Children struggle to stop inappropriate behaviors. What interventions improve inhibitory control, for whom, and why? Prior work suggested that practice proactively monitoring for relevant signals improved children’s inhibitory control more than practice with motoric stopping. However, these processes were not clearly dissociated. This study tested 162 seven- to nine-year-old children (89 female, 72

The parent–adolescent relationship is important for adolescents’ emotion regulation (ER), yet little is known regarding the neural patterns of dyadic ER that occur during parent–adolescent interactions. A novel measure that can be used to examine such patterns is cross-brain connectivity (CBC)—concurrent and time-lagged connectivity between two individuals’ brain regions. This study sought to provide

This study examined 7-to-13.5-month-old middle-class Western infants’ visual orienting to third-party interactions in parallel with their social attention behavior during own social interactions (Leipzig, Germany). In Experiment 1, 9.5- to-11-month-olds (n = 20) looked longer than 7- to-8.5-month-olds (n = 20) at videos showing two adults interacting with one another when simultaneously presented with

This study investigated ethnic-racial identity (ERI) developmental processes (i.e., exploration and resolution) as pathways for adolescents to develop global bicultural competence, or the ability to meet heritage and host cultural demands. The sample included 749 U.S. Mexican-origin youth (30% Mexico-born; 51% male) followed from early-to-late adolescence (Mage = 12.79–17.38 years). Longitudinal structural

Princess culture is criticized for contributing to gender stereotypes and poor body esteem, however, there is little longitudinal research examining these claims. This study examines associations between engagement with princess culture during early childhood and gender stereotypes, body esteem, and adherence to hegemonic masculinity in early adolescence. Participants included 307 children (51% female

This study sought to (a) replicate infant temperament profiles from predominantly White samples in a sample of low-income, predominantly first-generation Mexican-American families, (b) investigate associations between infant temperament profiles and toddler behavioral and physiological regulation, and (c) explore whether mothers’ cultural orientation would moderate those associations. Mothers and infants

This study investigates whether asking early adolescents to evaluate the food choices of remote peers improves their own food selection. Participants were students from fifth (N = 219, Mage = 9.30 years) and sixth grades (N = 248, Mage = 10.28 years) of varying nationalities living in the United Arab Emirates (race and ethnicity were not collected). Students saw peers’ healthy or unhealthy food choices

Attachment was examined as a predictor of teens’ empathic support for friends in a multimethod longitudinal study of 184 U.S. adolescents (58% Caucasian, 29% African American, 13% other) followed from ages 14 to 18. Adolescents’ secure state of mind regarding attachment at 14 predicted teens’ greater capacity to provide empathic support during observed interactions with friends across ages 16–18 (Baverage = 

Adolescents’ dyadic relationships are likely influenced by the cultural context within which they exist. This study applied a person-oriented approach to examine how perceived support and negativity were manifested across youths’ relationships with mothers, fathers, and best friends, simultaneously, and how distinct relationship profiles were linked to adaptive and maladaptive functioning (aggression

Personality and identity formation are intricately linked in adolescent development. The personality disposition of perfectionism has been associated with identity processes, but their longitudinal interplay in adolescence has not yet been investigated. This four-wave study, with 5- to 6-month intervals between each wave (N = 744 Caucasian adolescents, Mage = 15.2 years, 55% girls), examined associations

Gender bias exists in our language environment. We investigated personal name usage in two large corpora of language written for and by U.K. children aged 5–13. Study 1 found an overrepresentation of male names in children’s books, largely attributable to male authors. In stories written by over 100,000 children, Study 2 found an overall male bias that interacted with age. Younger children wrote more

This 5-year longitudinal study investigated advanced theory-of-mind (AToM) development in 161 German 5- to 10-year-olds (89 females, 72 males). Core aspects of AToM developed nonlinearly, with children reaching a milestone at the age of 7 years, around when they attained the conceptual insight that mental states can be recursive. In late elementary school, a multicomponent battery was used. Performance

Children in the United States grow up in a context wherein colorblindness and racism coexist. This article examined how colorblindness functions as a societal “master narrative” that shapes how children construct their own racial identities. Data were collected via semi-structured interviews with 217 Black, White, and Multiracial children (Mage = 9.92) in public schools in the Pacific Northwest during

Changing the way children make their response appears to sometimes, but not always, boost their inhibitory control—though interpreting existing findings is hampered by inconsistent methods and results. This study investigated the effects of delaying, and changing, the means of responding. Ninety-six preschoolers (Mage 46 months) completed tasks assessing inhibitory control, counterfactual reasoning

