Louis Oppenheimer

• PhD
• University of Amsterdam

In total 131 children from fourth- and sixth-grades (mean ages 9.10 and 11.9 years) participated in this study with as its purpose to explore the relationships among conceptions of control and autonomy and various personality characteristics. To achieve this aim, the children were presented with questionnaires indexing their conceptions of control...

246 Dutch participants aged 8, 10, 12, 14, and 16 years were presented with the Strength of Identification Scale (SoIS; Barrett, 2007) and the National Identity scale based on Cultural and Historical achievements (NICH; derived from the NATID, Keillor & Hult, 1999). The study aimed to examine the extent and nature of Dutch children and adolescents'...

Some time ago, my son came down from his room where he was preparing for an examination the next day with the simple question: “Dad, I don’t understand this part of mathematics, can you help me?” My first reaction was to ask him “What mathematics?” He answered “Differential and integral calculus.” My self-image as a father/parent, which in my own d...

The purpose of this concluding article in this special issue is to examine whether the developmental courses for National Identification, in-group/out-group attitudes, and the relations between both variables could be characterized by general developmental patterns across different national settings. For this purpose the data from all participants...

The purpose of the present study was to examine the relationship between national identity and in-group/out-group attitudes with Bosniak and Serbian children living in Bosnia. In total, 89 Bosniak (n = 49) and Serbian (n = 40) children aged 7 and 11 years participated in the study. They were presented with the national identity and the in-group/out...

In this short introduction, the background, rationale, and hypotheses are presented for the studies that are reported in the special issue, as well as the order in which the studies are presented.

This paper reviews some of the relevant background findings against which the empirical studies reported in this special issue were designed. Particular attention is given to previous findings on the development of children's national knowledge, national attitudes and national identifications. The paper also reviews five existing theories, which ha...

In the beginning of the first decade of this century, some highly-publicized extremistic acts of terror occurred. A hostage tragedy in a school in Beslan (North Ossetia) was followed in the Netherlands by the brutal murder of the controversial Dutch filmmaker and newspaper columnist Theo van Gogh, bomb attacks in Bali and Madrid and other acts of t...

Although literature dealing with the psychological consequences of terrorist attacks and terrorism is abundant, very little information is available about the way children understand and perceive terrorists and terrorism. A series of photographs showing clay puppets of terrorists made by 11-year-old children inspired the two studies reported in thi...

Enemies and enemy images are thought to be prerequisites in preparedness for war (i.e., to fight and kill). In spite of this knowledge, very little information is available about children’s understanding of enemies and the emergence and nature of enemy images. In part this is due to the absence of theoretical insights into the developmental course...

The hypothesis guiding this study stated that just world beliefs (i.e., the belief that the world is orderly and just) are primitive beliefs that lose their importance across age as they become replaced by more sophisticated forms of reasoning enabling individuals to handle a world that is neither orderly nor just. In addition, just world beliefs w...

While there is ample evidence that enemies and enemy images are prerequisites in preparedness for war, little information is available about children's understanding of enemies or the presence of enemy images. Based on a pilot study in which assessment instruments were developed and validated, the present study examined the understanding of enemies...

In the present study, the relationships among the developments of beliefs in a just world (BJW; i.e., a principle to perceive the world as orderly and just), moral development, and attitudes toward human rights were studied with Dutch adolescents. BJW were thought to be either coping cognitions or precursors of moral development that affect attitud...

Within Triandis’s (1994) theoretical framework, two studies are reported that deal with the developmental course for subjective perceptions of cultural dimensions in Dutch society (i.e., vertical and horizontal individualism and collectivism). While perceptions of society are always subjectively determined, the perceived dimensions that are prevale...

This study reports on 10-year-old Filipino children’s understanding of peace, war, and strategies to attain peace. In total, 56 children were presented with a semistructured interview consisting of free associations to peace and questions pertaining to the definitions of peace and war and strategies to attain peace. The children were divided into 3...

In general, memory is perceived as the mental faculty that permits individuals to acquire, retain and retrieve knowledge related to their own personal experiences and forms an important part of individuals’ identities. The concept of collective memory involves the assumption that both groups and societies have memories (Halbwachs, 1950/1968) and su...

The self-system of children between the ages of 8 and 18 years was assessed to examine whether (a) their awareness of conflicts between self-descriptors within one self-concept was age-related, (b) such conflicts were related to psychological wellbeing, and (c) an effect of age on awareness interacted with the relation between conflict and wellbein...

Contemporary discussions within the fields of neuroscience (biology), physics and philosophy have provided profound new insights into the architecture of the brain, brain processes and the nature of consciousness. These insights permit the formulation of theoretical models that attempt to describe the organization of the self-system: that is, the w...

