Individual differences in emotion, cognitions, and task choice following achievement failure are found among four- to seven-year-olds. However, neither performance deterioration during failure nor generalization after failure--aspects of the helpless pattern in 10-year-olds--have been reliably demonstrated in this age group. In the present study,…

Two studies addressed the normative aspects of attachments to mothers and fathers in middle childhood. Using both cross-sectional and longitudinal comparisons, we tested the hypothesis that children show no changes in perceptions of availability of attachment figures across the later middle childhood years, but do utilize attachment figures less…

In a short-term longitudinal study of 432 first-grade children, we examined whether gender interacted with contextual differences (school-level poverty) and individual differences at school entry (behavioral problems, emotional problems, and social competence) to predict changes in peer physical and relational victimization and receipt of…

We examined individual differences in developmental trajectories of emotion situation knowledge (ESK), at three time points throughout elementary school in a sample of children from economically disadvantaged families. Results showed that ESK and the subscales of joy, fear, anger, shame and interest exhibited positive growth from the first to the…

This short-term longitudinal study examined relations between emotion knowledge and social functioning in a sample of low-income kindergarten and 1st graders. Individual differences in spontaneous emotion naming and emotion recognition skills were used to predict children's social functioning at school, including peer-nominated sociometric status,…