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IV. COGNITIVE COMPETENCE IQ and EQ Our society’s near obsession with IQ scores has overshadowed the importance of other components of cognitive competence. A high IQ is a powerful predictor of academic competence (Pellegrini, et al., 1987; Masten, et al., 1988), plus it has been associated with fewer behavior problems, social competence, and successful adjustment in general (Garmezy, 1985; Madge and Tigard, 1981). However, many children deemed to be "resilient" by many researchers have not been especially gifted intellectually (Werner, 1996). In fact, some scholars maintain that our emotional quotient makes as much if not more of a contribution to success in life than does IQ because a high EQ contributes so much to our relational skills (Goleman, 1995). Language Acquisition and Reading According to Werner, the cognitive skill which is absolutely essential, at least in our society, is the ability to read. In her words, "Reading is a skill that is essential to survive and in a sense essential to fostering resilience in a society like ours that does depend on that written word" (Werner, 1996). Before we can learn to read, however, attention must be paid to basic language acquisition skills. The richer one’s early vocabulary, the more likely he will be able eventually to read complex material and engage in complex thinking. A powerful illustration of the protective function of early language acquisition is provided by Hart and Risley (1995), who, in the 1960s, helped develop a program to improve the educational and developmental experiences of children in the Turner House Preschool Program in an impoverished African American community in Kansas City, Kansas. Using children’s spontaneous speech "as the best measure of cognitive functioning," they compiled an "individual dictionary" for each child of all the different words the child produced during a specified observation period (5-6). The children seemed fully competent in their use of language until they were compared to professors’ children who attended a Laboratory Preschool at the University of Kansas. The professors’ children talked at least twice as much as the Turner House children, about more different aspects of what they were doing, and asked more questions about what they were doing and why. With intervention, the Turner House children readily increased their amount of talking, but the rate of adding new words to their dictionaries was markedly slower than that of the professors’ children. The researchers realized that, if they did not alter the children’s developmental trajectory, they would, like many children raised in poverty, reach high school lacking the vocabulary used in more advanced textbooks. They then instituted an enrichment intervention consisting of field trips and small discussion groups to provide some of the richness of experience that professors’ children generally enjoyed as a matter of everyday family life. This resulted in "a spurt of new vocabulary words," but "the increases were temporary.... We could not accelerate the rate of vocabulary growth so that it would continue beyond direct teaching." (p.15). They concluded that "by the age of 4, when the children had become competent users of the syntax and pragmatic functions of their language, patterns of vocabulary growth were already established and intractable" (p. 16). Hart and Risley then decided that, "to understand how and when differences in developmental trajectories began, we needed to see what was happening to children at home in the very beginning of their vocabulary growth.... We needed to find out whether or not parents actually do anything during their everyday interactions with their children that makes a lasting difference in how fast their children’s vocabularies grow" (p.17). To do this, they undertook a longitudinal study of 42 "ordinary, well-functioning families" with children from 7 to 9 months old. Over a 2 1/2 year period, monthly hour-long in-home observations were made of these children and their parents, whom the researchers described as confident of their parenting skills, self-assured, comfortable about being observed, and probably less transient and more traditional in values than the average American family (p. 33). The families involved were 13 higher SES professional families, 23 middle to lower SES working class families, and 6 welfare families. The researchers found that the amount of talking that went on in the home related directly to the size and growth rate of the child’s vocabulary, and that "SES made an overwhelming difference in how much talking went on in a family" as can be seen in the following table:
Note: Parent utterances and different words were averaged over 13-36 months of child age. Child utterances and different words were averaged for the four observations when the children were 33-36 months old. P.176
Perhaps most striking in these data is the fact that, on all measures, the vocabularies of the children from advantaged homes was larger than the vocabularies of the parents in the welfare families. Hart and Risley further found that the amount of parenting per hour and the quality of the verbal content associated with that parenting were strongly related to the subsequent IQ score of the child at three years of age. Parent behaviors that fostered language acquisition included:
The researchers note that "all the children had experience with quality interactions; the differences between children’s experience lay in how often such interactions occurred and in the ways the behaviors that added quality to interactions were blended in a characteristic parenting style." They conclude that:
children’s early interactions set up an entire general approach to words as symbols for experience.... Parent talk defines and labels what children should notice and think about the world, their family, and themselves and suggests how interesting and important various objects, events, and relationships are. Words and sentences, internalized as symbols, become a means for organizing experience and rationalizing and relating it, as well as the basis for logical thinking, problem solving, and self-control. The words and expressions that give utterance and preciseness to talk (and, eventually, writing) to other people also serve when talking to oneself as thinking. When the children were in the third grade, 9 or 10 years old, Walker recruited 29 of the 42 original families to participate in a study of their children’s school performance. He found that the children’s rate of vocabulary growth at age 3 was strongly associated with scores at age 9-10 on both the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-Revised (PPVT-R) of receptive vocabulary (r=.58) and the Test of Language Development-2: Intermediate (TOLD) (r=.74) and its subtests (listening, speaking, semantics, syntax). Vocabulary