Over the past decade or so, developments in language comprehension research in the domain of cognitive aging have converged on support for resilience in older adults with regard to situation model updating when reading texts. Several studies have shown that even though age-related declines in language comprehension appear at the level of the…

This special section on the development of emotion regulation highlights several important new directions for research. Specifically, the findings of these studies indicate that: (1) emotion regulation develops across the lifespan and not just in early childhood and does so in complex ways, (2) it is necessary to distinguish among emotions to…

The aim of the current article is to extend prior conceptualizing by presenting a model of social and emotional competence that recognizes both the mechanisms and the manifestations of social and emotional competence. The Social and Emotional Competence School Model draws together conceptual underpinnings from the social and emotional competence…

We provide evidence for multidirectionality, variability, and plasticity in the nature and direction of change in physical health, cognitive functioning, and well-being during the middle years of the life course. The picture of well-being in midlife based on longitudinal data from the Midlife in the United States (MIDUS) study is a more positive…

The study of development vacillates between a focus on change (i.e., studying how and why infants are so different from adults) and excitement about early competence and continuity (i.e., studying how capable infants are, and marveling at how similar they turn out to be to adults). The study of memory development has been no exception. This…

We examined support and conflict with parents and close friends in a sample of ethnically diverse young adults (European-, Asian-, Cuban-, Latin-, and Mexican Americans). College students (N = 495) completed six subscales from the Network of Relationships Inventory (NRI; Furman & Buhrmester, 1985). Friends were rated higher than parents on…

We often have a feeling that we know ourselves much better than others know us, coupled with a feeling that our minds are not transparent to other people. In this article we begin to explore cultural variations in the development of this feeling. Children in Britain and Japan aged 7, 9 and 11 years judged how well they and how well their…

Although cultural and subcultural differences during the transition to adulthood have been examined, important factors like rural/urban upbringing and gender differences among Canadian emerging adults have been neglected. The present study explored developmentally significant tasks including criteria for adulthood, beliefs about religiosity, and…

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…

The emotional responses to achievement contexts of 149 preschool children from three cultural groups were observed. The children were Japanese (N = 32), African American (N = 63) and White American of mixed European ancestry (N = 54). The results showed that Japanese children differed from American children in expressing less shame, pride, and…

This study compared Mainland Chinese, Chinese American and European American mothers' self-reported emotional expression within the family. Mothers of 3-year-old European American (n = 40), Chinese American (n = 39) and Mainland Chinese (n = 36) children (n = 20 girls per group) completed the Self-Expressiveness in the Family Questionnaire (SEFQ),…

Children's agentic and communal goals were examined in hypothetical "conflict," "group entry," "victimization," and "positive" situations (N = 310, 11-13 years). Multilevel modeling was used to separate the variation in goals to the between- and within- (i.e., situation-specific) individual levels. About half of the variation in goals was due to…

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,…

Chaotic home systems have been linked with children's adverse psychological and academic outcomes. But, as they represent a departure from the suburban ideal of space, order, and family cohesiveness and stability, they should also be linked with low support for survival values. Using longitudinal data from the 1970 British Cohort Study (BCS70)…

Growth mixture modeling (GMM) is a method for identifying multiple unobserved sub-populations, describing longitudinal change within each unobserved sub-population, and examining differences in change among unobserved sub-populations. We provide a practical primer that may be useful for researchers beginning to incorporate GMM analysis into their…