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Part I:
Status of Research

Characteristics of Resilient Individuals

III. 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 & Tigard, 1981). However, many children deemed to be resilient by many researchers have not been especially gifted intellectually (Werner, 1996a & b). 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 that is absolutely essential for the development of competence and resilience, 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, 1996b, p. 22). 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 at 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 (pp. 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 the amount of their 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, the preschoolers 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 Table 2.

Table 2
Averages for Measures of Parent and Child Language and Test Scores

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. (Hart & Risley, 1995, p.176)

Perhaps most striking in these data is the fact that, on all measures, the vocabularies of the children from advantaged homes were 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 3 years of age. Parent behaviors that fostered language acquisition included:

• Talking for sociability or to stay involved
• Listening to add information, to encourage commenting, or to prompt elaboration
• Trying to be nice when enforcing a rule or when prohibiting exploration
• Giving children choices as a reminder of appropriate behavior or as instruction
• Telling children about things--what is worth noticing and remembering, what to expect, and how to cope

Hart and Risley (1995) 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:

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 (pp. 95-100).

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 age 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 age 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, or any association between vocabulary use or IQ test scores at age 3 and performance in these academic skills at age 9 or 10. However, in terms of family experience, the feedback tone, symbolic emphasis, and guidance style were better predictors of scores on the PPVT-R than were child accomplishments at age 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 foster 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 & Johnson, 1983).

The Capacity to Plan

Yet another critical component of cognitive competence is the capacity to plan. 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, p. 323). 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. Rolf and Johnson (1990) note that "poor planners may understand consequences and contingencies, but often they fail to prepare for them or fail to avoid situations in which absence of preparation will increase the chances of negative outcomes" (p. 391).

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 & Wolin, 1994, p.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-prepresentations, 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, p. 649).

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 White (1976), 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" (p. 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 and Adequate Cognitive Appraisal

Hearkening back to our discussion of the reflective-self function is the importance of self-understanding to cognitive competence. According to Beardslee (1990b), 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 (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" (quoted in Beardslee (1993, p.275). In a study of adolescent offspring of parents with affective illness, he and Podorefsky (1988) found that those young people who coped well showed strong understanding of themselves and their parents' illness, and they were clear that they did not cause the illness.

The significance of cognitive appraisal cannot be over-emphasized. In the words of Kumpfer and Bluth (19xx), "Threats may exist along a continuum with the degree of perceived threat or stress defined more by the person than by reality" (p. 9). Hill and Madhere (1996)found this to be the case with the urban elementary school children for whom exposure to violence was a chronic condition. They note that, "The children's perceptions of their exposure to community violence proved more powerful in the analysis than the composite of actual numbers of incidents of violence," and that "their perceptions may structure how violence will be interpreted" (pp. 39-40). Not surprisingly, higher scores on violence apprehension were positively correlated with higher scores on state anxiety. On a more optimistic note, Kumpfer and Bluth ( ) cite the work of Johnson and Rosen (1990), who found that drug-exposed infants who were developing better than others had mothers who judged the infants to have an easier temperament than the independent observers. Similarly, unemployed African American mothers who perceive that their lack of a job is due to institutional racism "have higher psychological well-being and seem better off than mothers who blame themselves for their situation" (Randolph, 1996, p. 16).

Adaptive cognitive appraisal is essentially the capacity to take life's lemons and make lemonade. In the words of Kumpfer and Bluth, "Some resilient individuals ... may turn discrimination and negative appraisal by others into a challenge to defy negative predictions" (19xx, p. 10). They cite Gordon and Song's study of 26 vocationally successful African Americans who, in discussing how they had defied the negative predictions of others, spoke of "showing them they are wrong" or "proving that I am as good as they are" (1994, p. 38).

The double-edged sword of the use of cognitive appraisal is seen when a child neglected by her peers tells herself, "I really don't want to play tag-I want to read." On the positive side, the child decides how to cope rather than reacting reflexively, but if she uses this reasoning repeatedly, she may not spend the time and energy to learn how to make friends (Bland et al.,1994).

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