Counterfactual emotions such as regret may aid future decision-making by encouraging people to focus on controllable features of personal past events. However, it remains unclear when children begin to preferentially focus on controllable features of such events. Across two studies, Australian 4-9-year-olds (N = 336, 168 females; data collected…

Maternal sensitivity during an observed mother-child clean-up task at 18 months and maternal sensitivity during an observed mother-child free-play task at 18 months were tested as independent predictors of child internalizing symptoms, externalizing symptoms, social competence, and language development at 24 months. Participants (n = 292 mothers)…

The present study assessed both concurrent and early influences of the maternal caregiving environment to examine unique contributions of each to variation in children's emotional responses to COVID-19 pandemic. Preschoolers (3-5 years; M = 4.12, SD = 0.49) previously assessed in infancy, several years prior to pandemic outbreak, were re-assessed…

What are the psychological consequences of receiving direct and indirect help in childhood? We conducted three preregistered experiments (N = 619, 7-9 years, 80% Dutch, 51% girls, 49% boys, mostly higher socioeconomic status) in the Netherlands (July 2020-July 2022). Children received direct help (correct answer), indirect help (hint), or no help.…

Music is a powerful medium to study emotion recognition. However, findings are mixed regarding the proficiency of young children to detect emotion conveyed by music. Moreover, we lack knowledge about music emotion recognition and callous-unemotional traits, which portend risk for externalizing problems. The current study examined the performance…

This study investigated whether infants encode better the features of a briefly occluded object if its movements are specified simultaneously by vision and audition than if they are not (data collected: 2017-2019). Experiment 1 showed that 10-month-old infants (N = 39, 22 females, White-English) notice changes in the visual pattern on the object…

This study examined the reciprocal relation between lesson-specific perceived cognitive appraisals and academic emotions on an intra-individual level. A daily diary study was conducted using a sample of 266 Chinese Han students (Grades 7-8; 56.8% boys; M[subscript age] = 13.70, SD[subscript age] = 0.52) during 10 mathematics lessons in 2022.…

The present study examined how children spontaneously represent facial cues associated with emotion. 106 three- to six-year-old children (48 male, 58 female; 9.4% Asian, 84.0% White, 6.6% more than one race) and 40 adults (10 male, 30 female; 10% Hispanic, 30% Asian, 2.5% Black, 57.5% White) were recruited from a Midwestern city (2019-2020), and…

This study examined the development of emotion understanding. Children (N = 296, 157 boys, 139 girls) and parents (67% White, 8% Black, 15% Hispanic, 2% Asian American, 6% Biracial, 2% "Other") recruited from Denver, Colorado were observed annually for four years starting in 2019 (beginning M[subscript age] = 2.44 years, SD = 0.26)…

Understanding the underlying mechanisms by which racism degrades mental health and the factors that disrupt these mechanisms is paramount. Black adolescents (M[subscript age] = 15.5) and their mothers (M[subscript age] = 44) were observed discussing a hypothetical discriminatory situation and surveyed about their discriminatory experiences…

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…

Longitudinal associations between signaled night awakening and executive functioning (EF) at 8 and 24 months in children with ([greater than or equal to] 3 awakenings, n = 77) and without parent-rated fragmented sleep ([less than or equal to] 1 awakening, n = 69) were studied. EF was assessed with the Switch task at 8 and 24 months. At 24 months,…

This study examined interparental conflict as a curvilinear predictor of children's reactivity to interparental conflict and, in turn, their school problems across three annual measurements. Participants included 243 preschool children (M[subscript age] = 4.60 years; 56% girls) and their parents from racially (e.g., 48% Black; 16% Latinx) diverse…

This study examined whether childhood interparental conflict moderated the mediational pathway involving adolescent exposure to interparental conflict, their negative emotional reactivity to family conflict, and their psychological problems in a sample of 235 children (M[subscript age] = 6 years). Significant moderated-mediation findings indicated…

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…