Previous research on children's knowledge about the mind has primarily focused on their comprehension of false beliefs, leaving the conceptualization of thoughts and thinking less explored. To address this gap, we developed a new assessment tool, the interview about the mind (IaM), to assess children's understanding of the mind. Two studies…

Children (n = 202; 4 to 7 years old) witnessed a confederate break a toy and were asked to keep the transgression a secret. Children were randomly assigned to a Coaching condition (i.e., No Coaching, Light Coaching, or Heavy Coaching) and a Moral Story condition (i.e., Positive or Neutral). Overall, 89.7% of children lied about the broken toy when…

Children often learn information in a context that is vastly different to the one in which they are asked to recall or use that information. Despite this, little is known about the effect of context change on children's recall of educational information. Here, 197 5- and 6-year-olds were taught the same interactive lesson in their classroom or on…

Problem Statement: When children watch television, they are exposed to commercial advertisements whose general purpose is to make a positive impression on viewers about a commodity or service in order to drive the sales of that commodity or service. Due to their voiced and moving images, their setup and characters, and their being short and…

Legible penmanship is important. However, young students have difficulty producing legible handwriting (Marr, Windsor, & Cermak, 2001). As legible handwriting is a benefit for both the students and the teachers in the classroom setting, this study examined if pencil size had an impact on preschool and kindergarten students' handwriting. The…

Vagal tone is widely believed to be an important physiological aspect of emotion regulation and associated positive behaviors. However, there is inconsistent evidence for relations between children's baseline vagal tone and their helpful or prosocial responses to others (Hastings & Miller, 2014). Recent work in adults suggests a quadratic…

In this study it was aimed to examine the content quality of cartoons preferred to watch by 3-6 years children. The content quality of the cartoons in current study was investigated under two titles: "themes and futures of characters". Themes of the cartoons were analyzed under three subtitles: reality status, contents and types of…

Four- to 11-year-old children were interviewed about 2 different sorts of memories in the same home visit: recent memories of highly salient and stressful events--namely, injuries serious enough to require hospital emergency room treatment--and their earliest memories. Injury memories were scored for amount of unique information, completeness…

Poverty is a well-established risk factor for behavior problems, yet our understanding of putative family mediators during early childhood (i.e., before age 5 years) is limited. The present study investigated whether the association between poverty and behavior problems during early childhood is mediated simultaneously by perceived parenting,…

Research Findings: In order to examine the explanatory power of behavioral self-regulation in the domain of emotion knowledge, especially in a non-U.S. culture, 365 German 4- and 5-year-olds were individually tested on these constructs. Path analyses revealed that children's behavioral self-regulation explained their emotion knowledge in the…

This article presents part of a research project where the aim is to investigate six- to seven-year-old children's language use in storytelling. The children's oral texts are based on the picture book "Frog, Where Are You?" The book consists of a series of episodes that more or less directly point to the plot structure. However, it also…

This study examined physical activity (PA) variables related to recess PA patterns of kindergarten, first and second grade children, and the social preferences and individuals influencing their PA. Data collected (N = 147) used the System of Observing Children's Activity and Relationships during Play (SOCARP) instrument. Children were interviewed.…

One hundred eighteen children, divided into three age groups (4-, 6-, and 8-year-olds) participated in a competitive game designed to explore advances in children's deceptive abilities. Success in the game required children to inhibit useful information or provide misinformation in their communication with an adult opponent. Age trends were…

Although tattling is a common practice among young children, there is little systematic research about its socioemotional correlates. The current study focused on children's tattling between the ages of 5 and 7, assessing both their explicit attitudes toward tattling and their actual reporting of a transgression and relating them to individual…

Role-play (i.e., pretending in which children imagine and act out the part of another individual) was assessed with child interviews and parent questionnaires about invisible friends, personified objects, and pretend identities in a sample of 208 young children. Children who engaged in role-play did not differ from other children in age or…