Children and adolescents encounter different hurtful experiences in school settings. How these events are processed (e.g., whether they think that the transgressor was hostile) is likely to depend on the relationship with the transgressor. In this study, we examined how adolescents (58 girls and 35 boys, mean age = 14.03 years, SD = 0.60) dealt…

As humans, we are attuned to the moods and emotions of others. This understanding of emotions enables us to interpret other people's actions on the basis of their emotional displays. However, the development of this capacity is not well understood. Here we show a developmental pattern in 10- and 14-month-old infants' sensitivity to others'…

In two experiments, 4- to 9-year-olds played a game in which they selected one of two boxes to win a prize. On "regret" trials the unchosen box contained a better prize than the prize children actually won, and on "baseline" trials the other box contained a prize of the same value. Children rated their feelings about their prize before and after…

Adults' and 8-year-old children's perception of emotional faces is disrupted when faces are presented in the context of incongruent body postures (e.g., when a sad face is displayed on a fearful body) if the two emotions are highly similar (e.g., sad/fear) but not if they are highly dissimilar (e.g., sad/happy). The current research investigated…

The current research investigated the influence of body posture on adults' and children's perception of facial displays of emotion. In each of two experiments, participants categorized facial expressions that were presented on a body posture that was congruent (e.g., a sad face on a body posing sadness) or incongruent (e.g., a sad face on a body…

Regret and relief are related to counterfactual thinking and rely on comparison processes between what has been and what might have been. In this article, we study the development of regret and relief from late childhood to adulthood (11.2-20.2 years), and we examine how these two emotions affect individuals' willingness to retrospectively…

The remarkable contributors to this special issue highlight the importance of developmental research on emotion and its regulation, as well as its conceptual and methodological challenges. This commentary offers some additional thoughts, especially concerning alternative views of the convergence of multiple measures of emotional responding, the…

Three studies assessed parent-child agreement in perceptions of children's everyday emotions in typically developing 4- to 11-year-old children. Study 1 (N = 228) and Study 2 (N = 195) focused on children's worry and anxiety. Study 3 (N = 90) examined children's optimism. Despite child and parent reporters providing internally consistent…

Adults and children 5, 8, and 11 years of age listened to short excerpts of unfamiliar music that sounded happy, scary, peaceful, or sad. Listeners initially rated how much they liked each excerpt. They subsequently made a forced-choice judgment about the emotion that each excerpt conveyed. Identification accuracy was higher for young girls than…

The response set effect has been observed in a number of developmental tasks that are proposed to required inhibition. This effect has been interpreted as evidence that the specific responses children plan to make in these tasks become prepotent. Here we investigated whether there is a response set effect in the hand game. In this task, children…

This investigation analyzed the methods used over the past 35 years to study emotion regulation (ER) in children. Articles published from 1975 through 2010 were identified in 42 child clinical, developmental, and emotion psychology journals. Overall, 61.1% of published ER articles relied on one method and 23.6% used two methods. Analyses revealed…

Research suggests that emotions influence children's ability to discern fantasy from reality; however, reasons for this association remain unknown. The current research sought to better understand the mechanisms underlying children's distinctions by examining the roles discrete emotions and context have in 3- to 5-year-olds' evaluations of fantasy…

The primary aims of the current study were to longitudinally examine the direct relationship between children's temperamental surgency and social behaviors as well as the moderating role of children's emotion regulation. A total of 90 4.5-year-old children participated in a laboratory visit where children's temperamental surgency was rated by…

This study investigated how infants perceive and interpret human body movement. We recorded the eye movements and pupil sizes of 9- and 12-month-old infants and of adults (N = 14 per group) as they observed animation clips of biomechanically possible and impossible arm movements performed by a human and by a humanoid robot. Both 12-month-old…

The association between having a reputation for valuing popularity and relational aggression was assessed in a sample of 126 female children and adolescents (mean age=12.43 years) at a 54-day residential summer camp for girls. Having a reputation for valuing popularity was positively related to relational aggression. This association was moderated…