The authors examined the developmental trajectories of children's early letter knowledge in relation to measures spanning and encompassing their prior language-related and cognitive measures and environmental factors and their subsequent Grade 1 reading achievement. Letter knowledge was assessed longitudinally at ages 4.5, 5.0, 5.5, and 6.5…

In the present longitudinal study, early adopted children (N = 160) were followed from infancy to adolescence to assess the influence of previous and concurrent factors on the children's social development. This study allowed for more conclusive evidence of the influence of early and concurrent rearing experiences and temperament on…

A large literature has documented the influence of family economic resources on child development, yet income's effects in middle childhood have been understudied. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (N = 3,551), the author examined the influence of family income in early and middle childhood on academic skills and…

The authors examined the effects of heavy adolescent marijuana use on employment, marriage, and family formation and tested both dropping out of high school and adult marijuana use as potential mediators of these associations among a community sample of African Americans followed longitudinally from age 6 to age 32-33. They used propensity …

Classroom emotional climate was hypothesized to moderate psychosocial adjustment in 1st grade for children with an early childhood history of anxious solitude. Participants were 1,364 children in the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) Study of Early Child Care and their mothers, child-care providers, and teachers.…

Improvements in 5- and 7-year-olds' acquisition and retention of related concept pairings were examined when additional similarities and differences between pair members were provided. Using a standard paired-associate learning paradigm, children learned 18 related picture pairs; some of the children either were given or produced additional…

The present study examined children's cognitive engagement with television as a function of the continuity of central or incidental content and whether this varied with age and clinical status. In Experiment 1, 9- to 11-year-old children's response times on a secondary task were slower the later a probe occurred in a sequence of central events,…

The authors examined how visual selection mechanisms may relate to developing cognitive functions in infancy. Twenty-two 3-month-old infants were tested in 2 tasks on the same day: perceptual completion and visual search. In the perceptual completion task, infants were habituated to a partly occluded moving rod and subsequently presented with …

Multiple dimensions of adolescents' connectedness with their families were investigated among 489 9th-grade students (M = 14.86 years) from families with Mexican, Chinese, and European backgrounds. Participants reported on various aspects of their family relationships and completed diary checklists of daily behaviors for a 2-week period. …

On average, men outperform women on mental rotation tasks. Even boys as young as 4 1/2 perform better than girls on simplified spatial transformation tasks. The goal of our study was to explore ways of improving 5-year-olds' performance on a spatial transformation task and to examine the strategies children use to solve this task. We found that…

Reports an error in "Does Barbie make girls want to be thin? The effect of experimental exposure to images of dolls on the body image of 5- to 8-year-old girls" by Helga Dittmar, Emma Halliwell and Suzanne Ive ("Developmental Psychology," 2006 Mar, Vol 42[2], 283-292). A substantive error occurs in the Body shape dissatisfaction section on page…

The authors examined the structure and content of adults' sense of spiritual identity by analyzing semistructured interviews with 13 spiritually devout men and 15 devout women, ages 22 to 72. "Individuals' responses to the Role-Related Identity Interview" (G. T. Sorell, M. J. Montgomery, & N. A. Busch-Rossnagel, 1997b) were content analyzed and…

This study examined 3- to 5-year-olds' (N = 128; 54% girls) ability to discriminate emotional fantasy and reality. Children viewed images depicting fantastic or real events that elicited several emotions, reported whether each event could occur, and rated their emotional reaction to the image. Children were also administered the Play Behavior…

Research has indicated that differential parental treatment is linked to differences in externalizing symptomology (EXT) across siblings, even those siblings who are genetically identical. However, the direction of causation and longitudinal significance of this relationship remains unclear. Thus, in the present study, the authors examined 486 …

This study compared the contribution of genes and environment to teacher-rated reactive and proactive aggression in 6-year-old twin pairs (172 pairs: 55 monozygotic girls, 48 monozygotic boys, 33 dizygotic girls, 36 dizygotic boys). Genetic effects accounted for 39% of the variance of reactive aggression and for 41% of the variance of proactive…