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 applies a "within-family, age-snapshot design" to investigate differences between siblings in the development of compliance during the preschool years by disaggregating situational, within-family, and between-family effects. The aim of the study was to investigate the relation between sibling differences in compliance and the…

Living with a pet is related to a host of socioemotional health benefits for children, yet few studies have examined the mechanisms that drive the relations between pet ownership and positive socioemotional outcomes. The current study examined one of the ways that pets may change the environment through which children learn and whether childhood…

Dance is a universal human behavior and a crucial component of human musicality. When and how does the motivation and tendency to move to music develop? How does this behavior change as a process of maturation and learning? We characterize infants' earliest dance behavior, leveraging parents' extensive at-home observations of their children.…

Presenting pictures of faces side by side is a common paradigm to assess infants' attentional biases according to social categories, such as gender, race, and language. However, seeing static faces does not represent infants' typical experience of the social world, which involves people in motion and performing actions. Here, we assessed infants'…

New motor skills supply infants with new possibilities for action and have consequences for development in unexpected places. For example, the transition from crawling to walking is accompanied by gains in other abilities--better ways to move, see the world, and engage in social interactions (e.g., Adolph & Tamis-LeMonda, 2014). Do the…

Our interest is in the development of gratitude as a moral virtue, and its variability across different cultural contexts. Given psychology's overreliance on samples collected from the United Sates, Western Europe, and Australasia, we contrasted patterns of age-related expressions of gratitude among a sample of U.S. 7- to 14-year-old children with…

This article investigates the early emergence of reason-giving. Toddlers are sensitive to disagreements, and they can track several kinds of informational access, such as visual perception. We investigated whether young children use these skills (a) when assessing whether providing reasons is needed and (b) when selecting appropriate behaviors to…

Early mother-infant coordinated interactions play a critical role in infant development. The present study describes the development of the dyadic coordination of vocalization and gaze behavior between mothers and infants over the first year of life. In addition to describing developmental trajectories of behavior, the study contributes to our…

Adults teach children not to "judge a book by its cover." However, adults make rapid judgments of character from a glance at a child's face. These impressions can be modestly accurate, suggesting that adults may be sensitive to valid signals of character in children's faces. However, it is not clear whether such sensitivity requires…

The present study investigates the relation between language environment and language delay in 63 British-English speaking children (19 typical talkers (TT), 22 late talkers (LT), and 22 late bloomers (LB) aged 13 to 18 months. Families audio recorded daily routines and marked the new words their child produced over a period of 6 months. To…

As a spoken word unfolds over time, similar sounding words ("cap" and "cat") compete until one word "wins". Lexical competition becomes more efficient from infancy through adolescence. We examined one potential mechanism underlying this development: lexical inhibition, by which activated candidates suppress…

Around their first birthdays, infants begin to point, walk, and talk. These abilities are appreciable both by researchers with strictly standardized criteria and caregivers with more relaxed notions of what each of these skills entails. Here, we compare the onsets of these skills and links among them across two data collection methods: observation…

In the present work, we explore the development of processing of emotional facial configurations under a predictive processing (or predictive coding) framework. Predictive processing provides a new approach to brain function that has been used to explain a wide range of processes, from perception to socioemotional processing. The explanatory power…

Residential mobility is a normal feature of family life but thought to be a source of disruption to a child's development. Mobility may have its own direct consequences or reflect families' capabilities and vulnerabilities. This article examines the association between changes of residence and verbal and behavioral scores of children aged 5,…