Inconsistency in parenting is a factor that may influence children's mental health. A questionnaire, measuring three parental inconsistencies (temporal, situational, and father-mother inconsistency) was administered to adolescents in nine countries to assess its association with adolescents' psychological disorders. The results show that parental…

Residential crowding in both U.S. and U.K. samples of 36-month-old children is related concurrently to the Bracken scale, a standard index of early cognitive development skills including letter and color identification, shape recognition, and elementary numeric comprehension. In the U.S. sample, these effects also replicate prospectively.…

This article presents some findings of a small-scale research study carried out in 1 kindergarten in Hong Kong. The study looked at the problems associated with the transition of families from one culture (mainland China) to a new culture (Hong Kong), concentrating on the children's development of a sense of belonging in Hong Kong. Specific issues…

Research NeedsObjective: To examine associations between exposure to potentially traumatic events (PTEs) and clinical patterns of symptoms and disorders in preschool children. Method: Two hundred and thirteen referred and non-referred children, ages 24 to 48 months (MN = 34.9, SD = 6.7 months) were studied. Lifetime exposure to PTEs (family…

Results from a study of 100 Head Start children and their teachers suggested that teacher-child relationship quality was associated with children's classroom behaviors. Specifically, teacher-child conflict was strongly related to children's externalizing behaviors. Based on these findings, we present recommendations for the development of policies…

Background: Antipsychotic medications have been used extensively to treat aggressive behaviours in persons with intellectual disabilities (ID) when the main psychiatric diagnoses given to them in the past were schizophrenia, childhood psychoses and ID with behaviour problems. Today, antipsychotics are still estimated to comprise 30-50% of all the…

This study examined developmental associations between growth in domain-general cognitive processes (working memory and attention control) and growth in domain-specific skills (emergent literacy and numeracy) across the prekindergarten year and their relative contributions to kindergarten reading and math achievement. One hundred sixty-four Head…

The past decade has seen an upsurge in public understanding of early brain development. News reports, statements by policymakers, and commercial marketing of products for infants and young children have all contributed to a widespread understanding of the explosive growth of the brain in the early years and that stimulation acts as a catalyst to…

Interesting systems, whether biological or artificial, develop. Starting from some initial conditions, they respond to environmental changes, and continuously improve their capabilities. Developmental psychologists have dedicated significant effort to studying the developmental progression of infant imitation skills, because imitation underlies…

Twenty children, ten 2-year-olds and ten 3-year-olds, participated in an AB procedure. In the baseline phase, each child was trained the same four matching relations to criterion under intermittent reinforcement. During the subsequent imitation test, the experimenter modeled a total of 20 target gestures (six trials each) interspersed with…

Using a sticker search task, Gentner and Rattermann ("Perspectives on thought and language: Interrelations in development" (Gelman & Byrnes, Eds.), pp. 225-227, 1991) found that the ability to ignore surface features and match objects in terms of relative size emerged around 5 years of age. However, because spatial position covaried with relative…

Search for a ball that has undergone hidden motion rapidly improves during the second year of life ("Dev. Psychol.," 2000; 36:394-401). In three experiments we investigated whether the poor performance of younger toddlers was due to attentional failure by highlighting the major cue for the hidden object. We observed only slight improvement in…

Responsiveness defines the prompt, contingent, and appropriate reactions parents display to their children in the context of everyday exchanges. Maternal responsiveness occupies a theoretically central position in developmental science and possesses meaningful predictive validity over diverse domains of children's development, yet basic…

This study investigated "individual differences" in different aspects of early number concepts in preschoolers. Eighty 4-year-olds from Oxford nursery classes took part. They were tested on accuracy of counting sets of objects; the cardinal word principle; the order irrelevance principle; and predicting the results of repeated addition…

To date, developmental research has rarely addressed the notion that imitation serves an interpersonal, socially based function. The present research thus examined the role of social engagement on 24-month-olds' imitation by manipulating the social availability of the model. In Experiment 1, the children were more likely to imitate the exact…