Early research on the socialization of Latino children has posited that mothers exercise authoritarian practices, compared with lateral reasoning (authoritative) strategies emphasized by Anglo mothers. This work aimed to categorize fixed types of parenting practices tied to the mother's personality rather than to culturally bounded contexts; it…

The ability to individuate objects is one of our most fundamental cognitive capacities. Recent research has revealed that when objects vary in color or luminance alone, infants fail to individuate those objects until 11.5 months. However, color and luminance frequently covary in the natural environment, thus providing a more salient and reliable…

The current experiment examined the use of plausibility judgments by children to reject distractors presented on "yes/no" recognition memory tests. Participants studied two lists of word pairs that shared either a categorical or rhyme association, which constituted the global nature of the two study conditions. During the recognition memory tests,…

The spirituality and religiosity of Indonesian Muslim adolescents were examined longitudinally as were the relations of spirituality and religiosity with (mal)adjustment. At Time 1 (T1), 959 seventh-grade Muslim adolescents were screened for selection of a sample; at Time 2 (T2), 183 eighth-grade adolescents participated; and at Time 3 (T3), 300…

Two generations ago, Latino children and families were often defined as disadvantaged, even "culturally deprived," by psychologists, social scientists, and pediatric researchers. Since then, empirical work from several disciplines has yielded remarkable discoveries regarding the strengths of Latino families and resulting benefits for children.…

This article examines age differences from childhood through middle adolescence in the extent to which children include factual and interpretive information in constructing autobiographical memory narratives. Factual information is defined as observable or perceptible information available to all individuals who experience a given event, while…

Structural barriers constrain marginalized youths' development of work salience and vocational expectations. Sociopolitical development (SPD), the consciousness of, and motivation to reduce, sociopolitical inequality, may facilitate the negotiation of structural constraints. A structural model of SPD's impact on work salience and vocational…

This article presents empirical evidence challenging the received wisdom that a nonword-reading deficit is a characteristic trait of disabled readers. On the basis of 2 large-scale empirical studies using the reading-level match design, we argue that a nonword-reading deficit is the consequence of normal developmental differences in word-specific…

We know that social competence contributes to young children's adaptation to, and cognitive learning within, classroom settings. Yet initial evidence is mixed on the social competencies that Latino children bring to kindergarten and the extent to which these skills advance cognitive growth. Building from ecocultural and developmental-risk theory,…

In his commentary, Foster (2010) made arguments at 2 levels, offering a broad critique of statistical or methodological approaches in developmental psychology in general together with critical comments that applied only to our recent article (Dogan, Stockdale, Widaman, & Conger, 2010). Certain criticisms by Foster aimed at the field as a whole…

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the development of college students' major selection and whether and how this choice is associated with their developing ethnic identities. Ninety ethnically diverse college students were interviewed in their first, sophomore, and senior years. Mixed-method analyses revealed 5 theoretically…

Previous research has identified the age prospective memory paradox of age-related declines in laboratory settings in contrast to age benefits in naturalistic settings. Various factors are assumed to account for this paradox, yet empirical evidence on this issue is scarce. In 2 experiments, the present study examined the effect of task setting in…

The relationship between complexity and usefulness can be captured by a U-shaped curve. This comment explores that relationship. Complexity may be useful for one of the main aims of developmental psychology (causal inference) but not for another (description of developmental phenomena). Currently, developmentalists conduct complex analyses that…

The present study examined consistency and inconsistency in adolescents' ethnic identification (i.e., self-reported ethnicity) across the 6 middle-school semesters. The sample (N = 1,589, of whom 46% were boys and 54% were girls) included African American, Asian/Pacific Islander, Caucasian/White, Latino/Latina, Mexican/Mexican American, and…

In 3 studies (N = 188) we tested the hypothesis that children use a perceptual access approach to reason about mental states before they understand beliefs. The perceptual access hypothesis predicts a U-shaped developmental pattern of performance in true belief tasks, in which 3-year-olds who reason about reality should succeed, 4- to 5-year-olds…