Examined relations of individual differences in regulation and negative emotionality to Indonesian third-graders' social skills/low externalizing problem behavior, sociometric status, and shyness. Found that children's low socially appropriate behavior/high problem behavior and rejected peer status were related to low dispositional regulation and…

Assessed links between free-time activities in middle childhood and school grades, conduct, and depression symptoms concurrently and 2 years later; also explored 2 mechanisms that might underlie activity-adjustment links. Found links between the nature of children's free-time activities and their adjustment. Social contexts of free-time activities…

Examined associations between income-to-needs change and child outcomes at 36 months for NICHD Study of Early Child Care participants. Found that for children in poverty, income-to-needs decreases related to worse outcomes and increases related to better outcomes. When income-to-needs increases were at least one standard deviation above mean…

Used National Maternal and Infant Health Survey data to examine effects of poverty and maternal depression on child development. Found that maternal depression and poverty jeopardized development of very young children. Affluence somewhat buffered the deleterious consequences of depression. Chronic maternal depression had severe implications for…

Examined relative influence of peer and parenting behavior on changes in adolescent gang involvement and gang-related delinquency among ninth-graders. Found that gang involvement decreased over the school year, with average levels of gang delinquency remaining constant. Gang involvement and gang-related delinquency were most strongly predicted by…

Examined effects of parent-adolescent relationships on school performance for Chinese American and European American high school students. Found positive effects of both authoritative parenting and relationship closeness on school performance for European Americans and to some extent second-generation Chinese, but not first-generation Chinese. The…

Examined National Longitudinal Survey of Youth data on four versions of HOME-Short Form for four major ethnic groups. Found differences for majority of items between poor and non-poor families. Magnitude of effect for poverty was greater than for ethnicity. For every item at every age, effects of poverty were proportional across European American,…

Examined frequency with which children were exposed to various parental actions, materials, events, and conditions as part of their home environments, and how these exposures related to well-being. Found the most consistent relations between learning stimulation and children's developmental status, with relations for parental responsiveness and…

Argues that dynamic systems theories may illuminate processes whereby public policy influences child development and highlight gaps in current relevant research. Discusses five principles of dynamic systems theories using examples from research addressing effects of current antipoverty and welfare policies on children. Concludes by suggesting…

Three experiments explored 5- and 7-month-olds' intermodal coordination of proprioceptive information produced by leg movements and visual movement information specifying these same motions. Results suggested that coordination of visual and proprioceptive inputs is constrained by infants' information processing of the displays and have…

Examined distractibility during visual fixations in 6- to 24-month-olds. Found that latency to turn toward a distractor was a function of length of look before distractor onset. Immediately before onset, children had greater sustained lowered heart rate for trials on which they continued looking at television monitor than for trials on which they…

Three experiments examined vision's role in infants' grasping of horizontally and vertically oriented rods. Found that infants differentially oriented their hand regardless of lighting and similar to control conditions where they could see rod and hand throughout reach. Findings suggest that infants may use current sight of object's orientation or…

Examined the contribution of biological and environmental variables to 11-year-olds' phonological development. Found that temporal lobe (planar) asymmetry, hand preference, family history of reading disability, and SES explained over half the variance in phonological and verbal performance, demonstrating a linear association between cerebral…

Two experiments tracked infants' eye movements to examine use of word-initial information to understand fluent speech. Results indicated that 21- and 18-month-olds recognized partial words as quickly and reliably as whole words. Infants' productive vocabulary and reaction time were related to word recognition accuracy. Results show that…

Examined relationship between mother-child conversational interactions when children were 30, 36, and 42 months old and children's recall of these activities 1 day and 3 weeks later. Found that at all ages, features of activities jointly handled and jointly discussed were remembered better than features jointly handled but discussed by mother only…