Effective communication is vital in both social and professional contexts, yet the nuanced relationship between nonverbal communication (NVC) and affectivity, particularly in relation to demographic factors, has not been fully understood. The lack of clarity in how these elements interact poses a challenge in developing tailored communication…

While day-to-day negative affect normatively rises across adolescence, emotional experiences also stratify, or diverge, across individuals. Moreover, negative affect is not a unitary construct but comprises distinct feeling states (e.g., sadness, anger, anxiety), each characterized by distinct age-related trends. Yet, most developmental research…

This study examined age-related patterns in exposure and affective reactivity to daily stressors across a 20-year time span among adults who were between 22 and 77 years old at their baseline interview. Longitudinal data from the National Study of Daily Experiences (NSDE) consisted of three bursts of eight consecutive nightly interviews of stress…

Civic education is often touted as a counterweight to the contentiousness of American politics. Yet, civic education's relationship to dislike and distrust of opposing partisans (affective polarization) remains largely untested. Simultaneously, there are calls for educators to promote more civic informed action, taking civic education beyond the…

Research suggests that the fear of harsh punishment from parents encourages children's antisocial lie-telling as they attempt to avoid the punishment for their transgressions. In contrast, warm and supportive parenting practices foster internalization of moral rules and norms and an ability to resist the temptation, so children have no need to lie…

This study investigated how adults over the lifespan flexibly adapt their use of prosocial speech acts when conveying bad news to communicative partners. Experiment 1a (N = 100 Scottish adults aged 18-72 years) assessed whether participants' use of prosocial speech acts varied according to audience design considerations (i.e., whether or not the…

Climate change worry (CCW) is a specific worry about climate change, involving thoughts about changes that might occur in the climate system and their possible effects. Nowadays, it is growing especially among adolescents. As there is a lack of measurement tools with adequate psychometric properties to assess CCW in this age group, we investigated…

Developmental theories suggest affect-biased attention, preferential attention to emotionally salient stimuli, emerges during infancy through coordinating individual differences. Here we examined bidirectional relations between infant affect-biased attention, temperamental negative affect, and maternal anxiety symptoms using a Random Intercepts…

Data from 83,423 parent reports of temperament (surgency, negative affectivity, and regulatory capacity) in infants, toddlers, and children from 341 samples gathered in 59 countries were used to investigate the relations among culture, gender, and temperament. Between-nation differences in temperament were larger than those obtained in similar…

School bonding refers to the connections that students have with their schools and with various aspects of their academic environments, with an emphasis on close affective relationships and investment in doing well at school. The Perception of School Social Bonding (PSSB) instrument is a 10-item, self-report instrument with 3 subscales measuring…

When perceiving emotional facial expressions, adults use a template-matching strategy, comparing the perceived face with a stored representation. A rejection of unnaturally exaggerated faces is characteristic of this strategy because the exaggerated expressions do not match the stored template. In contrast, a rule-based perceptual strategy (e.g.,…

This study quantitatively and qualitatively measured gender and age differences in cognitive, affective, and behavioral engagement while playing video games among the University of North Texas (UNT) undergraduate students. Also, it examined the relationship between time spent playing video games and the three engagement states. For the…

Previous studies have shown that social exclusion can have negative effects on the well-being of children and adolescents. However, there is inconsistent evidence regarding how the impact of social exclusion changes with age. This study used the Cyberball paradigm to investigate the effects of exclusion and subsequent inclusion on primary needs…

Promoting children's and adolescents' mental, physical, and social wellbeing is highly important to help them learn, create social connections, and stay healthy. Nature has the potential to restore cognition, reduce stress and mental fatigue, and improve wellbeing, all factors that are conducive to learning. There is growing interest in…

This study examined gene-environment correlation (rGE) in intellectual and academic development in 561 U.S.-based adoptees (57% male; 56% non-Latinx White, 19% multiracial, 13% Black or African American, 11% Latinx) and their birth and adoptive parents between 2003 and 2017. Birth mother intellectual and academic performance predicted adoptive…