Investigated effects of divorce and family relations on young children's development in ethnically diverse low-income families. Found that soon-to-be-divorced families demonstrated higher rates of preschool-age behavior problems, and already-divorced families showed similar trends. Parental conflict and behavior problems accounted for pre-divorce…

Related children's experience in after-school programs to first grade performance. Found that staff positivity was associated with fewer boys' behavior problems, whereas staff negativity was related to boys' poorer reading/math grades. Program flexibility was associated with better boys' social skills. More frequent negative peer interactions in…

Unsupervised after-school peer contact was examined as a risk factor in developing externalizing problems among early adolescents. Longitudinal findings showed that unsupervised peer contact, lack of neighborhood safety, and low monitoring incrementally predicted grade seven externalizing problems, after controlling for family background factors…

Data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth were used to examine the effects of welfare reform on children. Although effect sizes were generally small, the findings suggested the potential value of welfare-reform approaches that emphasized long-term human-capital development. Positive effects of support services on earnings were strongest…

Examined interrelations among behavioral inhibition (BI), cardiac activity, and attachment status in 4.5-year olds. Found that only Secure children showed predicted relationship between low BI and high heart period (HP) or respiratory sinus arrhythmia. Increases in HP from assessment during separation from mother to assessment three minutes after…

Two studies compared executive function performance of preschoolers with autism and control group matched on age, verbal ability, and nonverbal ability. Study 1 found no group differences on eight tasks. Autistic children initiated fewer joint attention and social interaction behaviors. Followup with subset of Study 1 children found that neither…

Assessed representational abilities in hearing and deaf 2-year-old children of hearing and deaf mothers. Found group differences in expressive and receptive language based on maternal report and on experimenter assessment, but no differences emerged in child solitary symbolic play or in child- or mother-initiated child collaborative symbolic play.…

Examined individual differences in social cognition among 128 urban preschoolers. Found that individual differences in understanding of false-belief and emotion were associated with differences in language ability, parental occupation, and mothers' education. Variance in family background only contributed uniquely to false-belief understanding.…

Two experiments assessed preschoolers' understanding of objects possessing a property in part only and their understanding that different parts of an object may possess opposed properties. Results suggested that children as young as 3 years possess a sophisticated ability to reason about the heritability of properties from parts to wholes.…

Five experiments examined children's understanding of logical consistency. Findings indicated that only by 6 years of age were logically inconsistent claims understood despite good memory for claims, varying question forms, ability to identity other types of statements as not sensical or to compare/contrast claims in other ways, and attempts made…

Tested role of event plausibility and script-relevant knowledge in events suggestively planted in memory of 5- to 7-year olds and 9- to 12-year olds. Found that the majority did not remember either false event. Significantly more children recalled the plausible but not the implausible false event; only one recalled the implausible but not…

Examined relationships among mothers' hostile attribution tendencies regarding their children's ambiguous problem behaviors, mothers' harsh discipline, and children's externalizing behavior problems. Assessments over four years demonstrated that mothers' hostile attributions predicted children's externalizing school behavior problems. The…

Compared aggressive, withdrawn, and aggressive/withdrawn children to normative and matched control groups on teacher and peer relationship attributes, loneliness, and social satisfaction from kindergarten through grade 2. Found that withdrawn behavior was neither highly stable nor predictive of relational difficulties. Aggression was fairly stable…

Used data from National Longitudinal Survey of Youth to model developmental trajectories across middle childhood. Found that individual trajectories were extremely diverse in level and sometimes in slope. Compared to girls, boys had heterogeneous slopes for math and behavior problems. Compared to boys, girls showed a significantly higher degree of…

Examined concurrent and longitudinal links between observational measures of 8- to 9-year olds' playground behaviors/peer contacts (alone, conversation, group size, and network) and three sociometric measures of peer relationships (social preference, bully, and victim). Found significant concurrent and predictive relationships, with relationships…