Ad is standard, the headline grossly misrepresents the story. What The research actually observed is that in the presence of an observing angry/disapproving person, the kids were cowed, hestitant to play. Kids not stated down by the angry person played more freely. That suggests that kids are scared of angry people, not that kids tried to avoid making the person angry. Ad is common for psych studies, they read far too much into one behavior delta, and don't try multiole configurations to tease apart the many possible interpretations.
"“Ultimately, we want kids who are well regulated, who can use multiple cues from others to help decide what they should and shouldn’t do,” Repacholi said."<p>Is that what we really want? Ultimately I´d hope that we raise kids that can listen to themselves as much as others, so they have some hope of guarding themselves from whatever neuroses the adults around them have picked up.
I'd love to see a study testing the hypothesis that exposure to lots of anger in early childhood leads a person to poor impulse control or greater susceptibility to addiction. Im not sure how you actually <i>would</i> test this hypothesis without actually measuring something else like the correlation with certain state child welfare laws.
I find these type of studies so fascinating! By studying infants and toddlers we can truly get a sense of how truly "social" we are as animals and how we adapted to that fact by developing these subtle learning mechanism.
If you look at the study (which is hidden behind a paywall :/) only 150 infants were studied. That's quite a small number to make any definitive claim, given there are probably hundreds of millions of toddlers on the planet. The researchers probably mention it in the article, but the press release doesn't.