With a large and diverse sample of children from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development, the role of infant-mother attachment security as a protective factor against the development of children's anxious and aggressive behaviors at first grade was examined. When child's sex,…

Mothers' perceptions of marital quality and depressed mood and children's attachment security and friendship quality were assessed in the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development. One month after their birth and again when the children were 3 and 4 years old and in first and third…

Within-family associations between changes in income and changes in the home environment during infancy and early childhood were examined using data from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (n = 1364). Linear and nonlinear (i.e., semilog) specifications were estimated for…

The infant's participation in sequences of joint activity that require visual attention is usually seen as an outcome of and evidence for the existence of particular infant psychological competencies. In a review of the relevant literature, we suggest that what is presupposed in most theories of joint attention is the role that shared social…

In this commentary, I consider several strengths of the position adopted by Racine and Carpendale (2007), but suggest that the authors are in danger of overstating their case. In doing so, they appear to sideline an issue that should be pivotal for accounts of joint attention: how does a child come to arrive at an understanding that people, both…

In responding to the commentaries from Hobson (2007), Moore (2007) and Rakoczy (2007), we first discuss the commonalities our approach has with other theories and then elaborate on the nature of shared practices and their relationship with language and understanding. We then address views of representation, arguing against an empiricist approach…

This paper documents the occurrence of form variability through diminutive "wordplay", and examines whether this variability facilitates or hinders morphology acquisition in a richly inflected language. First, in a longitudinal speech corpus of eight Russian mothers conversing with their children (1.6-3.6), and with an adult, the use of diminutive…

While the productive role of social interaction between peers in promoting cognitive development has been clearly established, the communicative processes through which this is achieved is less clearly understood. Earlier work has established that different types of conversation become established between children as they work together on a…

Two studies are presented in which favourable and unfavourable conditions for children's meta-cognitive monitoring processes are examined. Previously reported findings have shown that especially children's uncertainty monitoring (in contrast to certainty monitoring) poses specific problems for children in their elementary school years. When…

The study investigated the dynamic relation between contingency learning and heart rate with risk and non-risk babies 5- to 10-months-old. Four groups were compared in a two contingency treatments (contingent, yoked) x two risk status design. Concurrent heart rate was monitored during three phases of a contingency learning task (baseline,…

It has often been claimed that children's mathematical understanding is based on their ability to reason logically, but there is no good evidence for this causal link. We tested the causal hypothesis about logic and mathematical development in two related studies. In a longitudinal study, we showed that (a) 6-year-old children's logical abilities…

Attitudes to institutional authority, strength of support for moral values and maturity of socio-moral reasoning have all been identified as potential predictors of adolescent delinquency. In a sample of 12-15-year-old boys (N = 789), after checking for effects of age, IQ, social background and ethnicity, self-reported delinquency was…

We respond to the commentary by Brusten, Stams, and Gibbs (2007) on the research by Tarry and Emler (2007), arguing for the appropriateness of key design decisions--studying delinquency as assessed by self-report in a sample of 12- to 15-year-old males. We argue that "known-group" methods for assessing involvement in delinquency, the major…

Emler, Renwick, and Malone (1983) argued against a developmental interpretation of the Defining Issues Test (DIT), suggesting instead that it actually measures a social psychological phenomenon--political identification. On the other hand, Sanders, Lubinski, and Benbow (1995) have argued that DIT scores measure intellectual ability. In this study,…

The statement matching paradigm was used to examine how 10- to 13-year-olds categorized adults when both ethnicity and gender varied across targets. Forty-seven children watched a PowerPoint presentation of a conversation involving two Black men, two Black women, two White men and two White women. Each slide displayed the speaker's picture, name…