Children's and adults' understanding of causality of illness and health : From a perspective of naive biology

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The present study examined young children's and adults understanding of the causality of illness and health. Results revealed that young children preferred vitalistic explanations (i.e., vital force taken in from foods works as resistance to illness) to explanations emphasizing social/moral desirability. With regard to the food, they considered the amount of food more important than its sorts. Although adults used scientific words such as virus, they did not understand them deeply, and still gave vitalistic explanations for the illness causality.