This chapter explores paths toward emotion-focused coping among typically developing young children and their more or less average parents--portraying characteristic developmental patterns, demands, and stresses. Emotion-focused coping strategies are effortful and aim to decrease negative emotions in stress-inducing interpersonal contexts. The…

The study of resilience in maltreated children reveals the possibility of coping processes and resources on multiple levels of analysis as children strive to adapt under conditions of severe stress. In a maltreating context, aspects of self-organization, including self-esteem, self-reliance, emotion regulation, and adaptable yet reserved…

Because the patterns of coping shown by children and youth depend on the particular types and levels of stress they face, it is difficult to understand or study coping, or to promote it in interventions, unless coping is conceptualized as embedded within the overall ecology of stressful conditions, including the demands and resources that…

It is advantageous to study regulation and coping and their development at multiple levels of expression and origin simultaneously. We discuss several topics of current interest in the emotion-related regulation literature that are relevant to coping, including conceptual issues related to definitions and types of coping, types of physiological…

This chapter identifies four challenges to the study of the development of coping and regulation and outlines specific theoretical and empirical strategies for addressing them. The challenges are (1) to integrate work on coping and processes of emotion regulation, (2) to use the integration of research on neuro-biology and context to inform the…

The term executive function is used increasingly within developmental psychology and is often taken to refer to unfolding brain processes. We trace the origins of research on executive function to show that the link with social interaction has a long history. We suggest that a recent frenzy of research exploring methods for studying individual…

Research has demonstrated that differential parental scaffolding utterances influence children's development of executive function. Traditional conceptualizations of scaffolding, though, have difficulty in explaining how such differential effects influence children's cognitive development; they do not account for the timing of parental utterances…

This chapter describes longitudinal findings from a socially diverse sample of 125 British children seen at ages two and four. Four models of social influence on executive function are tested, using multiple measures of family life as well as comprehensive assessments of children's executive functions. Our results confirm the importance of…

A major objective of this chapter is to present a novel, ecologically sensitive social problem-solving task for school-aged children that captures the complexity of social and cognitive demands placed on children in naturalistic situations. Competence on this task correlates with a range of skills including executive functions, verbal reasoning,…

Much of the evidence from the West has shown links between children's developing self-control (executive function), their social experiences, and their social understanding (Carpendale & Lewis, 2006, chapters 5 and 6), across a range of cultures including China. This chapter describes four studies conducted in three Oriental cultures, suggesting…

The chapters in this issue revisit the social origins of the development of executive function (EF) through both empirical examination of the contexts in which EF development occurs (in vivo), as well as its social antecedents and consequences. Importantly, they also point to new directions in studying the social foundations of neurodevelopment,…

State-funded pre-Kindergarten is a growing phenomenon in the United States. The majority of 4-year-olds now spend time every weekday in care outside of their home and many of these children are being served in preschool classrooms funded with state education dollars. The public strongly supports such programs and there is generally bipartisan…

This document consists of the four 2003 issues of a newsletter disseminating information on the Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD) and providing a forum for important news, research, and information concerning advancement in child growth and development research. Each issue of the newsletter includes announcements and notices of…

Three experiments examined cross-modal transfer of shape between touch and vision in 1-month-olds, controlling for side bias and stimulus preference. Results did not provide good evidence that 1-month-olds can transfer information about smooth or nubby shapes from touch to vision. Findings highlight the need to control for side bias and stimulus…

Examined whether the atypical pattern of brain activity found in infants of depressed mothers generalized to situations not involving the mother. Found that 13- to 15-month-olds of depressed mothers exhibited reduced left--relative to right--frontal activity during baseline and during interactions with mother and familiar experimenter. This…