This study investigated the changing relation between emotion and inhibitory control during adolescence. One hundred participants between 11 and 25 years of age performed a go-nogo task in which task-relevant stimuli (letters) were presented at the center of large task-irrelevant images depicting negative, positive, or neutral scenes selected from…

This study attempted to establish and quantify the connections between parenting, offspring psychosocial adjustment, and the epigenome. The participants, 35 African American young adults (19 females and 16 males; age = 17-29.5 years), represented a subsample of a 3-wave longitudinal 15-year study on the developmental trajectories of low-income…

This study assessed young children's understanding of the effects of emotional and physiological states on cognitive performance. Five, 6-, 7-year-olds, and adults (N = 96) predicted and explained how children experiencing a variety of physiological and emotional states would perform on academic tasks. Scenarios included: (a) negative and positive…

Three-, 5-, and 7-year-olds and adults (N = 64) listened to stories depicting 2 protagonists of different ages (infant and child or child and grownup) that encounter an entity that looks like a real (e.g., a snake) or an imaginary (e.g., a ghost) fear-inducing creature. Participants predicted and explained each protagonist's intensity of fear.…

To examine the ontogeny of emotional face processing, event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded from adults and 7-month-old infants while viewing pictures of fearful, happy, and neutral faces. Face-sensitive ERPs at occipital-temporal scalp regions differentiated between fearful and neutral/happy faces in both adults (N170 was larger for fear)…

To examine developmental patterns of and genetic influences on common fears, a 51-item survey was administered to more than 2,600 adolescents and adults, including more than 400 pairs of like-sex twins. Findings suggest significant genetic modulation of developmental patterns in the acquisition and maintenance of some adaptive fears. (Author/RH)

Recent longitudinal data suggest that retrospectively defined earned-secures are not more likely than continuous-secures to have been anxiously attached to their mothers in infancy and indeed experience high-quality maternal parenting in childhood. Such findings leave unanswered the question of why earned-secures report negative childhood…

Four studies explored children's beliefs about the stability of positive traits among three groups. Findings indicated that younger children were more likely than older children or adults to believe that negative physical and psychological traits would change positively, that they could control the expression of a trait, and that extreme positive…

This research investigated 4- through 7-year-olds' and adults' (n=64) concepts about the emotional consequences of desire fulfillment versus desire inhibition in situations where people's desires conflict with prohibitive rules. Results revealed developmental increases in attributing positive or mixed emotions to story characters that make…