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

本研究调查了幼儿和成人对疾病和健康因果关系的理解。结果显示，幼儿更喜欢活力论的解释（即从食物中摄取的生命力可以抵抗疾病），而不是强调社会/道德可取性的解释。至于食物，他们认为食物的数量比食物的种类更重要。成年人虽然使用了病毒等科学词汇，但他们对这些词汇的理解并不深刻，对疾病的因果关系仍然给出了活力论的解释。

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.