This book of essays offers an international perspective on how the concepts of war and peace develop in children and how, through overt teaching of conflict resolution and peacemaking skills in schools, a more peaceful world can be created. Following an introduction, the 14 essays in the book are grouped in 3 parts: (1) "Developmental Perspectives"...

Over the past decades the number of studies dealing with the developing understanding of peace and war among children and adolescents has considerably increased. No coherent overview is available despite this increase. The purpose of this review is to address this absence and to offer a systematic discussion of early and contemporary studies. Besid...

1The present manuscript is based on the MA thesis of the second author. We would like to express our gratitude to two anonymous reviewers for the comments on an earlier draft of this paper. The purpose of this study was to develop an instrument for the assessment of children's understanding of processes involved in the formulation of goals, making...

Reviews the book, Peace by Peaceful Means: Peace and Conflict, Development and Civilization by Johan Galtung, (see record 1996-98488-000). This volume presents a plan of action, a strategy that should be followed by the world community to attain a world without conflict, violence, and inequality. This is a remarkable achievement in itself. The way...

The development of the comprehension and verbal articulation of the concept of war precedes the development of the concept of peace by several years. The implications of these findings for the norms, values, and attitudes towards peaceful and non-peaceful behaviour are discussed. It is argued that a "state of peace" is not necessarily the baseline...

This article examines the value of the psychosomatic family model for the study of chronically ill children. Four conceptual problems arise in the discussion of this model: the unidirectional causality of the model; the function of the sick child for the family system; the pathology of the family characteristics; and the disease type. In the presen...

Humor is thought to be a social instrument or a social skill that affects the outcomes of social interactions. The purposes of the present study were (1) to address the question whether within a peer group, humor and social distances are related to a particular social status such as popularity, neglection, and rejection and (2) to replicate Sherman...

In a recent article, Gillett (1994) noted that "the development of a peace culture is not easy in any circumstances … in which conflict has developed a long history and become part of the culture" (p. 20). The purpose of this article is to clarify several features of the sociocultural structure. In agreement with Gillett (1994), the position will b...

The purpose of this study was to address the question of why, when there is a comparable severity of asthma, medical facilities, and treatments, some children develop controlled asthma whereas other children do not and are frequently ill. The major research questions pertained to whether families with a child with uncontrolled asthma differ from fa...

The purpose of this article is to present a model for the development of the self-system in which six concepts within and related to the self-system are distinguished as follows: Four intraindividual self-concepts involving the real and the ideal self-concepts, the perceived real concepts of others about the self, and the perceived ideal concepts o...

This article examines age-related changes in the conceptions children and adolescents hold about peace, war, and strategies to attain peace. These were expected to change from concrete, materially related to abstract, norm-related conceptions. The conceptions were assessed by means of a semi-structured questionnaire presented to 101 Dutch children...

The emergence of the action theory perspective within European developmental psychology was the result of a growing dissatisfaction during the middle 1970s with existing theories and theoretical constructs concerning social (cognitive) and moral development. This dissatisfaction became most manifest during a number of workshops organized by the dis...

The purpose of this chapter is to focus upon the concept of development as a product of a complex interaction between the biological organism and the (social) environment. First, the contributions of the biological organism in the regulation of human activity will be discussed, followed by a theoretical reflection on the origins of action. It will...

In Chapter 6, on theoretical reflections with respect to interests and their structural development, interests were perceived as a relation between the individual and the environment and to function as a self-regulating principle. In this chapter, a series of studies will be presented with the purpose of exploring the development of interests with...

The Proliferation of Action Theories and Their Applications Jaan Valsiner and Louis Oppenheimer Our contemporary psychology becomes satiated by references to "action" and "activity. " Over the recent decade numerous theoretical perspectives have appeared. all of which operate with the notion of "action" (Ajzen. 1985; Eckensberger & Silbereisen. 198...

In two successive experiments, the development of children’s understanding of the self and others and the nature and relationship between the development of both concepts were studied. In the first experiment, 50 children from five age levels participated (mean ages 5.6, 6.6, 8.4, 10.5, and 12.5 Years). The children were required to give descriptio...

Before the child is able to recognize the perceptible and visible body parts as belonging to the self, many experiences must be passed through. These experiences are often associated with painful feelings. Pain will lead the child to self recognition. Pain is the most powerful teacher of differentiation between the subjective and the objective. Onl...

In this study, the self-concept is considered to be composed of of several distinct concepts; the actual self and various “possible selves”. These concepts of the self can be studied from the person’s own point of view and from the person’s fantasies of the points of view of others. The purpose of this study is to examine the developmental course o...

