From a young age, children in Western, industrialized societies overimitate others' actions. However, the underlying motivation and cultural specificity of this behavior have remained unclear. Here, 3- to 8-year-old children (N = 125) from two rural Namibian populations (Haillom and Ovambo) and one urban German population were tested in two…

Prior research suggests that human children lack an aptitude for tool innovation. However, children's tool making must be explored across a broader range of tasks and across diverse cultural contexts before we can conclude that they are genuinely poor tool innovators. To this end, we investigated children's ability to independently construct 3 new…

Significant research has investigated the relationship between mother--child reminiscing and children's autobiographical memory development. It has been suggested that mothers who adopt a high elaborative reminiscing style tend to have children who provide greater memory elaboration during joint reminiscing, yet the empirical findings are somewhat…

Recent research questions whether children conceptualize race as stable. We examined participants' beliefs about the relative stability of race and emotion, a temporary feature. Participants were White adults and children ages 5-6 and 9-10 (Study 1) and racial minority children ages 5-6 (Study 2). Participants were presented with target children…

American and Japanese children's evaluations of the reporting of peers' transgressions to authority figures were investigated. Seven-, 9-, and 11-year-old children (N = 160) and adults (N = 62) were presented with vignettes and were asked to evaluate the decisions of child observers who reported their friend's either major or relatively minor…

In this cross-cultural study, we tested 2 main hypotheses: first, that an early self-concept along with self-other differentiation is a universal precursor of prosocial behavior in 19-month-olds, and second, that the importance attached to relational socialization goals (SGs) concerning interpersonal responsiveness (obedience, prosocial behavior)…

Childhood obesity is increasingly prevalent in Western and non-Western societies. The authors related multiple dimensions of physical self-concept to body composition for 763 Chinese children aged 8 to 15 and compared the results with Western research. Compared with Western research, gender differences favoring boys were generally much smaller for…

Examines theoretical issues concerning the development of and the unity or diversity underlying private speech and studies the developmental progression of private speech in a low-income, culturally different sample. The effects of age, sex, environmental context, and the relationship of social speech to varieties of private speech are also…