Research with adults has increasingly moved beyond the focus on a small set of allegedly basic emotions, each associated with a signature facial expression. That expansion has been accompanied by a greater emphasis on the potential variability of emotion concepts across different cultural settings. In this conceptual review of children's…

In Experiment 1, Japanese children (4-, 5-, 7-, and 10-year-olds (n = 78)) and adults (n = 36), answered questions about the possibility of psychogenic bodily reactions, i.e., bodily outcomes with origins in the mind. The 4- and 5-year-old preschoolers typically denied that bodily conditions could originate in mental states. Developmentally,…

There is a paucity of research examining the relative contribution of the different mechanisms of working memory (short-term storage [STM], processing speed) to children's complex memory span. This study served to replicate and extend the few extant studies that have examined the issue. In this study, the relative contribution of three mechanisms…

This study examined developmental differences in, and cognitive bases of, coping flexibility in children with and without ADHD. Younger (age 7 to 8) and older (age 10 to 11) children with and without ADHD (N = 80) responded to hypothetical vignettes about problematic interactions with peers that shifted from controllable to uncontrollable over…

This study investigated age differences in the way in which attentional resources are allocated to expository text and whether these differences are moderated by content preexposure. The organization of the preexposure materials was manipulated to test the hypothesis that a change in organization across two presentations would evoke more…

US children's books are a rich source of information about mental states (Dyer, Shatz, & Wellman, 2000). Examining books from other cultures can determine whether and how such information is conveyed by other languages. Forty US and 40 Japanese picture books for preschoolers were compared. The books were coded for references to mental state…

The present study examined the relationship between sub-clinical depressive symptoms and children's anticipated cognitive and behavioral reactions to two written vignettes depicting emotion-eliciting stressors (i.e., fight with one's best friend and failure at a roller blade contest). Participants (N = 244) ranging in age between 10 and 13 were…

The confounding of chronological and educational age and of schooling and socioeconomic status are persistent problems in the study of the cognitive consequences of schooling. The educational system among the Kharwar in India provides a natural experiment to overcome these problems, since it shows neither source of confounding. The sample…

The present study investigates the contribution of general processing resources as well as other more specific factors to the life-span development of sensorimotor synchronization and its component processes. Within a synchronization tapping paradigm, a group of 286 participants, 6 to 88 years of age, were asked to synchronize finger taps with…