It is theoretically plausible that social anxiety (SA) and social relationships (SR) can influence each other. However, the available empirical evidence is inconsistent, leading to substantial uncertainty regarding the cross-lagged relations between SA and SR. This meta-analysis systematically integrates data from 107 longitudinal studies,…

Kim and Opfer (2017) report data that demonstrate children produce a negatively accelerating (e.g., logarithmic) response pattern in the unbounded number-line task. This pattern of results is the opposite of those generally reported for the unbounded number-line task (e.g., Cohen & Blanc-Goldhammer, 2011; Cohen & Sarnecka, 2014). We…

In this commentary, I delineate several questions raised by the Hammond and Drummond (2019) paper: (a) to why there seems to be an association between state positive emotion and prosocial behavior in young children, and if and how early positively tinged prosocial behavior provides a pathway to (b) later prosocial behavior more generally…

In this article, we integrate two constructionist approaches--the theory of constructed emotion and rational constructivism--to introduce several novel hypotheses for understanding emotional development. We first discuss the hypothesis that emotion categories are abstract and conceptual, whose instances share a goal-based function in a particular…

The 3 papers by Hammond and Drummond (2019), LoBue and Adolph (2019), and Stern, Botdorf, Cassidy, and Riggins (2019) bring into focus some of the exciting and promising new directions emerging in the field of emotional development. This commentary urges researchers moving in these new directions to leverage what is already known about emotional…

We examined the development of children's positive and negative attitudes toward other-gender peers over 1 year, and explored the longitudinal social consequences of holding positive or negative attitudes on the beholder of these attitudes. Participants were 206 second graders (Mage = 7.18 yrs, SD = .56, 50% girls) and 206 fourth graders…

In recent years, an increased interest in the importance of children's ability to regulate emotions in socially adaptive ways has driven considerable research on the development of emotion regulation. A widely studied emotion regulation strategy known as "expressive suppression" (ES), in which a person attempts to conceal…

Children often answer questions when they do not have the requisite knowledge or when they do not understand them. We examined whether "ground rules" instruction--to say "I don't know," to tell the truth, and to correct the interviewer when necessary--assisted children in applying those rules during an interview about a past…

This review challenges the traditional interpretation of infants' and young children's responses to three types of potentially "fear-inducing" stimuli--snakes and spiders, heights, and strangers. The traditional account is that these stimuli are the objects of infants' earliest developing fears. We present evidence against the…

This study aimed to test a 5-wave sequential mediation model linking maternal mind-mindedness during infancy to children's school readiness in kindergarten through a serial mediation involving child language and effortful control in toddlerhood and the preschool years. Among a sample of 204 mother-child dyads, we assessed maternal mind-mindedness…

Our goal in the present study was to evaluate the claim that category labels affect children's judgments of visual similarity. We presented preschool children with discriminable and identical sets of animal pictures and asked them to make perceptual judgments in the presence or absence of labels. Our findings indicate that children who are asked…

In this review, we evaluate developmental and personality research with the aim of determining whether the personality trait of conscientiousness can be identified in children and adolescents. After concluding that conscientiousness does emerge in childhood, we discuss the developmental origins of conscientiousness with a specific focus on…

In this article, we contrast evolutionary and psychobiological models of individual development to address the idea that individual development occurring in prototypically risky and unsupportive environments can be understood as adaptation. We question traditional evolutionary explanations of individual development, calling on the principle of…

In many instances, children and older adults show similar difficulties in reward-based learning and outcome monitoring. These impairments are most pronounced in situations in which reward is uncertain (e.g., probabilistic reward schedules) and if outcome information is ambiguous (e.g., the relative value of outcomes has to be learned).…

Two experiments were used to investigate the scope of imitation by testing whether 36-month-olds can learn to produce a categorization strategy through observation. After witnessing an adult sort a set of objects by a visible property (their color; Experiment 1) or a nonvisible property (the particular sounds produced when the objects were shaken;…