The relationship of parental warmth, communication, and tracking (WCT), and child conduct problems in early elementary school (age 5.5 years) to monitoring in late elementary school (age 9.5 years) was longitudinally examined in a sample of 267 boys and girls. WCT in kindergarten was associated with lower kindergarten levels and less growth of…

This study examined attachment in institutionalized and community children 12-31 months of age in Bucharest, Romania. Attachment was assessed using ratings of attachment behaviors and ratings of caregiver descriptions in a structured interview. As predicted, children raised in institutions exhibited serious disturbances of attachment as assessed…

When an object moves behind an occluder and re-emerges, 4-month-old infants perceive trajectory continuity only when the occluder is narrow, raising the question of whether time or distance out of sight is the important constraining variable. One hundred and forty 4-month-olds were tested in five experiments aimed to disambiguate time and distance…

A sample of 147 mother-infant dyads was recruited from a peri-urban settlement outside Cape Town and seen at 2- and 18-months postpartum. At 18 months, 61.9% of the infants were rated as securely attached (B); 4.1% as avoidant (A); 8.2% as resistant (C); and 25.8% disorganized (D). Postpartum depression at 2 months, and indices of poor parenting…

In a 3-wave longitudinal study (with assessments 2 years apart) involving 186 early adolescents (M ages of approximately 9.3, 11.4, and 13.4), the hypothesis that parental warmth/positive expressivity predicts children's effortful control (EC) (a temperamental characteristic contributing to emotion regulation) 2 years later, which in turn predicts…

Evidence indicates that peer victimization is predictive of later maladjustment, but the mechanisms by which harassment impairs development have yet to be identified. The objectives of this study were (a) to discern normative trends in peer victimization experiences and self- and peer perceptions during preadolescence and (b) to investigate…

The relation between cognitive and motor performance was studied in a sample of 378 children aged 5-6. Half of these children had no behavior problems; the others were selected for externalizing (38%) or internalizing problems (12%). Quantitative and qualitative aspects of motor performance were related to several aspects of cognition, after…

Adolescent adjustment measures may be related to each other and to the social environment in various ways. Are these relationships similar in genetic and environmental sources of covariation, or different? A multivariate behaviorgenetic analysis was made of 6 adjustment and 3 treatment composites from the study Nonshared Environment in Adolescent…

The impact of 2 types of learning experiences on children's perception of multimodal emotion cues was examined. Children (aged 7-12 years) were presented with conflicting facial and vocal emotions. The effects of familiarity were tested by varying whether emotions were presented by familiar or unfamiliar adults. The salience of particular…

Developmental ordering is a fundamental prediction in developmental science. However, tests of ordering hypotheses are not generally available for continuously developing variables. One promising test of developmental ordering, the shape of the relationship between 2 variables, requires that changes in each underlying variable are captured equally…

This within-family, longitudinal study including biological and stepfamilies investigated mutual influences between marital conflict and children's behavior problems. Children (4 to 17 years; N296) residing in 127 families drawn from a general population study were investigated at Time 1 and again 2 years later. These nested data were analyzed…

Forty-one children (3 to 7 years) were exposed to a staged event and later interviewed by 1 of 41 professional interviewers. All interviews were coded with a detailed, mutually exclusive, and exhaustive coding scheme capturing adult behaviors (leading questions vs. neutral) and child behaviors (acquiescence vs. denial) in a temporally organized…

Event-related potentials (ERPs), in response to 4 facial expressions of fear, angry, happy, and sad, were collected from 72 institutionalized children (IG), ages 7 to 32 months, in Bucharest, Romania, and compared with ERPs from 33 children, ages 8 to 32 months, who had never been institutionalized (NIG). The NIG and IG exhibited different…

Given that gestures may provide access to transitions in cognitive development, preschoolers' performance on standard tasks was compared with their performance on a new gesture false belief task. Experiment 1 confirmed that children (N45, M age54 months) responded consistently on two gesture tasks and that there is dramatic improvement on both the…

Can infants below age 1 year learn words in one context and understand them in another? To investigate this question, two groups of parents trained infants from age 9 months on 8 categories of common objects. A control group received no training. At 12 months, infants in the experimental groups, but not in the control group, showed comprehension…