The present study investigates the relation between language environment and language delay in 63 British-English speaking children (19 typical talkers (TT), 22 late talkers (LT), and 22 late bloomers (LB) aged 13 to 18 months. Families audio recorded daily routines and marked the new words their child produced over a period of 6 months. To…

A well-documented finding in aging and emotion research is that older adults reliably report less negative and, often, more positive affect than younger adults. How older people accomplish this is, however, an open question. We propose that this age effect is the result of differential use of emotion regulation strategies, especially when…

Although children enact third-party punishment, at least in response to harm and fairness violations, much remains unknown about this behavior. We investigated the tendency to make the punishment fit the crime in terms of moral domain; developmental patterns across moral domains; the effects of audience and descriptive norm violations; and…

Multiple studies have shown that children conform to majorities in perceptual judgment tasks against their better knowledge. However, these studies report contradictory results about how conformity develops over age. Here, we study variation in conformity over the course of middle childhood: we examined potential informational and normative…

Ageism is the most prevalent form of prejudice and is experienced by both older and younger people. Little is known about whether these experiences are interdependent or have common origins. We analyze data from 8,117 older (aged 70 and over) and 11,647 younger respondents (15-29 years) in representative samples from 29 countries in the European…

Complexity is one of the major demands of adolescents' future life as adults. To investigate adolescents' competence development in applying problem-solving strategies in complex environments, we conducted a 2-wave longitudinal study in a sample of Finnish adolescents (11-17 years old; N = 1,959 at Time 1 and N = 1,690 at Time 2, 3 years later).…

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…

Recent research found no evidence that children aged 7-10 years are able to direct their attention to more valuable information in working memory. The current experiments examined whether children demonstrate this ability when the reward system used to motivate participants is engaging and age-appropriate. This was explored across different memory…

In this longitudinal Canadian study, we investigated the relationship between the developmental trajectories of community involvement and generative concern measured at ages 23, 26, and 32. Participants completed a questionnaire on youth involvement, the Youth Involvement Inventory (YII), and the Loyola Generativity Scale (LGS) at all 3 ages. A…

Most children learn a language such as Mandarin Chinese that uses lexical tone to communicate meaning. This study aimed to examine the phonological specificity of tone representations in monolingual and bilingual learners of Mandarin. Two age-groups were tested: toddlers (2.5 to 3.5 years) and preschoolers (4 to 5 years; N = 80). Using a…

Life span developmental theories suggest that as individuals age, they accumulate knowledge about how to deploy emotion regulation (ER) strategies effectively and learn how to match their ER strategy use with changes in situational demands. Using an event-contingent experience sampling design wherein 150 adults Age 18 to 89 years reported on…

Prior studies have demonstrated that social norms or cues of others' eating behaviors serve as powerful guides for one's own eating behaviors. Yet it remains underexplored whether young children are susceptible to social pressure by remote peers when faced with a conflict between what they prefer and the healthy choices of a group majority. Here…

Research on age differences in the experience of negative emotional states have produced inconsistent results, particularly when emotion is examined in the context of daily stress. Strength and vulnerability integration (SAVI; Charles, 2010) theory postulates that age differences in emotional states are contingent upon whether a stressor occurred,…

Adults can ignore old and prioritize newly arriving visual stimuli, enabling optimal goal-directed search (visual marking; Watson & Humphreys, 1997). However, the ability to use time of appearance to enhance visual search is currently absent in work on attentional development in children. Experiment 1 examined children's (6-, 8-, and…

Representations of social categories help us make sense of the social world, supporting predictions and explanations about groups and individuals. In an experiment with 156 participants, we explore whether children and adults are able to understand category-property associations (such as the association between "girls" and "liking…