The goals of this study were to investigate (a) the dyadic relations of mothers' and children's perceptions of children's anxiety symptoms across development, (b) whether maternal perceptions of children's anxiety serve as a mediator of the association between maternal anxiety and child anxiety, and (c) whether sensitive/structured parenting…

Children's beliefs about the contribution of effort and ability to success and failure shape their decisions to persist or give up on challenging tasks, with consequences for their academic success. But how do children learn about the concept of "challenge"? Prior work has shown that parents' verbal responses to success and failure shape…

This study is a secondary data analysis that extends knowledge about the effects of the early childhood Family Check-Up (FCU) intervention to trajectories of general psychopathology problems (p factor) across early and middle childhood, and effects on adolescent psychopathology and polydrug use. The Early Steps Multisite study (ClinicalTrials.gov…

Childhood adversity can have detrimental impacts on life course mental and physical health. Timing, nature, severity, and chronicity of adversity are thought to explain much of the variability in health and developmental outcomes among exposed individuals. The current study seeks to characterize heterogeneity in adverse experiences over time at…

The goal of the current study was to investigate whether children's social information processing (SIP) predicts their conversations with peers, including both their remarks to peers and peers' remarks to them. When children (N = 156; 55% male; United States; Representation by Race: 60% African American, 18% Mixed race, 15% European American, 7%…

The current study examined three research questions: (a) Are unmarried at birth fathers' prenatal and birth-related behavioral, attitudinal, and identity adjustments directly related to father engagement in child-related activities during early childhood and father-child closeness in middle childhood and adolescence? (b) Do father engagement in…

Developmental delays in cognitive flexibility early in elementary school can potentially increase vulnerability for subsequent externalizing and internalizing psychopathology. The first goal of the current study was to identify latent subgroups of children characterized by different developmental trajectories of cognitive flexibility throughout…

The role of early child care experiences on the development of the mother--child attachment relationship has been studied extensively. However, no prospective studies of early child care have addressed how these experiences might be reflected in the content of attachment representations during adolescence and beyond. The goal of this study was to…

Emerging cognitive control supports increasingly efficient goal-directed behaviors. With age, children are increasingly expected to decide autonomously and with little external aid which goals to attain. However, little is known about how children engage cognitive control in such a self-directed fashion. The present study examined self-directed…

Neurological soft signs (NSSs), minor neurological abnormalities, have been implicated as risk factors for poor cognitive performance in small-scale studies. Here we investigate the associations between NSSs and multiple domains of cognitive performance in a large, population-based cohort and evaluate sex differences in these associations. We…

Proper segmentation of auditory streams is essential for understanding music. Many cues, including meter, melodic contour, and harmony, influence adults' perception of musical phrase boundaries. To date, no studies have examined young children's musical grouping in a production task. We used a musical self-pacing method to investigate (1) whether…

We are expected to behave appropriately to suit social situations. One form of behavioral control is the selection of a linguistic register that is appropriate to the listener. Register selection errors can sometimes be interpreted as rude behavior and result in having a bad influence on the relationship with the listener and the evaluation by…

In a hidden inequality context, resource allocators and resource recipients are unaware that an unknowingly advantaged recipient possesses resources. The present study presented children aged 3-13 years (N = 121) with a hidden inequality vignette involving an accidental transgression in which one resource claimant, who unknowingly possessed more…

The present study investigates the processes by which essentialist beliefs about religious categories develop. Children (ages 5 and 10) and adults (n = 350) from 2 religious groups (Jewish and Christian), with a range of levels of religiosity, completed switched-at-birth tasks in which they were told that a baby had been born to parents of 1…

The goal of the current study was to statistically evaluate the reliable scalability of a set of tasks designed to assess Theory of Mind (ToM) without language as a confounding variable. This tool might be useful to study ToM in populations where language is impaired or to study links between language and ToM. Low verbal versions of the ToM tasks…