The assessment of psychosocial strengths in children and adolescents has predominately focused on the measurement of single traits and constructs, such as grit (Christopoulou, Lakioti, Pezirkianidis, Karakasidou, & Stalikas, 2018), optimism (Oberle, Guhn, Gadermann, Thomson, & Schonert-Reichl, 2018), hope (Pedrotti, 2018), and gratitude…

Life span developmental psychology proposes that the ability to create a coherent life narrative does not develop until early adolescence. Using a novel methodology, 10-, 12-, and 14-year-old participants were asked to tell their life stories aloud to a researcher. Later, participants separated their transcribed narratives into self-identified…

Certain psychopathologies are often linked to dysregulation of specific emotions (e.g., anxiety is associated with dysregulation of fear), but few studies have examined how regulatory repertoires for specific emotions (e.g., the strategies a person uses to regulate fear) relate to psychopathology, and fewer still have examined this in childhood. A…

Alleviating disadvantage in low-income environments predicts higher cognitive abilities during early childhood. It is less established whether family income continues to predict cognitive growth in later childhood or whether there may even be bidirectional dynamics. Notably, living in poverty may moderate income-cognition dynamics. In this study,…

Background: Whereas research has indicated that children with Down syndrome (DS) imitate demonstrated actions over short delays, it is presently unknown whether children with DS recall information over lengthy delays at levels comparable with typically developing (TD) children matched on developmental age. Method: In the present research, 10…

Research on family socialization of positive emotion has primarily focused on the infant and toddler stages of development, and relied on observations of parent-child interactions in highly structured laboratory environments. Little is known about how children's spontaneous expressions of positive emotion are maintained in the uncontrolled…

High rates of anxiety and depression are reported among youth with autism spectrum disorders. These conditions are generally assessed using measures validated for typically developing youth. Few studies have investigated their validity for autism spectrum disorders, which is crucial for accurate assessment and the provision of proper treatment.…

The present study tests two predictions stemming from the hypothesis that a source of difficulty with rational numbers is interference from whole number magnitude knowledge. First, inhibitory control should be an independent predictor of fraction understanding, even after controlling for working memory. Second, if the source of interference is…

Children seem able to efficiently interpret a variety of linguistic cues during speech comprehension, yet have difficulty interpreting sources of nonlinguistic and paralinguistic information that accompany speech. The current study asked whether (paralinguistic) voice-activated role knowledge is rapidly interpreted in coordination with a…

Research among adults has demonstrated concurrent and prospective negative associations between TV viewing and mental health, yet little research has examined these associations among African American and Latino youth or examined the role of children's involvement with TV and parental mediation of TV viewing via coviewing. The purpose of the…

This study investigates whether age-related changes in the structure of 5 complex working memory (WM) tasks (a) reflect a general or domain specific system, (b) follows a similar trajectory across different age spans, and (c) contribute domain general or domain specific resources to achievement measures. The study parsed the sample (N = 2,471)…

Reduced feedback during practice has been shown to be detrimental to movement accuracy in children but not in young adults. We hypothesized that the reduced accuracy is attributable to reduced movement parameter learning, but not pattern learning, in children. A rapid arm movement task that required the acquisition of a motor pattern scaled to…

The link between emotion regulation and academic achievement is well documented. Less is known about specific emotion regulation strategies that promote learning. Six- to 13-year-olds ("N" = 126) viewed a sad film and were instructed to reappraise the importance, reappraise the outcome, or ruminate about the sad events; another group…

The purpose of this study was to (a) understand foster parents' perceptions of their parental roles and their involvement in their foster children's academic work; (b) understand their perceptions of their experiences in interacting with their foster children's public school; and (c) provide suggestions to enhance the parent-school collaboration…

This study examines civic identity (i.e., civic values and responsibility to community and to people) in middle childhood, a previously unexplored developmental period in the civic engagement literature, and how adults and socialization processes in the home and school contexts are associated with children's civic outcomes. Middle childhood is a…