Conversational turns are an important predictor of cognitive and language development, but little is known about their relationship with socioemotional development. In a previous study using LENA technology, Gómez and Strasser (2021) found that conversational turns assessed with 43 infants at 18 months predicted socioemotional competencies at 30…

Research consistently indicates that adolescents in the 21st century are not getting adequate sleep, which may put them behind developmentally and at risk of poor mental and physical well-being as well as diminished social and academic performance throughout high school. There are elevated concerns regarding the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on…

Social motivation is theorized to promote Theory of Mind development in childhood, but research testing this link is scarce and largely limited to urban middle-class milieus of the Global North. Here, we investigated the link between social motivation (i.e., social reward responsivity) and Theory of Mind (i.e., false belief understanding) among…

The Coping with Toddlers' Negative Emotions Scale (CTNES) assesses parents' emotional socialization of toddlers. The original measure is lengthy, with 82 items in total, and no short-form version is available to date. The objective of the current study was to create a short-form version of the CTNES. We aimed to: (1) test the CTNES subscales…

Social-emotional competence is critical to children's social and school success, prompting interest in understanding factors that promote these skills prior to elementary-school. Cognitive stimulation (e.g., reading, playing) is related to preschool children's social outcomes; However, few studies have examined these associations earlier, or…

Social cognitive mapping (SCM) is a common approach to identifying peer groups in developmental research. However, this approach involves three stages that each implies a unique conception of peer group. This article aims to bring conceptual clarity to the identification of peer groups using SCM by demonstrating how the meaning of peer groups…

This study examined mother-child reminiscing about children's experiences with peers and its relation to children's peer-related self-views and social competence. Sixty-three mothers and their preschool-aged children discussed at home two specific past events involving the child and his or her peers, one event being positive and one negative. The…

This research adopted observational and experimental paradigms to investigate the relationships between components of emotion knowledge in three- to four-year-old children. In Study 1, 88 children were assessed on the Emotion Matching Task (Morgan, Izard, & King), and two tasks requiring the generation of emotion labels and causes. Most tasks…

The current study examined relations among child temperament, peer interaction, and theory of mind (ToM) development. We hypothesized that: (1) children classified as behaviorally inhibited at 24 months would show less ToM understanding at 36 months in comparison to nonbehaviorally inhibited children; (2) children who displayed negative peer…

Contingent self-esteem (i.e., the degree to which one's self-esteem is dependent on meeting particular conditions) has been shown to predict a wide range of psychosocial and academic problems. This study extends previous research on contingent self-esteem by examining the predictive role of perceived parenting dimensions in a sample of early…

We investigated the influence of being imitated on children's subsequent trust. Five- to six-year-olds interacted with one experimenter who mimicked their choices and another experimenter who made different choices. Children were then presented with two tests. In a preference test, the experimenters offered conflicting preferences for the contents…

Five hundred five children (267 female) enrolled in school years 5 and 6 in the UK (M = 9 years and 9 months) completed measures of trust beliefs in peers, best friendships, ascriptions of trustworthiness, and trustworthiness toward peers. Children's social disengagement, peer preference, and peer victimization were assessed by sociometric…

Experimental studies of children's responses to apologies often present participants with hypothetical scenarios. This article reports on an experimental study of children's reactions to experiencing an actual disappointment and subsequent apology. Participants (ages four to seven) were told that another child was supposed to share some attractive…

This study examined how children reason about competing personal preferences. Seventy-two participants (mean ages 5 years 5 months, 10 years 4 months, and 17 years 7 months) considered three hypothetical scenarios in which a protagonist's personal preference was in conflict with her or his friend's personal preference. Scenarios varied in the…

Consistent with Biological Sensitivity to Context and Differential Susceptibility hypotheses, this study found that children who, as infants, were more temperamentally reactive were more sensitive to the quality of childcare they experienced as toddlers, but not to the amount of childcare with peers they had experienced since birth. Children with…