While day-to-day negative affect normatively rises across adolescence, emotional experiences also stratify, or diverge, across individuals. Moreover, negative affect is not a unitary construct but comprises distinct feeling states (e.g., sadness, anger, anxiety), each characterized by distinct age-related trends. Yet, most developmental research…

Research suggests that the fear of harsh punishment from parents encourages children's antisocial lie-telling as they attempt to avoid the punishment for their transgressions. In contrast, warm and supportive parenting practices foster internalization of moral rules and norms and an ability to resist the temptation, so children have no need to lie…

Data from 83,423 parent reports of temperament (surgency, negative affectivity, and regulatory capacity) in infants, toddlers, and children from 341 samples gathered in 59 countries were used to investigate the relations among culture, gender, and temperament. Between-nation differences in temperament were larger than those obtained in similar…

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.,…

Previous studies have shown that social exclusion can have negative effects on the well-being of children and adolescents. However, there is inconsistent evidence regarding how the impact of social exclusion changes with age. This study used the Cyberball paradigm to investigate the effects of exclusion and subsequent inclusion on primary needs…

Promoting children's and adolescents' mental, physical, and social wellbeing is highly important to help them learn, create social connections, and stay healthy. Nature has the potential to restore cognition, reduce stress and mental fatigue, and improve wellbeing, all factors that are conducive to learning. There is growing interest in…

Childhood is marked by profound changes in prosocial behaviour. The underlying motivational mechanisms remain poorly understood. We investigated the development of altruistically motivated helping in middle childhood and the neurocognitive and -affective mechanisms driving this development. One-hundred and twenty seven 6-12 year-old children…

Numerous event-related potential (ERP) studies have examined adults' neural responses to child emotional expressions to understand the neurobiological mechanisms contributing to caregiving. It is unclear, however, whether one emotion evokes an enhanced response across components, and whether this pattern differs based on parent status or other…

We examined the longitudinal relation between behavioral inhibition (BI) and social anxiety symptoms and behavior and the mediating role of emotion regulation (ER). Moreover, we investigated the influence of parenting behavior on the development of ER strategies. Participants were 291 children (135 male) followed longitudinally from 2 to 13 years.…

For research on emotional development, defining emotions as psychological systems of appraisals, expressions, body reactions, and subjective feelings in all phases of ontogenesis raises tricky methodological issues. How can we measure single emotions when appraisals and feelings cannot be assessed from outside, when expressions do not seem to be…

Social participation represent one of the major outcomes of inclusive education. Students with additional support needs often encountered negative attitudes of social acceptance exhibited by their typically developing peers hindering their social participation in the educational context. This study explored the multicomponent structure of…

Variability is a fundamental feature of human brain activity that is particularly pronounced during development. However, developmental neuroimaging research has only recently begun to move beyond characterizing brain function exclusively in terms of magnitude of neural activation to incorporate estimates of variability. No prior neuroimaging…

Twin studies have documented that parenting behavior is partly heritable, but it is unclear how parents' genetics shape their caregiving. Using tools of molecular genetics, the present study investigated this process by testing hypotheses about associations between a genome-wide polygenic score for educational attainment and parental caregiving in…

Compassion is known to predict prosocial behavior and moral judgments related to harm. Despite the centrality of compassion to social life, factors predicting adulthood compassion are largely unknown. We examined whether qualities of parent-child-relationship, namely, emotional warmth and acceptance, predict offspring compassion decades later in…

Background: As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, governments have implemented preventive measures towards reducing infections. These conditions can affect the mental health of children and adolescents; however, this has not yet been fully explored. Objective: The aim of the study was to analyze changes in symptomatology and positive emotions in…