Active listening, communication Important highlights of this research is in red for you.

Children have a more finely tuned sense of pride than most adults realize, recent studies indicate.

Pride and FEAR 

Children have a more finely tuned sense of pride than most adults realize, recent studies indicate. For children fear of being humiliated far outranks many concerns that adults assume they are most troubled by, like the birth of a sibling or having an operation. Children also say they are disturbed by incidents that would make them seem ''bad.'' Among their biggest concerns are being caught stealing or being sent to the school principal's office. This glimpse into the children's world serves notice to adults to be more aware of how easily a child is mortified. And it may give pause to parents who, failing to respect or understand children's feelings, may drag them into painful situations. Adults, recalling their own childhoods as well as the received wisdom from experts, presume to know what troubles a child. But rarely has anyone systematically asked children just what they think is most troubling about their lives. 'We Don't Really See or Hear' ''We all think we know our own children, but all too often we don't really see or hear, nor understand, what is really troubling them,'' said Kaoru Yamamoto, a psychologist at the University of Colorado school of education, who has done the main research on child perceptions of stress. The latest study, published in the current issue of the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, involved surveys of 1,814 children in grades three through nine in six countries: the United States, Australia, Canada, Egypt, Japan and the Philippines. Children were asked to rate the stressfulness of common experiences. One surprising finding, researchers said, is that children share similar fears and concerns, even across national boundaries. The researchers had not expected these concerns to transcend cultural differences. In an earlier study, Dr. Yamamoto provided experimental evidence for the gap in adult and children's views. The survey asked adults and children to rank 20 events and to assess the stressfulness of each on a scale of 1 to 7. Not only did the adults' rankings differ sharply from the children's, but also the intensity of stress varied sharply for many of the events. School Life and Peers In general, the children's ratings pointed to the emotional prominence of school life and peer opinions in their world. While family life offers a child a basic sense of security, experts say, school and peer life also shape a child's perception of accomplishment and personal worth. One of the sharpest differences between adults and children was in how traumatic they felt it was for a child to have a new sibling. Both clinical wisdom and most children's therapists rate a new baby in the family as one of the most stressful events in a child's life. The children, however, rated having a new brother or sister as the least troubling of the 20 events. It is quite probable that a child asked about a hypothetical sibling would not realize the mix of emotions the actual birth of a baby might evoke. But the study points to the child's sense of what is troubling, rather than how events may actually affect him. From the children's point of view, the possibility most haunting them, after a parent's death, was going blind. Other particularly troubling events in their view included being kept back a grade, wetting their pants in class and seeing their parents fight. Emerging Sense of Worth The survey results underscore how an embarrassment or humiliation can be an especially stinging blow to a child's emerging sense of worth. ''One of the most common triggers of suicide in children and teens is a humiliating experience, like getting caught stealing,'' said Ann Epstein, a child psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School. ''A child's self-image is forming continually, and is very shaky,'' Dr. Epstein added. ''They tend to blow some things up out of all proportion. And their sense of guilt is much stronger and more moralistic than in adults. So the idea of getting caught doing something bad, in the child's mind, may mean to them that they will always be seen as bad, or if they're embarrassed, that they'll never attain their dignity again.'' ''These injuries to self-esteem, in their minds, can come to define their whole identity,'' she observed. Dr. Yamamoto's findings suggest that many seemingly trivial moments in a child's life, such as being sent to the principal, may loom among the more daunting, and that parents, teachers and even child counselors, are likely to miss their emotional import for the child. Fears and Perceptions of Fears For his research on a child's fears and adult perception of those fears, Dr. Yamamoto asked 39 child experts, 97 teachers and 61 college students to rate the stressfulness for a child of the same events the children had rated. The experts included social workers, school psychologists, and special education teachers. The research, conducted in the United States, was published in Psychological Reports. The adults, like the children, showed a strong unanimity in their judgments. But while adults tended to agree, there were major discrepancies between their views of what events would most trouble children and what the children said. Indeed, the experts were no better than the college students in gauging children's reactions. The adults were accurate about the impact of some things, such as the death of a parent. But there was a major difference between the adults and children on the impact of 16 of the 20 items. The events that adults took too lightly included receiving a bad report card and witnessing parents quarrel. On the other hand, the adults exaggerated the trauma for children of such things as going to a dentist. ''Through the school years, many children don't have the ability to make many of their true feelings known to parents, or they are too reluctant,'' Dr. Yamamoto said. ''And the younger they are, the harder it is to present their case.'' Let the Child Be Heard For the parent who wants to understand better what might be troubling a child, researchers recommend making a specific effort to let the child be heard, something many parents do not take the time to do. ''Parents too quickly impose what they think is going on in the child's mind, and make a snap decision about what's best for them,'' said Dr. Robert Coles, a child psychiatrist at Harvard University, whose research involves interviewing children at length. ''You've got to pause to hear what the child really is seeing and feeling.'' ''Kids will tell you how they're bearing up, if you make the effort to pay attention,'' Dr. Coles added. ''But you've got to be patient with the fact that there is a difference between grown-ups and kids in frame of reference, how they use language, and the way the mind works. You've got to suspend your interpretive zeal for a few moments.'' Listening Is the Key While many parents may be surprised to learn just what it is that is most troubling to their children, psychologists have long grappled with techniques for eliciting those feelings from a child. ''Most parents don't pause to realize that listening is different from talking,'' said Mudita Nisker, a marriage, family and child counselor in Oakland, Calif. ''They jump right in to giving advice.'' Ms. Nisker gives classes to parents and educators on communicating with children. ''Kids shut down when their parents start giving them advice instead of listening,'' she said. ''Parents can give their advice after they've listened and really know what's troubling a child.'' In one widely used approach, called ''active listening,'' the parent paraphrases what the child says, rather than leading the conversation. This technique tends to encourage a continuous stream of feelings, rather than quelling them through advice or parental interpretation. Thus if a little girl com-plains, in a shaky voice, ''Suzy said my clothes looked weird today,'' the parent might reply, ''So you were upset when Susy didn't like your clothes.'' In the response, the parent brings in to the open the im-plicit message, the unstated feelings, without directing the conversation. ''If the parent lets the child lead the conversation, where it ends up is often very different than where it started,'' Ms. Nisker said. ''It may go from being hurt about the clothes re-mark, to resentments about the other child, to the child's intense desire to make new friendships, for instance. Active listening is called for not just when a child gives signs of being upset, such as when they are sulking or withdrawn or when they are irritable - but also when the parent is at odds with the child, such as when something is being forbidden to the child.

