Life-purpose orientations can highly influence people's life paths and well-being. However, existing psychological measurements tend to dismiss the need for assessing the individual's life purpose orientations, especially in non-Western cultures. This study sought to develop a new measure to assess purpose orientations specific to the Chinese…

Research shows use of social media (SM) has important implications for college adjustment. However, most studies only focused on Facebook and did not attend to specific use patterns. Drawing on the activity-audience framework of social media use and literature of college adjustment, we examined the associations between use of Facebook, Instagram,…

Socioeconomic disparities in early language are widespread and have long-lasting effects. The aim of this study is to investigate when social gaps in language problems arise and how they change across the first years of schooling. We address this question in two large longitudinal Norwegian datasets: the Behavior Outlook Norwegian Developmental…

This study aimed to explore commonalities among discrimination, stereotyping, and peer-related social experiences of children of immigrants, and to see if these experiences might relate to children's school-based well-being. Two age-based cohorts of 294 children and their immigrant parents from Portugal, the Dominican Republic, and Cambodia were…

In the United States a "civic engagement gap" persists between low-income youth and their higher-income counterparts. To examine the developmental origins of civic engagement in a sample of U.S. children growing up in poverty, a conceptual model was tested employing the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten Class (ECLS-K)…

Read It Again (RIA) is a curriculum for pre-kindergarten (pre-K) classrooms that targets children's development of language and literacy skills. A cluster randomized trial was conducted in which 104 pre-K classrooms in the Appalachian region of the United States were randomly assigned to one of three study conditions: Control (n = 30), RIA only…

Students targeted by homophobic discrimination are at risk for poor academic outcomes, yet few studies have examined how witnessing discrimination affects students. This study examined the impact of direct and indirect experiences of heterosexism on feelings of safety, belongingness, and connectedness among a sample of 1,702 students at a public…

Guided by the social emotional learning framework, this study examined whether early adolescents' social awareness (empathic concern, perspective taking) and self-management (effortful control) would uniquely contribute to early adolescents' subsequent forms of aggression, and whether perceptions of their school climate (friction, cohesion,…

Research suggests that adolescents can benefit from participating in youth programs; however, recruitment and retention are challenging for many programs, and youth living in low-income, urban areas can be the hardest to reach. We investigated motivation to attend a neighborhood-based program for urban adolescents. Participants completed…

This study examined the extent to which socioemotional well-being mediated the relationship between language status and achievement, while exploring variability in this relationship based on informant (student versus teacher reports of socioemotional problems) and native language background (Spanish-speaking English language learners [ELLs] versus…

Video games have the potential to be contexts for moral learning. We investigated whether "Quandary," a video game designed to promote ethical thinking and moral considerations for decision-making, would help promote positive skills such as perspective taking and empathy in adolescents. We examined the effect of playing…