Changes in visual attention and story comprehension for children (N = 132) with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and comparison peers were examined. Between the ages of 7 and 9 (Phase 1) and approximately 21 months later (Phase 2), children viewed 2 televised stories: 1 in the presence of toys and 1 in their absence. Both groups of…

This study examined relations between early behavioral inhibition and social and school outcomes in Chinese children (N = 200). Data on behavioral inhibition were collected from a sample of 2-year-olds in China. Follow-up data on social behaviors, peer relationships, and school performance were collected from multiple sources at 7 years of age.…

This study used data on 2,453 children aged 4-17 from the National Survey of Child and Adolescent Well-Being and 5 analytic methods that adjust for selection factors to estimate the impact of out-of-home placement on children's cognitive skills and behavior problems. Methods included ordinary least squares (OLS) regressions and residualized…

The influence of parenting skills on adolescent outcomes among children affected by maternal HIV/AIDS (N = 118, M age = 13) was investigated. Among families with more frequent family routines, over time adolescents showed lower rates of aggression, anxiety, worry, depression, conduct disorder, binge drinking, and increased self-concept. Among…

The generality of a multilevel factorial model of social competence (SC) for preschool children was tested in a 5-group, multinational sample (N = 1,540) using confirmatory factor analysis. The model fits the observed data well, and tests constraining paths for measured variables to their respective first-order factors across samples also fit…

The study monitored the eye movements of twenty 5-year-old children while reading an alphabet book to examine the manner in which the letters, words, and pictures were fixated and the relation of attention to print to alphabetic knowledge. Children attended little to the print, took longer to first fixate print than illustrations, and labeled…

Five experiments examined 79 newborns' ability to discriminate and categorize a spatial relation, defined by the left-right spatial position of a blinking object-target with respect to a vertical landmark-bar. Three-day-old infants discriminated the up versus low position of an object located on the same side of the landmark-bar (Experiment 1) and…

Scale errors refer to behaviors where young children attempt to perform an action on an object that is too small to effectively accommodate the behavior. The goal of this study was to examine the frequency and characteristics of scale errors in everyday life. To do so, the researchers collected parental reports of children's (age range = 13-21…

This research examined children's questions and the reactions to the answers they receive in conversations with adults. If children actively seek explanatory knowledge, they should react differently depending on whether they receive a causal explanation. Study 1 examined conversations following 6 preschoolers' (ages 2-4 years) causal questions in…

Children around 4, 5, and 7 years old (N = 48) listened to scenarios depicting a child alone or accompanied by another person (mother, father, friend) who encounters an entity that looks like a real or an imaginary fear-inducing creature. Participants predicted and explained each protagonist's fear intensity and suggested coping strategies.…

This study investigated how 4-month-old infants represent sequences: Do they track the statistical relations among specific sequence elements (e.g., AB, BC) or do they encode abstract ordinal positions (i.e., B is second)? Infants were habituated to sequences of 4 moving and sounding elements--3 of the elements varied in their ordinal position…

Connections between adolescents' social information processing (SIP), moral reasoning, and emotion attributions and their reactive and proactive aggressive tendencies were assessed. One hundred mostly African American and Latino 13- to 18-year-olds from a low-socioeconomic-status (SES) urban community and their high school teachers participated.…

This study assessed the unique effects of racial identity and self-esteem on 259 African American adolescents' depressive and anxiety symptoms as they transitioned from the 7th to 8th grades (ages 12-14). Racial identity and self-esteem were strongly correlated with each other for males but not for females. For both males and females, an increase…

Three experiments investigated changes from 15 to 30 months of age in children's (N = 114) mastery of relations between an object and an aperture, supporting surface, or form. When choosing between objects to insert into an aperture, older children selected objects of an appropriate size and shape, but younger children showed little selectivity.…

Gender intensification, an increased pressure for adolescents to conform to culturally sanctioned gender roles, has been posited as an explanation for the emergence of the gender difference in depression. This longitudinal study assessed whether 410 individuals became more stereotypical in their gender-role identity across adolescence and whether…