Eotvos Lorand University

TUESDAY, July 2, 2024 -- When your preschooler pitches a fit, handing them a smartphone or tablet is probably the fastest -- and the worst -- way to stop it, a new study suggests. "If parents regularly offer a digital device to their child to calm them or to stop a tantrum, the child won't learn to regulate their emotions," said first author Veronika Konok , of Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, Hungary. "This leads to more severe emotion-regulation problems, specifically anger management problems, later in life." That's because kids learn about regulating their responses to various situations in their first few years of life. Some of it is a matter of being taught how to choose a deliberate response over an automatic one -- something learned primarily from their parents. This learned ability is known as effortful control. With many parents giving little ones digital devices to control their emotional responses, researchers in Hungary and Canada wanted to know if this squelches kids' ability to control themselves later on. Their findings were published June 27 in the journal Frontiers in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry . The upshot: "Children have to learn how to manage their negative emotions for themselves," Konok said in a journal news release. "They need the help of their parents during this learning process, not the help of a digital device." For the study, Konok and her team asked more than 300 parents of 2- to 5-year-olds to fill out questionnaires about child and parent media use. Participants completed the survey twice -- first in 2020 and again two years later. The responses showed that when parents leaned on digital emotion regulation, kids were less able to manage anger and frustration a year later. Kids who were frequently given devices during cranky times had lower levels of effortful control during the followup. And the crabbier kids were, the more often they were handed a phone or tablet to shush them, researchers lamented. "It's not surprising that parents more frequently apply digital emotion regulation if their child has emotion regulation problems, but our results highlight that this strategy can lead to the escalation of a pre-existing issue," Konok said. Researchers urged parents to coach their kids through tough situations, help them understand their emotions and teach them ways to cope. They said it's also important for health professionals working with families to share alternative strategies for helping kids control their emotions -- without electronics. "Based on our results, new training and counseling methods could be developed for parents," said senior study author Caroline Fitzpatrick , of the University de Sherbrooke in Montreal. "If people's awareness about digital devices being inappropriate tools for curing tantrums increases, children's mental health and well-being will profit." Whatever your topic of interest, subscribe to our newsletters to get the best of Drugs.com in your inbox.

It's no surprise that your dog can learn to sit when you say 'sit' and come when called. But a new study has made the unexpected discovery that dogs generally also know that certain words 'stand for' certain objects. When dogs hear those words, brain activity recordings suggest they activate a matching mental representation in their minds. It's no surprise that your dog can learn to sit when you say "sit" and come when called. But a study appearing March 22 in the journal Current Biology has made the unexpected discovery that dogs generally also know that certain words "stand for" certain objects. When dogs hear those words, brain activity recordings suggest they activate a matching mental representation in their minds. "Dogs do not only react with a learned behavior to certain words," says Marianna Boros of the Department of Ethology at the Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary, one of the paper's co-first authors. "They also don't just associate that word with an object based on temporal contiguity without really understanding the meaning of those words, but they activate a memory of an object when they hear its name." Word understanding tests with individuals who do not speak, such as infants and animals, usually require active choice, the researchers say. They're asked to show or get an object after hearing its name. Very few dogs do well on such tests in the lab, often fetching objects correctly at a rate expected by chance. The researchers wanted to look closer at dogs' implicit understanding of object words by measuring brain activity using non-invasive EEG without asking them to act. The idea was that this might offer a more sensitive measure of their understanding of language. In their studies, they had 18 dog owners say words for toys their dogs knew and then present the objects to them. Sometimes they presented the matching toy, while other times they would present an object that didn't match. For example, an owner would say, "Zara, look, the ball," and present the object while the dog's brain activity was captured on EEG. The brain recording results showed a different pattern in the brain when the dogs were shown a matching object versus a mismatched one. That's similar to what researchers have seen in humans and is widely accepted as evidence that they understand the words. The researchers also found a greater difference in those patterns for words that dogs knew better, offering further support for their understanding of object words. Interestingly, while the researchers thought this ability might depend on having a large vocabulary of object words, their findings showed that it doesn't. "Because typical dogs learn instruction words rather than object names, and there are only a handful of dogs with a large vocabulary of object words, we expected that dogs' capacity for referential understanding of object words will be linked to the number of object words they know; but it wasn't," says Lilla Magyari, also of Eötvös Loránd University and University of Stavanger and the other co-first author. "It doesn't matter how many object words a dog understands -- known words activate mental representations anyway, suggesting that this ability is generally present in dogs and not just in some exceptional individuals who know the names of many objects," Boros added. The discovery that dogs as a species may generally have a capacity to understand words in a referential way, just as humans do, might reshape the way scientists think about the uniqueness of how humans use and understand language, the researchers say. That has important implications for theories and models of language evolution. For dog owners, it's also an important realization. "Your dog understands more than he or she shows signs of," Magyari says. "Dogs are not merely learning a specific behavior to certain words, but they might actually understand the meaning of some individual words as humans do." The researchers are now curious to know if this ability to understand referential language is specific to dogs or might be present in other mammals as well. Either way, they want to learn more about how this ability emerged and whether it depends on dogs' unique experience of living with people. They also want to know why, if dogs understand object words, more of them don't show it.