Background: Mixed results in the literature related to type of permanent placement and developmental outcomes of maltreated children suggest differences in postmaltreatment placement environments may be an important mechanism to consider. Objective: The goal of this study was to identify how home environment variables mediate risk in maltreated…

Objective: To chart the emergence of precursors and early signs of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and autistic traits in the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children, a prospective longitudinal cohort study of the surviving offspring of 14,541 pregnant women from southwestern England with an expected delivery date between April 1991 and…

Providing high-quality education and care for young children at a historically Black university in rural South Africa was a challenging task. But despite many obstacles, two teacher educators (an American and a South African) worked together, partnered with a surprising collection of others, seized every possible opportunity, and persisted, seeing…

The relations between fathers' and mothers' home literacy involvement at 24 months and children's cognitive and social emotional development in preschool were examined using a large sample of African American and Caucasian families ("N" = 5190) from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Birth Cohort (ECLS-B). Hierarchical…

Background: Deficient vocabulary is a frequently reported symptom of developmental language impairment, but the nature of the deficit and its developmental course are not well documented. Aims: To describe the nature of the deficit in terms of breadth and depth of vocabulary knowledge and to determine whether the nature and the extent of the…

Background: Research on resilience in the aftermath of potentially traumatic life events (PTE) is still evolving. For decades, researchers have documented resilience in children exposed to corrosive early environments, such as poverty or chronic maltreatment. Relatively more recently, the study of resilience has migrated to the investigation of…

Chromosomal microarray analysis (CMA) has emerged as a powerful new tool to identify genomic abnormalities associated with a wide range of developmental disabilities including congenital malformations, cognitive impairment, and behavioral abnormalities. CMA includes array comparative genomic hybridization (CGH) and single nucleotide polymorphism…

In 1959, Campbell and Fiske introduced the use of multitrait-multimethod (MTMM) matrices in psychology, and for the past 4 decades confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) has commonly been used to analyze MTMM data. However, researchers do not always fit CFA models when MTMM data are available; when CFA modeling is used, multiple models are available…

This dissertation presents the results of three field experiments implemented to evaluate the effectiveness of strategies to improve the health or education of children in developing countries. In Guatemala, community health workers at randomly selected clinics were given patient tracking lists to improve their ability to remind parents when their…

Wisconsin is a state that values cooperation and historically has been willing to invest in providing opportunities for success. But there are troubling signs. Childhood poverty is increasing in Wisconsin faster than the national rate. It is easy to think that making substantive changes in poverty in the communities and the state is just too hard,…

Initial investigations into the development of self-concept have been largely descriptive and focused primarily on the concept of self-representation, namely, how the me-self evolves across childhood and adolescence. Investigators sought to document developmental differences in self-representation through coding of spontaneously generated…

Current federal legislation identifies three goals for the child welfare system: safety, permanence, and family and child well-being. Unfortunately, child well-being becomes subordinate to the more easily achievable and measurable goal of permanence--returning children to the biological family, facilitating an adoption, or placing them with…

Causal inference is of central importance to developmental psychology. Many key questions in the field revolve around improving the lives of children and their families. These include identifying risk factors that if manipulated in some way would foster child development. Such a task inherently involves causal inference: One wants to know whether…

Understanding the pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics of drugs used in psychopharmacology across the pediatric age spectrum from infants to adolescents represents a major challenge for clinicians. In pediatrics, treatment protocols use either standard dose reductions for these drugs for children below a certain age or use less conventional…

By three years of age, children are skilled at assessing under which circumstances others can see things. However, nothing is known about whether they can use this knowledge to guide their own deceptive behaviour. Here we investigated 3-year-olds' ability to strategically inhibit or conceal forbidden actions that a nearby adult experimenter could…