.

Social Comparison

The process, beginning as early as age 5 or 6, of using peers as a reference point to determine whether one performs better or worse across various domains.

Understanding of Complex Emotions (Ages 10–11)

The developmental milestone where children become proficient at identifying the specific situations and circumstances that elicit pride, guilt, shame, envy, and jealousy.

Shame (Olthof et al., 2000)

A self-evaluative emotion evoked in situations where an individual behaves incoherently or incompetently without causing harm to anyone else.

Shame and Guilt Co-occurrence (Olthof et al., 2000)

The simultaneous emotional response that occurs when a protagonist's incompetent or incoherent behavior directly causes harm to another person.

Understanding of Mixed Emotions (Ages 6 to 10)

The cognitive capability, facilitated by decentration, where children acknowledge that a person can experience both positive and negative feelings toward the same situation.

Emotional Display Rules

Socially sanctioned norms specifying when, where, and how emotions should be expressed, which children become increasingly aware of during primary school.

Gender Differences in Display Rule Compliance

The phenomenon observed by Davies (1995) wherein stronger social pressures on girls to 'act nice' result in them being more motivated and skilled at complying with display rules than boys.

Peer Group (Ages 6–10)

A structured and organized social collective characterized by regular interaction, an in-group identity, established behavioral and dress norms, and a hierarchical role organization.

Friendship Facilitation

A parental influence on peer sociability involving arranging visits by playmates and encouraging child participation in social activities.

Sociometry

A quantitative assessment technique where group members nominate specific peers they would prefer or not prefer to engage with in a given activity.

Popular Children

A sociometric category for children who receive many positive nominations (liked by many) and few negative nominations (disliked by few).

Rejected Children

A sociometric category for children who receive many negative nominations (disliked by many) and few positive nominations (liked by few).

Neglected Children

A sociometric category for children who receive few nominations of any kind, displaying low social impact and being virtually invisible to their peer group.

Controversial Children

A sociometric category for children who receive many liked and many disliked nominations, displaying high levels of both positive behaviors (cooperation) and negative behaviors (aggression).

Competitive Behavior Gender Differences (Roy & Benenson, 2002)

The finding that boys in middle childhood are more likely than girls to deliberately hinder another child's chances of winning a game, even when their own victory does not require it.

Retaliatory Aggression

Aggressive behavior executed in response to a perceived intentional provocation, which shows a slight increase during middle childhood as children learn to distinguish accidental from deliberate harm.