''You listen to let the child know there is understanding'' even if that understanding doesn't lead to an agreement with the child's request or point of view.

Put on a happy face

"Humans seem to be wired to look to faces to understand the person's intentions," said Todorov, who has spent years studying the subtleties of the simple plane containing the eyes, nose and mouth. "People are always asking themselves, 'Does this person have good or bad intentions?'" Taking what people  have learned over time -- namely that, rightly or wrongly, people make instant judgments about faces that guide them in how they feel about that person

New research from Vanderbilt University suggests that we can remember more faces than other objects and that faces "stick" the best in our short-term memory. The reason may be that our expertise in remembering faces allows us to package them better for memory."Our results show that we can store more faces than other objects in our visual short-term memory," Gauthier, associate professor of psychology and the study's co-author, said. "We believe this happens because of the special way in which faces are encoded." Kim Curby, the study's primary author and a post-doctoral researcher at Yale University, likens such encoding to packing a suitcase. "How much you can fit in a bag depends on how well you pack it," she said. "In the same way, our expertise in 'packaging' faces means that we can remember more of them." The findings, part of Curby's dissertation at Vanderbilt, are currently in press at the journal Psychonomic Bulletin and Review.Curby and Gauthier's research has practical implications for the way we use visual short-term memory or VSTM. "Being able to store more faces in VSTM may be very useful in complex social situations," Gauthier said."This opens up the possibility of training people to develop similarly superior VSTM for other categories of objects," Curby added.Short-term memory is crucial to our impression of a continuous world, serving as temporary storage for information that we are currently using. For example, in order to understand this sentence, your short-term memory will remember the words in the beginning while you read through to the end. VSTM is a component of short-term memory that helps us process and briefly remember images and objects, rather than words and sounds. VSTM allows us to remember objects for a few seconds, but its capacity is limited. Curby's and Gauthier's new research focuses on whether we can store more faces than other objects in VSTM, and the possible mechanisms underlying this advantage. Study participants studied up to five faces on a screen for varying lengths of time (up to four seconds). A single face was later presented and participants decided if this was a face that was part of the original display. For a comparison, the process was repeated with other objects, like watches or cars. Curby and Gauthier found that when participants studied the displays for only a brief amount of time (half a second), they could store fewer faces than objects in VSTM. They believe this is because faces are more complex than watches or cars and require more time to be encoded. Surprisingly, when participants were given more time to encode the images (four seconds), an advantage for faces over objects emerged. The researchers believe that our experience with faces explains this advantage. This theory is supported by the fact that the advantage was only obtained for faces encoded in the upright orientation, with which we are most familiar. Faces that were encoded upside-down showed no advantage over other objects. "Our work is the first to show an advantage in capacity for faces over other objects," Gauthier explained. "Our results suggest that because experience leads you to encode upright faces in a different manner (not only using the parts, but using the whole configuration) you can store more faces in VSTM.""What's striking about this is that some of the most prominent, current theories suggest that the capacity of VSTM is set in stone, unalterable by experience," Curby said. "However, our results clearly show that expert learning impacts VSTM capacity."Curby and Gauthier plan to continue their research on VSTM processes. Their next step will focus on comparing VSTM capacity in people who are experts for other categories of complex objects, such as cars. Later, they will utilize brain imaging to pinpoint the mechanisms in the brain by which faces are encoded more efficiently than other objects. Gauthier is a member of the Vanderbilt Vision Research Center, the Center for Integrative and Cognitive Neuroscience and the Vanderbilt Kennedy Center for Research on Human Development.

This research was supported by funding from the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation and the James S. McDonnell Foundation.