From the Preface: "The purpose of this book is to present the state-of-the-art of the study of the self-concept in Eastern and Western Europe. It offers an overview of the type of questions, points of emphasis, employed methodologies, and major findings in the various European countries... while some of the issues treated in this book relate to wel...

The primary thesis of this paper is that James J. Gibson and Kurt Lewin and their followers subscribe to the central ecological notions of interdependence of organisms and their environments. An attempt is made to show the connections between Gibson's conceptualization of affordance, and the related Lewinian notion of psychological ecology. Present...

The purpose of this study was to examine under which social conditions cognitive development of children at the same cognitive development level will be stimulated. One hundred and two children (mean age 7.8 years), understanding conversation of area quantity, but not yet able to grasp the compensatory relationships between the dimensions of length...

The purpose of this chapter is to provide a critical evaluation of the concept of social competence. On the basis of a discussion of literature dealing with theory, models, and assessment of social competence as well as empirical research with regard to social competence, it is argued that the terminology used and the interpretation of the empirica...

Sixty children participated in two studies designed to investigate the development of recursive thinking. They were from three age groups with ages 5, 7, and 9 years. To achieve this aim, Miller, Kessel and Flavell's (1970) task assessing children's abilities to conceptualize thought structures was presented in two versions. In the first study, emp...

The purpose of this study were (a) to seek information about social cognitive development (i.e., perspective-taking, reconstruction of social event sequences, and concepts about people) with retarded children, (b) to explore the roles of chronological age (CA), and mental age (MA) in this development, and (c) to examine the effects of the etiology...

Starting with a prototypical model of Newtonian mechanics, a sequence of dynamic models with increasing structural complexity is presented. The implicated smooth variation along a dimension of structural complexity yields dynamic models which display organismic properties such as stagewise development and emergent self-organization. Consequently, i...

78 children from three age levels ( M ages 5.7, 7.5, and 9.0 yr.) and from Dutch and nonDutch parents were presented three tasks to index their abilities to construct and reconstruct sequences of social events. The results show that all tasks form a stochastic Guttman-scale indicating that all measures tap the same cognitive ability. The resulting...

Within the large literature dealing with prosocial behavior in children and adults the same few key concepts are often employed in radically different ways. The term prosocial behavior is sometimes meant in a narrow or restricted sense to include only such behaviors as helping and/or altruistic behavior (cf. Bar-Tal, Raviv, and Leiser, 1980), being...

The purposes of this study were to examine the relationships between abilities to reconstruct sequences of social events, competences in social perspective-taking, and conservation skill as an index of the reversibility operation. It was expected that conservation (i.e., the reversibility operation) would developmentally precede competence in both...

Questionnaires exploring children's thinking about friendship relations, their perspective-taking competences, and their notions of popularity were presented to 48 children divided over four age groups (mean ages 5.9, 7.11, 10.3, and 12.2 years) and upper and lower sociometric status. The results suggest that concepts about processes leading to fri...

The aim of the present study was to obtain some insight in how children structure and organize their knowledge about other people. Ten short descriptions of social situations (i.e., interactions) illustrated by pictures were presented to 48 children from four different age groups (mean ages 5.4, 6.7, 8.6, and 10.7 years). The situations were accomp...

A cognitive model for the development of the processing of social perspectives was designed to represent the relationships between various cognitive variables and the processing of social perspectives. Several of the relationships between the variables and perspective-taking, in particular, are discussed in detail. Empirical data obtained from stud...

The effectiveness of different training and transfer test conditions in promoting perceptual learning in impulsive kindergarten children was investigated. Interproblem variability was found to be more effective than intraproblem variability, and a differentiation training procedure was found to be more effective than a matching training procedure....

The developmental relations between anticipatory imagery, conservation of length, and operational structures were investigated in 80 kindergarten and third grade boys and girls by means of imagery tasks combined with a length conservation task. an order difference between the presentation of stage assessment tasks and the imagery-conservation task...

Presented a matching task to 120 6-20 yr olds to investigate the relative influence of dimensional salience and salience of variability on problem solving. The task included 4 dimensions: form, color, number, and position. On each problem, 1 dimension was relevant and the other 3, which could be either constant or variable, were irrelevant for solu...

The aim of the present study was to examine the effect of different training methods on perceptual learning of impulsive children. The study employed 2 training methods: a matching to sample method (M) and a differentiation method (D). The M training required Ss to select from a set of stimuli those that were exactly the same as a standard figure,...

W. Damon and D. Hart's (1988) discussion of self-understanding (SU) is rooted in W. James's multidimensional self theory (1890, 1892). Their book reports empirical research that is always preceded and followed by elaborate theoretical discussion in which developmental theory with respect to SU serves as a basis for the formation of hypotheses. In a...