Cross-site comparisons indicate that East Asian children typically excel on tests of executive function (EF), but interpreting this contrast is made difficult by both the heavy reliance on testing in school settings and by the scarcity of studies that assess across-site measurement invariance. Addressing these gaps, our study included remote…

Social skills are dynamic developmental constructs typically measured using assessments developed via cross-sectional methods. The measurement model of derivatives (MMOD), a factor analytic approach targeting individual growth trajectories, was used to evaluate the longitudinal factor structure of the Social Skills Improvement System--Rating…

A double-blind randomized controlled trial of n-3 long-chain polyunsaturated fatty acid (n-3 LCPUFA) supplementation or matching placebo during third trimester of pregnancy was conducted within the COPSAC[subscript 2010] mother-child cohort consisting of 736 women and their children. The objective was to determine if maternal n-3 LCPUFA pregnancy…

Linear regression analysis is one of the most common techniques applied in developmental research, but only allows for an estimate of the average relations between the predictor(s) and the outcome. This study describes quantile regression, which provides estimates of the relations between the predictor(s) and outcome, but across multiple points of…

Children's confidence in their own knowledge may influence their willingness to learn novel information from others. Twenty-four-month-old children's ("N" = 160) willingness to learn novel labels for either familiar or novel objects from an adult speaker was tested in 1 of 5 conditions: accurate, inaccurate, knowledgeable, ignorant, or…

The present study examined whether repeated exposure to daily surveys about negative social experiences predicts changes in adolescents' daily and general maladjustment, and whether question content moderates these changes. Across a 2-week period, 6th-grade students (N = 215; mode age = 11) completed 5 daily reports tapping experienced or…

Four studies examined preschoolers' sensitivity to agents' knowledge of conventional forms. Three- to 4-year-olds heard a speaker apply either conventional or wrong labels to familiar objects (Studies 1 and 2, N = 57) or peculiar but correct labels (Study 3, N = 19). When then asked by the speaker for the referent of a novel label, children…

Two experiments examined preschoolers' ability to learn novel words using others' expertise about objects' nonobvious properties. In Experiment 1, 4-year-olds (n = 24) endorsed individuals' labels for objects based on their differing causal knowledge about those objects. Experiment 2 examined the robustness of this inference and its development.…

This study addresses the extent to which insecure and disorganized attachments increase risk for externalizing problems using meta-analysis. From 69 samples (N = 5,947), the association between insecurity and externalizing problems was significant, d = 0.31 (95% CI: 0.23, 0.40). Larger effects were found for boys (d = 0.35), clinical samples (d =…

A new measure of sibling conflict was used to identify 2 types of conflicts in 115 adolescent sibling pairs (older siblings, M = 15.59, SD = 2.01 years; younger siblings, M = 13.02, SD = 2.06 years). Conflicts overall were more frequent than intense and more likely to involve the invasion of the personal domain than conflicts involving equality…

This study examined identity development in a 5-wave study of 923 early-to-middle and 390 middle-to-late adolescents thereby covering the ages of 12-20. Systematic evidence for identity progression was found: The number of diffusions, moratoriums, and searching moratoriums (a newly obtained status) decreased, whereas the representation of the…

Human neonates prefer listening to speech compared to many nonspeech sounds, suggesting that humans are born with a bias for speech. However, neonates' preference may derive from properties of speech that are not unique but instead are shared with the vocalizations of other species. To test this, thirty neonates and sixteen 3-month-olds were…

Four-, 5-, and 7-year-olds (N = 60) listened to vignettes featuring characters that wanted to do actions that conflicted with parental rules. Desires included behaviors associated with the personal domain: friend, activity, and clothing choice. Scenarios involving moral rules served as a comparison. Children predicted and explained characters'…

How and when do children develop an understanding of extraordinary mental capacities? The current study tested 56 preschoolers on false-belief and knowledge-ignorance tasks about the mental states of contrasting agents--some agents were ordinary humans, some had exceptional perceptual capacities, and others possessed extraordinary mental…

Does early gesture use predict later productive and receptive vocabulary in children with pre- or perinatal unilateral brain lesions (PL)? Eleven children with PL were categorized into 2 groups based on whether their gesture at 18 months was within or below the range of typically developing (TD) children. Children with PL whose gesture was within…