Research with adults has increasingly moved beyond the focus on a small set of allegedly basic emotions, each associated with a signature facial expression. That expansion has been accompanied by a greater emphasis on the potential variability of emotion concepts across different cultural settings. In this conceptual review of children's…

When depicting emotions, children have been shown to alter the content of their drawings (e.g., number and types of expressive cues) depending on the characteristics of the audience (i.e., age, familiarity, and authority). However, no study has yet investigated the influence of the audience gender on children's depiction of emotions in their…

A large body of research has investigated both the emotional elaboration of facial stimuli in adults and the development of children's recognition of emotional expressions. Yet, it is still not clear whether children's ability to recognize an emotional face may be modulated by prior exposure to a different face, and whether an emotional expression…

Three decades of research have examined children's challenge and threat appraisals, yet unresolved issues remain. This study provides new insight about three central, open questions in this field: How do challenge and threat appraisals relate to events eliciting discrete negative emotions? How do challenge appraisals develop across childhood, and…

The family environment shapes children's social information processing and emotion regulation. Yet, the long-term effects of early family systems have rarely been studied. This study investigated how family system types predict children's attentional biases toward facial expressions at the age of 10 years. The participants were 79 children from…

We evaluated whether narrating anger-provoking events promoted learning from those events, as compared with other responses to anger, and whether the effectiveness of narrative depended on age. In addition, we tested relations between anger reduction and learning and, in a subset of participants, between narrative quality and learning. A sample of…

Art is a unique feature of human experience. It involves the complex interplay among stimuli, persons and contexts. Little is known of how the various features deemed important in art appreciation depend on development, thus are already present at a young age. Similarly to our previous approach with adults of differing levels of expertise, the…

Constructive parent-child conflict interactions that teach children to problem-solve and negotiate can enhance children's social adjustment. This paper identifies constructive and destructive qualities of mother-child conflict and explores whether child temperament moderated associations with changes in externalizing problems over time. One…

Children may be capable of understanding the value of emotion regulation strategies before they can enlist these strategies in emotion-evoking situations. This study was designed to extend understanding of children's judgment of the efficacy of alternative emotion regulation strategies. Children aged six and nine ("N" = 97) were…

This study examined how shyness-sensitivity and unsociability were associated with social, school, and psychological adjustment in Chinese children and adolescents. Participants included 564 children (272 boys, M[subscript age] = 9 years) and 462 adolescents (246 boys, M[subscript age] = 13 years) in a suburban region in China. Data were obtained…

Parenting research is frequently conducted without a thorough examination of socio-economic characteristics. In this study, longitudinal observations of positive parenting were conducted across six time points. Participants were 219 mothers of children with and without developmental delays. Mothers' positive parenting increased during early and…

The aim of this study was to investigate the role of social capital assessed in early adulthood in linking self-control in childhood with psychological and social functioning in middle age. Data collected at ages 8, 27, and 42 years were based on the Jyvaskyla Longitudinal Study of Personality and Social Development (159 females, 177 males).…

Despite growing research results indicating that shyness is a risk factor for psychosocial maladjustment in childhood, less is known about the conceptual mechanisms that may underlie these associations. The purpose of the current study was to explore links between self-reported shyness, coping strategies and social functioning in middle childhood.…

This paper reports on two exploratory studies of situations that elicit shyness in Mainland Chinese children. In Study 1 (N = 100; M[subscript age] = 10.42) interviews with Chinese children identified three kinds of shyness-eliciting situations: social novelty; negative social evaluation; and public attention. In Study 2 (N = 162, M[subscript age]…

Recent research has shown that children use colors systematically in relation to how they feel about certain colors and the figures that they draw. This study explored cultural differences between Finnish and English children's use of color to represent figures with contrasting emotional characters. One hundred and eight children (54 Finnish, 54…