Language is vital for social interaction, leading some to suggest early linguistic ability paves the way for good adolescent mental health. The relation between age-5 vocabulary and adolescent internalizing symptoms was examined in two U.K. birth cohorts that are nationally representative in terms of sex, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status: the 1970 British Cohort Study (BCS; N = 11,640) and the Millennium

Previous work indicates mutual exclusivity in word learning in monolingual, but not bilingual toddlers. We asked whether this difference indicates distinct conceptual biases, or instead reflects best-guess heuristic use in the absence of context. We altered word-learning contexts by manipulating whether a familiar- or unfamiliar-race speaker introduced a novel word for an object with a known category

This study used latent growth curve modeling to identify normative development and individual differences in the developmental patterns of shyness and anger/frustration across childhood. This study also examined the impacts of maternal intrusiveness and frontal electroencephalogram (EEG) asymmetry at age 4 on the developmental patterns of shyness and anger/frustration. 180 children (92 boys, 88 girls;

Acquisition of an argument structure may be affected by the diversity of lexical types that appear in that structure (Conwell et al., 2011; Yang, 2016). Seventy-two 5- and 6-year-old English-speaking children completed a learning study where they were exposed to a novel argument structure and then tested on their ability to comprehend it. The number of verb types heard in the learning phase did not

We examined how subjective assessments of recollection guide decision making. Subjective recollection was dissociated from accuracy during a forced-choice recognition task. Distracters were either similar to targets (match condition) or to other studied, but untested items (nonmatch condition). We assessed 223 participants (112 males) across three experiments (137 White, 37 Asian-American, 7 African-American

The ability to identify individuals by voice is fundamental for communication. However, little is known about the expectations that infants hold when learning unfamiliar voices. Here, the voice-learning skills of 4- and 8-month-olds (N = 53; 29 girls, 14 boys of various ethnicities) were tested using a preferential-looking task that involved audiovisual stimuli of their mothers and other unfamiliar

Students’ sense of belonging presents an essential resource for academic and health outcomes, whereas social exclusion at school negatively impacts students’ well-being and academic performance. Aiming to understand how feelings of school-related belonging and exclusion shape the structural brain development, this study applied longitudinal questionnaire-based data and MRI data from 71 adolescent students

Using a large sample from the National Institute of Child Health and Development Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (N = 1,178, 51% were male and 80% were White), the random intercept cross-lagged panel model was employed to unpack the trait and state aspects in the relations between mothers’ depressive symptoms and children’s behavioral problems from age 2 to 15. The transactional predictions

Children (N = 278, 34–71 months, 54% girls) were told which of two figurines turned on a music box and also observed empirical evidence either confirming or conflicting with that testimony. Children were then asked to sort novel figurines according to whether they could make the music box work or not. To see whether children would explore which figurine turned on the music box, especially when the

This study examined the direct and indirect associations of teachers’ depressive symptoms with children’s math achievement through teachers’ reports of family–teacher relationships and children’s approaches to learning (ATL) in Head Start. This study included 3- and 4-year-old 1,547 children (49% female; 27% White, 24% Black, 41% Hispanic/Latino, and 8% others) who attended Head Start from fall 2014

Racial discrimination can lead to psychosocial problems for Black adolescents, including internalization (e.g., depression) and externalization (e.g., conduct problems). Black parents (N = 186; Mage = 42.9) of adolescents (ages 10–18) were assessed to investigate how parental worries and racial socialization competency (i.e., confidence, skills, and stress) contribute to the association between parental

Research on classroom peer effects has focused nearly exclusively on high-income countries and on academic skills. Little is known about peer effects in low-income countries and whether effects differ under different educational environments (e.g., teacher-directed versus child-centered, conditions of concentrated advantage or disadvantage). Based on a data set of Ghanaian preprimary classrooms in

This study examined indirect associations of MyTeachingPartner coaching with pre-K students’ (N = 1,570; 73% low income) school readiness, via improvements of teachers’ (N = 393; 47% Black; 41% Head Start) classroom interactions. Data were collected across 2008–2009 and 2009–2010 in 10 urban sites across the eastern United States. The number of completed coaching cycles was examined as a predictor

This study examined associations among early adversity, diurnal cortisol, child sex, and caregiver sensitivity at age 6 months in relation to wheezing in children (47% male) followed to 30 months. Analyses included 676 mother-child dyads, 393 of whom completed an observational caregiver sensitivity measure. Participants were primarily ethnic minorities (42.7% Black, 25.4% Hispanic); 22.1% of children

A “digital revolution” has introduced new privacy violations concerning access to information stored on electronic devices. The present two studies assessed how U.S. children ages 5–17 and adults (N = 416; 55% female; 67% white) evaluated those accessing digital information belonging to someone else, either location data (Study 1) or digital photos (Study 2). The trustworthiness of the tracker (Studies

