We examined the influence of prior expectations on 4- to 10-year-olds' and adults' preferences and emotions following an undesirable outcome (N = 205; 49% female, 51% male; 6% Asian, 1% Black, 13% Hispanic/Latino [non-White], 57% White, 18% multiracial, and 5% another race/ethnicity; 75% with a college-educated parent). Participants attempted to…

Narrating emotional experiences to important others contributes to socioemotional and self-development from early childhood through adulthood. However, to date, almost no work has explored the distinctive ways that different listeners might shape narration, and the socioemotional outcomes of narrating experience. The present study examines how…

Coercion theory well characterizes the behavioral aspects that often lead to dysfunctional family processes. Recent conceptualizations have incorporated emotion into models of coercive interactions, yet empirical evidence has been limited. In this study, repeated measures of mother-child dyads (N = 319) were assessed over the course of 2 years to…

Food insecurity poses a serious threat to children's development, but the mechanisms through which food insecurity undermines child development are far less clear. Specifically, food insecurity may influence children through its effect on parents' psychological well-being and parent--child interactions as a result, but past research on the role of…

Emotion-related socialization behaviors that occur during parent--child interactions are dynamic. According to Eisenberg, Cumberland, and Spinrad's (1998) model, ongoing parental reactions to emotions and discussions of emotion indirectly shape children's socioemotional competence throughout childhood and adolescence. Typically developing…

Emotions remain something of a mystery for most of us even when we accept their centrality to development in general and to infancy in particular. I make 2 arguments in this paper. One: that the most crucial thing about emotions is that they allow mutuality of engagement with other emotional beings--not only evoking responses, but also provoking…

There is extensive disagreement as to whether preverbal infants have conceptual categories for different emotions (e.g., anger vs. disgust). In addition, few studies have examined whether infants have conceptual categories of emotions "within" the same dimension of valence and arousal (e.g., high arousal, negative emotions). The current…

A recent study by Ponari, Norbury, and Vigliocco (2018), showed that emotional valence (i.e. whether a word evokes positive, negative, or no affect) predicts age-of-acquisition ratings and that up to the age of 8-9, children know abstract emotional words better than neutral ones. On the basis of these findings, emotional valence has been argued to…

The reactivity-regulation model suggests that the origins and maintenance of shyness results from relatively high levels of reactivity in combination with relatively low levels of regulation. Although this model has received some empirical support, there are still issues regarding directionality of the relations among variables and a dearth of…

Infant-mother behavioral synchrony is thought to scaffold the development of self-regulation in the first years of life. During this time, infants' and mothers' physiological regulation may contribute to dyadic synchrony and, in infants, dyadic synchrony may support infants' physiological regulation. Because the sympathetic nervous system (SNS)…

The timing of events (e.g., how long it takes a child to exhibit a particular behavior) is often of interest in developmental science. Multilevel survival analysis (MSA) is useful for examining behavioral timing in observational studies (i.e., video recordings) of children's behavior. We illustrate how MSA can be used to answer 2 types of research…

Little is known about the role children's processing of emotions plays in altering children's vulnerability to interparental conflict. To address this gap, the present study examined whether the mediational cascade involving children's exposure to interparental conflict, their insecure responses to interparental conflict, and their psychological…

The seventh phase of this longitudinal study investigated whether children born through third-party assisted reproduction experienced psychological problems, or difficulties in their relationship with their mothers, in early adulthood. The impact of disclosure of their biological origins, and quality of mother-child relationships from age 3…

"Tuning in to Kids" (TIK) is a parenting program that focuses on emotion coaching and is evidenced to be effective in Western populations. This study used a randomized controlled trial to examine the intervention effects of TIK on Chinese parents of low to middle socioeconomic status in Hong Kong. One hundred four parents (99 mothers and…

Adults teach children not to "judge a book by its cover." However, adults make rapid judgments of character from a glance at a child's face. These impressions can be modestly accurate, suggesting that adults may be sensitive to valid signals of character in children's faces. However, it is not clear whether such sensitivity requires…