Self-regulation often refers to the executive influence of cognitive resources to alter prepotent responses. The ability to engage cognitive resources as a form of executive process emerges and improves in the preschool-age years while the dominance of prepotent responses, such as emotional reactions, begins to decline from toddlerhood onward.…

Few studies have used exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and exploratory bifactor factor analysis (EBFA) to define a baseline factor structure model checking the construct-relevant psychometric multidimensionality of student engagement. This study was conducted on a sample of 3,374 students in France, Wallonia-Brussels Federation, and Luxembourg by…

Negative affect (NA) and positive affect (PA) are established modifiable psychosocial correlates of cognitive health and have demonstrated capacity for meaningful within-person fluctuations based on person--environment interactions, age, and measurement approach. Previous research has shown NA is associated with increased response time…

Previous studies found an impact of language familiarity on face recognition in 9- and 12-month-olds. Own race faces are better recognized when associated with native language, whereas for other race faces, it is with non-native language. The aim of this study is to investigate if language familiarity can also influence abstract pattern…

Theory of mind refers to the ability to attribute beliefs to oneself and others. The present study used a dynamic systems approach to assess how environment may affect the development of second-order theory of mind (e.g., "John knows that Mary knows that he went out yesterday"). Theory of mind is divided into two major dimensions:…

Children (n = 202; 4 to 7 years old) witnessed a confederate break a toy and were asked to keep the transgression a secret. Children were randomly assigned to a Coaching condition (i.e., No Coaching, Light Coaching, or Heavy Coaching) and a Moral Story condition (i.e., Positive or Neutral). Overall, 89.7% of children lied about the broken toy when…

School engagement involves cognitive, emotional, and behavioral components that overlap conceptually. This conceptual ambiguity has led to measures that have either consisted of one general factor or separate correlated factors. However, neither approach can sufficiently account for both the uniqueness and the overlap of the subcomponents. The…

This study explores reciprocal relations between children's attachment representations and their cognitive ability. Previous literature has mainly focused on the prediction of cognitive abilities from attachment, rarely on the reverse prediction. This was explored in the current research. Attachment representations were assessed with the…

Faces convey important information about the social environment, and even very young infants are preferentially attentive to face-like over non-face stimuli. Eye-tracking studies have allowed researchers to examine which features of faces infants find most salient across development, and the present study examined scanning of familiar (i.e.,…

Infants' visual preference for infant-directed (ID) faces over adult-directed (AD) faces was examined in two experiments that introduced controls for emotion. Infants' eye movements were recorded as they viewed a series of side-by-side dynamic faces. When emotion was held constant, 6-month-old infants showed no preference for ID faces over AD…

When face processing studies find sex differences, male infants appear better at face recognition than female infants, whereas female adults appear better at face recognition than male adults. Both female infants and adults, however, discriminate emotional expressions better than males. To investigate if sex and age differences in facial scanning…

The present eye-tracking study aimed to investigate the impact of auditory speech information on 12-month-olds' gaze behavior to silently-talking faces. We examined German infants' face-scanning behavior to side-by-side presentation of a bilingual speaker's face silently speaking German utterances on one side and French on the other side, before…

This study examined developmental differences in, and cognitive bases of, coping flexibility in children with and without ADHD. Younger (age 7 to 8) and older (age 10 to 11) children with and without ADHD (N = 80) responded to hypothetical vignettes about problematic interactions with peers that shifted from controllable to uncontrollable over…

Comparison of 14 infants of highly educated mothers with 21 infants of less educated mothers indicated that infants' differential vocal responsiveness (DVR) to mother versus stranger was significantly higher among 3-month-olds with highly educated mothers, thereby suggesting that DVR is influenced by environmental factors. (RH)

This study addresses the longitudinal relationships between three kinds of moral cognitions--self-serving cognitive distortions, moral judgment, perception of community--and antisocial behavior in young adolescents. Aims were to gain insight in direct and indirect relationships, stability, and causality. The sample included 724 students (M age =…