This study is a randomized controlled trial of a 12-week community-based group parenting intervention (“CASITA”) in Lima, Peru. CASITA improved neurodevelopment in a pilot study of 60 Peruvian children and subsequently scaled to 3,000 households throughout the district. The objective of this study was to assess intervention effectiveness when implemented at scale. A total of 347 children ages 6–20 months

Children live in a world where disagreement is commonplace. Although disagreement can sometimes be explained by differences in people’s reliability, disagreement may also indicate that the referent elicits multiple perspectives. The present studies (total N = 129, 5- to 12-year-old ethnically diverse U.S. children, 42% girls) examined children’s ability to resolve disagreement among two individuals

This study examines how everyday discrimination is associated with 6-day trajectories of sleep/wake problems, operationalized as sleep disturbance and daytime dysfunction, among 350 diverse adolescents (Mage = 14.27, SD = 0.61, 69% female; 22% African American, 41% Asian American, 37% Latinx; 24% multiethnic/racial; across participating schools, 72% of students eligible for free/reduced price lunch)

Using data from the All Our Families study, a longitudinal study of 1992 mother-child dyads in Canada (47.7% female; 81.9% White), we examined the developmental pathways between infant gestures and symbolic actions and communicative skills at age 5. Communicative gestures at age 12 months (e.g., pointing, nodding head “yes”), obtained via parental report, predicted stronger general communicative skills

Spanking remains common around the world, despite evidence linking corporal punishment to detrimental child outcomes. This study tested whether children (Mage = 11.60) who were spanked (N = 40) exhibited altered neural function in response to stimuli that suggest the presence of an environmental threat compared to children who were not spanked (N = 107). Children who were spanked exhibited greater

Although professional development is widely used to improve the impacts of early childhood education, little is known about the conditions under which such interventions promote child outcomes. This study applies newly developed methods for quantifying intervention impact heterogeneity to understand whether educators’ collective workplace stress moderates professional development’s impacts on children’s

Four experiments examined Canadian 2- to 3-year-old children’s (N = 224; 104 girls, 120 boys) thoughts about shared preferences. Children saw sets of items, and identified theirs and another person’s preferences. Children expected that food preferences would be more likely to be shared than color preferences, regardless of whether the items were similar or different in appeal (Experiments 1–3). A final

Emotional expressions are abundant in children’s lives. What role do they play in children’s causal inference and exploration? This study investigates whether preschool-aged children use others’ emotional expressions to infer the presence of unknown causal functions and guide their exploration accordingly. Children (age: 3.0–4.9; N = 112, the United States) learned about one salient causal function

We examined the bidirectional relations between home literacy environment, reading interest, and children’s emergent literacy and reading skills in a sample of 172 English-speaking Canadian children (Mage = 75.87 months) followed from Grade 1 to Grade 3. Results of cross-lagged analysis revealed that the reading comprehension activities (RCA) at home positively predicted children's reading skills at

Children of color are more likely to have poor sleep health than White children, placing them at risk for behavioral problems in the classroom and lower academic performance. Few studies, however, have utilized standardized measures of both classroom behavior and achievement. This study examined whether children’s sleep (parent and teacher report) in first grade concurrently related to independent

Children from language minority homes reach school age with variable dual language skills. Cluster analysis identified four bilingual profiles among 126 U.S.-born, 5-year-old Spanish–English bilinguals. The profiles differed on two dimensions: language balance and total language knowledge. Balance varied primarily as a function of indicators of the relative quantity and the quality of their language

Infant research is providing accumulating evidence that number-space mappings appear early in development. Here, a Posner cueing paradigm was used to investigate the neural mechanisms underpinning the attentional bias induced by nonsymbolic numerical cues in 9-month-old infants (N = 32). Event-related potentials and saccadic reaction time were measured to the onset of a peripheral target flashing right

A longitudinal study with 45 children (Hispanic, 13%; non-Hispanic, 87%) investigated whether the early production of non-referential beat and flip gestures, as opposed to referential iconic gestures, in parent–child naturalistic interactions from 14 to 58 months old predicts narrative abilities at age 5. Results revealed that only non-referential beats significantly (p < .01) predicted later narrative

This study investigated the vocabulary development of children (N = 547) from linguistically and socioeconomically diverse classrooms in Germany from age 3 in preschool to age 7 in Grade 1. The results showed that for dual language learners (DLLs, n = 107) growth rates in their German majority language skills varied over classrooms. Compared to monolingual children, DLLs improved faster in classrooms

