Spanking remains common around the world, despite evidence linking corporal punishment to detrimental child outcomes. This study tested whether children (M[subscript age] = 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…

Adults recognize emotions conveyed by bodies with comparable accuracy to facial emotions. However, no prior study has explored infants' perception of body emotions. In Experiment 1, 6.5-month-olds (n = 32) preferred happy over neutral actions of actors with covered faces in upright but not inverted silent videos. In Experiment 2, infants…

Although some evidence indicates that even very young children engage in rudimentary forms of strategic behavior, the underlying mechanisms remain largely unknown. This study tested the hypothesis that uncertainty monitoring underlies such behaviors. Three-, four-, and five-year-old children ("N" = 88) completed a perceptual…

Inhibitory control and incentive processes underlie decision making, yet few studies have explicitly examined their interaction across development. Here, the effects of potential rewards and losses on inhibitory control in 64 adolescents (13- to 17-year-olds) and 42 young adults (18- to 29-year-olds) were examined using an incentivized antisaccade…

Dynamic relations during the preschool years across processes of control and understanding in the domains of emotion and cognition were examined. Participants were 263 children (42% non-White) and their mothers who were seen first when the children were 3 years old and again when they were 4. Results indicated dynamic dependence among the…

Emotion recognition was investigated in typically developing individuals and individuals with autism. Experiment 1 tested children (5-7 years, n = 37) with brief video displays of facial expressions that varied in subtlety. Children with autism performed worse than the control children. In Experiment 2, 3 age groups (8-12 years, n = 49; 13-17…

The relationship between neonatal visual information-processing and the burst-pause pattern of nonnutritive sucking was explored. (JMB)

Differential looking and manipulation were assessed in 44 six-month-old infants who were presented with familiar and novel visual stimuli. The infants looked at the novel stimuli longer. (ST)

The relationship between visual stimulus intensity and finger movements was examined in infants ranging in age from 10 to 15 weeks and from 20 to 25 weeks. Infants were shown a cone that varied in size, brightness, and distance from them. (Author/JMB)

The effects of different degrees of stimulus organization on subsequent generalization were studied with 120 fourth-grade children. (BRT)

Groups of 17-, 23-, and 29-week-olds were habituated to slides of women posing facial expressions varying display of teeth affect; subjects were then shown slides of women posing the familiarized expressions plus a toothy smiling expression. In a second experiment older subjects also proved to be insensitive to affect-related aspects of still…

The results of this experiment indicate that continuous stimulation has a marked pacifying effect on young infants. (WY)

Four-month-old infants' stimulus preferences were assessed using an operant paradigm with mobile reinforcers of different colors (blue, green). (Author/MP)

In an evaluation of the relation between dimensional salience and preschoolers' judgments of bigness, 3-year-old children were shown triads of rectangles and asked to select the "big" one. The biggest rectangle in each triad was neither the tallest nor the widest. (JMB)