More than 5 million deaths a year are attributable to tobacco smoking, making it the largest single cause of preventable death worldwide. The primary addictive component in tobacco is nicotine. Its addictive power is exemplified by the fact that by far most attempts to quit smoking fail. It is therefore mandatory to understand the biological…

Objective: Research suggests that early life adversity may affect subsequent parenting. Animal studies investigating mechanisms of transmission have focused on biological factors; whereas research in humans has emphasized cognitive and psychosocial factors. We hypothesized that neuropsychological and physiological factors would act as mediators…

Attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and tic disorders (TD) commonly co-occur. Clarifying the psychiatric comorbidities, executive functions and social adjustment difficulties in children and adolescents of ADHD with and without TD is informative to understand the developmental psychopathology and to identify their specific clinical…

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) in children and adolescents can significantly affect their lives and educational needs. Deficits are often exhibited in areas such as attention, concentration, memory, executive function, emotional regulation, and behavioral functioning, but specific outcomes are not particular to any one child or adolescent with a…

Background: Maternal executive function and household regulation both are critical aspects of optimal childrearing, but their interplay is not understood. We tested the hypotheses that (a) the link between challenging child conduct problems and harsh parenting would be strongest for mothers with poorer executive function and weakest among those…

The fourth edition of the "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders" ("DSM IV") describes ADD as behaviorally observed impairments in attention, impulsivity, and hyperactivity. Officially known as AD/HD, we use ADD here because we are dealing primarily with attention, organizational, and impulsivity issues. A more…

Prior research has found that higher residential mobility is associated with increased risk for children's academic and behavioral difficulty. In contrast, evaluations of experimental housing mobility interventions have shown moving from high poverty to low poverty neighborhoods to be beneficial for children's outcomes. This study merges these…

Four experiments demonstrate that walking boosts creative ideation in real time and shortly after. In Experiment 1, while seated and then when walking on a treadmill, adults completed Guilford's alternate uses (GAU) test of creative divergent thinking and the compound remote associates (CRA) test of convergent thinking. Walking increased 81% of…

Previous research has demonstrated that being bilingual from birth is advantageous for the development of skills of social cognition, executive functioning, and metalinguistic awareness due to bilingual children's extensive experience of processing and manipulating two linguistic systems. The present study investigated whether these cognitive…

Executive functions (EFs) involve a number of interconnected systems that, when compromised, can result in difficulties that affect a child's ability to perform tasks across early childhood settings, including the home and community-based settings. In retrospective research studies, researchers have found that a young child's…

Success in our 21st century schools is linked with students' mastery of a wide range of academic and technological skills that rely heavily on executive function processes. This article describes a theoretical paradigm for understanding, assessing, and teaching that emphasizes the central importance of six executive function processes: goal…

Executive functions and social cognition develop through childhood into adolescence and early adulthood and are important for adaptive goal-oriented behavior (Apperly, Samson, & Humphreys, 2009; Blakemore & Choudhury, 2006). These functions are attributed to frontal networks known to undergo protracted maturation into early adulthood…

Background: Inhibitory control (IC) has been regarded as a neuropsychological basic deficit and as an endophenotype of attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Implicated here are mediation processes between etiological factors and ADHD symptoms. We thus analyze whether and to what extent executive IC and delay aversion (DA; i.e.,…

It is widely believed that children's social-emotional growth and academic learning are inextricably connected. Pressured by high-stakes assessments, however, school professionals find it difficult to devote adequate time to children's social/behavioral development. As a response, we developed and piloted Social-Emotional Learning Foundations…

The focus of the present study is on the developmental antecedents of domain-general experimentation skills. We hypothesized that false-belief understanding would predict the ability to distinguish a conclusive from an inconclusive experiment. We conducted a longitudinal study with two assessment points (t1 and t2) to investigate this hypothesis.…