Exposure to childhood adversity has been consistently associated with poor developmental outcomes, but it is unclear whether these associations vary across different forms of adversity. We examined cross-sectional and longitudinal associations between threat and deprivation with cognition, emotional processing, and psychopathology in a…

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…

In a non-randomized controlled study, we investigated the efficacy of a school-based mindfulness curriculum delivered by schoolteachers to older secondary school students (16-18 years). We measured changes in emotion processing indexed by P3b event-related potential (ERP) modulations in an affective oddball task using static human faces. ERPs were…

Early in the first year of life infants exhibit equivalent performance distinguishing among people within their own race and within other races. However, with development and experience, their face recognition skills become tuned to groups of people they interact with the most. This developmental tuning is hypothesized to be the origin of adult…

Although apes understand others' goals and perceptions, little is known about their understanding of others' emotional expressions. We conducted three studies following the general paradigm of Repacholi and colleagues (1997, 1998). In Study 1, a human reacted emotionally to the hidden contents of two boxes, after which the ape was allowed to…

To investigate the relation between cognitive and affective social understanding, Japanese 4- to 8-year-olds received tasks of first- and second-order false beliefs and prosocial and self-presentational display rules. From 6 to 8 years, children comprehended display rules, as well as second-order false belief, using social pressures justifications…

Happiness is generally considered an emotion with only beneficial effects, particularly in childhood. However, there are some situations where the style of information processing triggered by happiness could be a liability. In particular, happiness seems to motivate a top-down processing style, which could impair performance when attention to…

Four-year-olds, 5-year-olds, and adults (N = 48) listened to stories featuring characters that experienced one of four types of thoughts after deciding to transgress or comply with a rule: thoughts about desires, rules, future negative outcomes, or future punishment. Participants predicted and explained the characters' emotions. Results showed…

Neural systems related to cognitive and emotional processing were examined in adolescents using event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Ten healthy adolescents performed an emotional oddball task. Subjects detected infrequent circles (targets) within a continual stream of phase-scrambled images (standards). Sad and neutral…

Three experiments investigated whether children in grades K, 2, and 4 (n = 144) view emotional comprehension as important in solving moral dilemmas. The experiments asked whether a human or an artificially intelligent machine would be best at solving different types of problems, ranging from moral and emotional to nonmoral and pragmatic. In…

Previous research has indicated that 70-85% of women and girls show a bias to hold infants, or dolls, to the left side of their body. This bias is not matched in males (e.g. deChateau, Holmberg & Winberg, 1978; Todd, 1995). This study tests an explanation of cradling preferences in terms of hemispheric specialization for the perception of facial…

Our facial expressions give others the opportunity to access our feelings, and constitute an important nonverbal tool for communication. Many recent studies have investigated emotional perception in adults, and our knowledge of neural processes involved in emotions is increasingly precise. Young children also use faces to express their internal…

Evidence suggests that autism is associated with impaired emotion perception, but it is unknown how early such impairments are evident. Furthermore, most studies that have assessed emotion perception in children with autism have required verbal responses, making results difficult to interpret. This study utilized high-density event-related…