Toward a Broader Understanding of Gender Development

性别可能是最基本的社会类别——无论是在我们如何对他人进行分类和思考方面，还是在我们如何定义自己方面。性别在整个生命周期中，尤其是在童年时期，在人类经历中起着核心作用。大量的研究探索了儿童如何开始理解什么是性别，并学习社会对性别角色的刻板印象所表明的典型行为、偏好和态度。有几种理论可以解释性别理解的发展，从幼儿识别自己性别的能力到大一点的儿童和青少年将性别纳入自己的自我概念的能力。虽然性别发展研究几十年来一直是发展心理学的核心，但几乎所有的研究都集中在经历“典型”性别发展的儿童身上。这个项目的目标是通过探索儿童时期典型和非典型的性别经历，研究文化、生物学和认知如何相互作用来解释性别理解的发展。该项目的前提是，要全面了解性别发展，就必须了解儿童性别经历的全部变化。具体而言，本研究主要关注三个主要研究问题：(1)社会投入在性别发展中的作用是什么？(2)理解性别在时间上是稳定的，对于发展更复杂的性别理解（如性别刻板印象）是必要的吗？(3)性别认同较少的儿童是否与性别认同较多的儿童表现出相似的性别发展模式？为了回答这些问题，研究人员将根据父母和孩子的报告，向孩子们展示一系列性别发展指标，包括隐性和显性指标，并将比较典型和非典型性别认同的反应。研究人员预测，目前的性别发展模型将不能充分描述所有儿童的性别发展，并预计这些发现将产生对如何修改这些理论以更好地解释所有儿童的性别认知和行为的见解。

Gender is perhaps the most fundamental social category -both in how we classify and think about other people and in how we define ourselves. Gender plays a central role in human experience throughout the lifespan and especially during childhood. A great deal of research has explored how children begin to understand what gender is and learn which gender typical behaviors, preferences and attitudes are indicated by societal stereotypes of gender roles. Several theories exist to explain the development of gender understanding, from toddlers' ability to identify their own gender to older children's and adolescents' ability to incorporate gender into their own self-concepts. Although the study of gender development has been central to developmental psychology for decades, nearly all research has focused on children who experience "typical" gender development. The goal of this project is investigate how culture, biology, and cognition interact to explain the development of gender understanding by exploring both typical and atypical gender experiences in childhood.This project is based on the premise that understanding the full range of variability in children's gender experiences is necessary to achieve a complete understanding of gender development. Specifically, this research focuses on three major research questions: (1) What is the role of social input in gender development? (2) Is an understanding that gender is stable across time necessary to develop more complex understandings of gender, such as gender stereotypes?, and (3) Do children with less common gender identities show patterns of gender development similar to those of children with more common gender identities? To answer these questions the researchers will present children with a battery of gender development measures including implicit and explicit measures, relying on both parental and child report, and will compare responses among those with both typical and atypical gender identities. The investigators predict that current models of gender development will not adequately describe gender development across all children, and anticipate that these findings will yield insights into how to revise these theories to better explain gender cognition and behavior in all children.