This study examined whether children understand that people selectively conceal or express emotion depending upon the context. We prepared two contexts for a verbal display task for 70 first-graders, 80 third-graders, 64 fifth-graders, and 71 adults. In both contexts, protagonists had negative feelings because of the behavior of the other…

This study examined longitudinal relations between early measures of prosocial action in infancy as well as cognitive and social-cognitive abilities, and the sharing behaviour of preschool children. The results reveal relations between delay-of-gratification at 24 months and inhibitory control at 30 months, and children's sharing at 5 years.…

The purpose of this research was to determine the influence of two subcomponents of auditory short-term memory on the developmental trajectories of behavior problems. The sample included 7,058 children from the NLSY79--Children and Young Adult survey between the ages 5 and 14 years. Results suggested that anxious/depressed behavior increases…

The current study examined the stability of temperament over time. Observers and mothers rated child behavior at eight timepoints across three assessment waves (8, 15, and 30 months of age). Internal consistency reliability of aggregates of the eight observer reports and eight mother reports were high. When considering single timepoint…

Institutional rearing adversely affects children's development, but the extent to which specific characteristics of the institutional context and the quality of care provided contribute to problematic development remains unclear. In this study, 72 preschoolers institutionalised for at least 6 months were evaluated by their caregiver using the…

Two main theoretical constructs seek to describe the elaborated sense of time that may be a uniquely human attribute: diachronic thinking (the ability to think about the past and use that information to predict future events) and event ordering (the ability to sequence events in temporal order). Researchers utilize various tasks to measure the…

Moderate, yet relatively consistent, associations between cognitive performance and shyness have been reported throughout the child and adult literatures. The current study assessed longitudinal associations between cognition (i.e., executive functioning) and parent-report temperamental shyness from infancy to early childhood and used temporal…

The articles in this special issue provide a complex picture of acquisition in bilinguals in which the factors that contribute to patterns of performance in bilingual children's two languages are myriad and diverse. The processes and contours of development in bilingual children are influenced, not only by the quantity, quality, and contexts…

Children who enter school with limited proficiency in the language of instruction face a range of challenges in negotiating this new context, yet limited data have been available to describe the early developmental outcomes of this subpopulation in the Australian context. The Australian Early Development Index (AEDI) is a teacher-rated checklist…

This study explored unique constructs of fantasy orientation and whether there are developmental benefits for fantasy-oriented children. By age 3, children begin developing executive functions, with some children exhibiting high fantasy orientation in their cognitions and behaviors. Preschoolers ("n" = 106) completed fantasy orientation…

The current study examined interactions among genetic influences and children's early environments on the development of externalizing behaviors from 18 months to 6 years of age. Participants included 233 families linked through adoption (birth parents and adoptive families). Genetic influences were assessed by birth parent temperamental…

The association of three different strategies of maternal control (behavioral, psychological, and physical), and maternal warmth with children's externalizing behaviors were analyzed in an observational study of 3-year-old children in Turkey ("N" = 123). The results indicated that (i) mothers exercised all three types of control…

There is considerable knowledge of parental socialization processes that directly and indirectly influence the development of children's emotion self-regulation, but little understanding of the specific beliefs and values that underlie parents' socialization approaches. This study examined multiple aspects of parents' self-reported…

This special section on the development of emotion regulation highlights several important new directions for research. Specifically, the findings of these studies indicate that: (1) emotion regulation develops across the lifespan and not just in early childhood and does so in complex ways, (2) it is necessary to distinguish among emotions to…

Dysregulated cortisol is a risk factor for poor health outcomes. Children of distressed mothers exhibit dysregulated cortisol, yet it is unclear whether maternal distress predicts cortisol activity in later developmental stages. This longitudinal study examined the prospective relation between maternal distress during late childhood (9-12 years)…