use at 3 was strongly associated with scores on the PPVT-R and the TOLD, and with reading comprehension. Walker’s findings were surprising in some respects in that general competence as estimated by the Stanford-Binet IQ test score at 3 less strongly predicted scores on the PPVT-R and the TOLD. Moreover, there was no association between rate of vocabulary growth and the children’s third grade scores in reading, writing, spelling, and arithmetic, nor was there any association between vocabulary use or IQ test scores at 3 and performance in these academic skills at 9 or 10. However, in terms of family experience, feedback tone, symbolic emphasis, and guidance style were better predictors of scores on the PPVT-R than were child accomplishments at 3. The link between the parents’ income, education, and social status and their children’s academic test performance had declined by the third grade. But the link between what the parents were doing with their children before the children were 3 years old remained as strong as ever over the intervening 6 years (p<.001). One enormous benefit of language skills and reading widely is that they expose the person to multiple points of view and fosters the appreciation of diverse ideas. In fact, some scholars maintain that "all psychological development may be described as a progressive loss of egocentrism and an increase in ability to take wider and more complex perspectives" (Johnson and Johnson, 1983). The Capacity to Plan Yet another critical component of cognitive competence is the capacity to plan. Once again, in their follow-up of women raised in institutions, Rutter and Quinton (1984) examined the mechanisms by which some women were able to find men who were neither criminal nor mentally ill and to make successful marriages. The most important variable in the resilient women’s marital and vocational adjustment was their capacity to plan, i.e., to exercise foresight and to take active steps to deal with environmental challenges (Rutter, 1987, pp). This capacity was associated with a lower rate of teenage pregnancy and a lack of pressure to make a hasty marriage, and it probably enabled them to choose more suitable husbands. Undergirding the capacity to plan are complex coping strategies Closely tied to the capacity to plan are good problem-solving abilities . The Wolins call this capacity "Initiative: The Pleasure of Problems." They define Initiative as "the determination to assert yourself and master your environment." They note that resilient people "prevail by carving out a part of life they can control," and that "as pieces of the world bend to their will, successful survivors build competence and a sense of power." Initiative is first evident, they say, in children’s following "the call of their curiosity to go exploring. Opening and closing drawers, poking around and conducting trial-and-error experiments that often succeed, resilient children find tangible rewards and achieve a sense of effectiveness. By school age, exploring evolves into working. Though not all resilient children become outstanding students, the random activities of their earlier years become focused, organized, and goal-directed over a wide range of activities. In adults, the gratifications and self-esteem associated with completing jobs becomes a lifelong attraction to generating projects that stretch the self and promote a cycle of growth" (Wolin and Wolin, 1994, 136).. Initiative requires that one have positive future expectations and an internal locus of control. In fact, the Wolins’ Initiative includes "assertiveness, capacity for problem- solving, optimism, and belief in personal control." They note that "many survivors pointed to an abiding belief that they could influence the course of their lives, no matter what." Other researchers have found that, among 9 to 21-year-olds under high psychosocial stress, positive future expectations correlated with better affect regulation, more positive self-representations, and better school adjustment . It "predicted enhanced socioemotional adjustment in school and a more internal locus of control 2.5 to 3.5 years later, and acted as a protective factor in reducing the negative effects of high-stress on self-rated competence" (Wyman, et al., 1993). Self-Efficacy Yet another important component of cognitive competence is self- efficacy -- the belief that one can have a desired effect on his world. According to Dr. Robert White, the precursor of self-efficacy is an inherent trait of all people, what he calls effectance motivation. He sees the earliest form of effectance motivation in infants’ visually exploring their world, babbling, and making gross movements which elicit some response from attentive caretakers. Effectance motivation evolves over time, he says, and "the feeling of being able to have some effect on people to get them to listen, provide some of the things we need, do some of the things we want, receive some of the love and help we want to give, provides a substantial foundation for security and self-respect (1976, 225). Self-efficacy and the active coping style associated with it have been shown to be influential in people’s avoiding behaviors that put them at risk for HIV infection (Bandura, 1990). Self-Understanding Hearkening back to our discussion of the reflective-self function is the importance of self-understanding to cognitive competence. According to Beardslee (1990), dimensions of self- understanding include adequate cognitive appraisal, realistic appraisal of the capacity for and consequences of action, developmental perspective , and understanding as a protective factor" (Beardslee, 1990). Beardslee (1989) defines self-understanding as "an internal psychological process through which an individual makes causal connections between experiences in the world at large and inner feelings." In a study of adolescent offsprings of parents with affective illness, he and Podorefsky (1988) found that those young people who coped well showed strong understanding of themselves and their parent’s illness, and they were clear that they did not cause the illness. Formal Operational Thinking Given their earlier development of formal operational and abstract thinking, gifted children may use cognitive appraisal to cope with stresses. For example, a child neglected by her peers might tell herself, "I really don’t want to play tag – I want to read" (Bland et al., 1994). Here the child decides how to cope rather than reacting reflexively. The double-edged sword of this mechanism is apparent, however; if she uses this reasoning repeatedly, she may not spend the time and energy to learn how to make friends. Be that as it may, formal operational and abstract thinking are clearly useful mechanisms which help both gifted children and adults develop resilience.
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