This study examined whether early institutional rearing and attachment security influence the quality and quantity of friendships at age 16 in 138 participants, including children abandoned to institutions in Bucharest, Romania, who were randomized to care as usual (n = 45, 26 female), or foster care (n = 47, 25 female), and a never‐institutionalized group (n = 46, 18 female). Adolescents in the foster

In a representative longitudinal sample of 2,602 Australian children (52% boys; 2% Indigenous; 13% language other than English background; 22% of Mothers born overseas; and 65% Urban) and their mothers (first surveyed in 2003), this article examined if maternal judgments of numeracy and reading ability varied by child demographics and influenced achievement and interest gains. We linked survey data

Naturalistic studies show that children can create language‐like communication systems in the absence of conventional language. However, experimental evidence is mixed. We address this discrepancy using an experimental paradigm that simulates naturalistic sign creation. Specifically, we tested if a sample of 6‐ to 12‐year‐old children (52 girls and 56 boys drawn from an urban, predominantly white population

Misconceptions about scientific concepts often prevail even if learners are confronted with conflicting evidence. This study tested the facilitative role of surprise in children’s revision of misconceptions regarding water displacement in a sample of German children (N = 94, aged 6–9 years, 46% female). Surprise was measured via the pupil dilation response. It was induced by letting children generate

Two preregistered experiments with 2,733 U.S. high school students (age range = 13–19 years) compared the impact of different messages on adolescents’ motivation to control social media use (SMU). A traditional message emphasized the benefits of avoiding SMU, whereas a values‐alignment message framed controlling SMU as being consistent with autonomy and social justice. Compared to no message or a traditional

Although attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is among the most heritable psychiatric childhood disorders, social and gene–environment interactions seemingly play an important role in the etiology of ADHD. Consistent with this, this study finds that School‐Wide Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (SWPBIS) reduced the likelihood of pharmacotherapeutic treatment for ADHD at age

Previous research on Montessori preschool education is inconsistent and prone to analytic flexibility. In this preregistered study, disadvantaged preschoolers in a French public school were randomly assigned to either conventional or Montessori classrooms, with the latter being adapted to French public education. Adaptations included fewer materials, shorter work periods, and relatively limited Montessori

Fraction knowledge and algebraic skill are closely linked. Algebra is a gatekeeper for advanced courses (Booth & Newton, 2012; Brown & Quinn, 2007). This study uses the person‐centered approach of latent profile analysis to examine individual differences in middle schoolers’ (N = 350) algebra performance at the end of the year (EOY). The relative importance of a range of fraction skills is considered

Socioeconomically disadvantaged neighborhoods increase the risk for poor mental health among residents, yet protective factors may operate alongside risk. This study evaluated the influence of the prenatal neighborhood ethnocultural context on child behavior problems and maternal depressive symptoms. Prenatal maternal role expectations, prenatal culture‐specific stress, and postpartum depression (PPD)

The academic achievement places children on a positive trajectory for their lifespan. The aim of this study was to examine the academic trajectories of children in out‐of‐home care (OOCH) and whether kinship care has a protective effect relative to nonkin foster care. The sample analyzed for this study consists of 519,306 racially diverse youth in North Carolina schools 8 to 11 years old in the school

Using intergenerational, prospective data at ages 9 months, 7, 11, and 14 years from the nationally representative United Kingdom Millennium Cohort Study, this interdisciplinary study unpacks why 14‐year‐old adolescents with early perceived pubertal timing (PT) were more likely to drink alcohol (ever, frequent, and binge drinking) compared to those whose PT was on‐time or late (5,757 girls, 5,799 boys;

This study used a machine learning framework in conjunction with a large battery of measures from 9,718 school‐age children (ages 9–11) from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive DevelopmentSM (ABCD) Study to identify factors associated with fluid cognitive functioning (FCF), or the capacity to learn, solve problems, and adapt to novel situations. The identified algorithm explained 14.74% of the variance

The biological world includes many negatively valenced activities, like predation, parasitism, and disease. Do children’s books cover these activities? And how do parents discuss them with their children? In a content analysis of children’s nature books (Study 1), we found that negatively valenced concepts were rarely depicted across genres and reading levels. When parents encountered negative information

The authors examined how children’s frontal electroencephalogram (EEG) theta/beta ratio—an index of neurocognitive control—changed from baseline to a social stressor, and whether these EEG changes moderated the relation between temperament and anxiety. Children (N = 152; Mage = 7.82 years, 52% male, 81% White) had their EEG recorded during a baseline and speech anticipation condition. Children’s frontal

Distractibility is the propensity to behaviorally react to irrelevant information. Although children are more distractible the younger they are, the precise contribution of attentional and motor components to distractibility and their developmental trajectories have not been characterized yet. We used a new behavioral paradigm to identify the developmental dynamics of components contributing to distractibility