We explore how children and adults actively experiment within the physical world to achieve different epistemic goals. In our experiment, one hundred one 4- to 10-year-old children and 24 adults either passively observed or used a touchscreen interface to actively interact with objects in a dynamic physical microworld with the goal of inferring…

The goal of this article was to examine gender-typed behavior longitudinally and to consider its relationship with sexual orientation in adulthood. Data were from 10,624 respondents who completed Wave 1 (adolescence), Wave 3 (emerging adulthood), and Wave 4 (early adulthood) of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health. First,…

Conflict adaptation is key in how children self-regulate and assert cognitive control in a given situation compared with a previous experience. In the current study, we analyzed event-related potentials (ERPs) to identify age-related differences in conflict adaptation. Participants of different ages (5-year-old children, 10-year-old children, and…

Two experiments investigated 18-month-olds' understanding of the link between visual perception and emotion. Infants watched an adult perform actions on objects. An emoter then expressed neutral affect or anger toward the adult in response to the adult's actions. Subsequently, infants were given 20 s to interact with each object. In Experiment 1,…

Three- and 4-year-old children were asked to judge which of a set of 3 lines was the longest, both independently and in the face of an inaccurate consensus among adult informants. Children were invariably accurate when making independent judgments but sometimes deferred to the inaccurate consensus. Nevertheless, the deference displayed by both age…

Homosexual adults tend to be more gender nonconforming than heterosexual adults in some of their behaviors, feelings, and interests. Retrospective studies have also shown large differences in childhood gender nonconformity, but these studies have been criticized for possible memory biases. The authors studied an indicator of childhood gender…

The selection of acts from the stream of infant behavior is examined. Adults (140 mothers, fathers, and other men and women) viewed videotapes of 9-, 15-, and 21-month-old infants. One half noted meaningful acts; the other half noted intentionally communicative acts. Parents selected more meaningful acts than nonparents and agreed more about…

Studies the aggressiveness of over 600 subjects, their parents, and their children over a 22-year period. Subjects who were more aggressive 8-year-olds were more aggressive 30-year-olds, exhibiting serious antisocial behavior as adults. The stability of aggression across generations within a family was also high. (Author/CB)

This study used data from the Berkeley Guidance Study (1954) to identify children with a pattern of temper tantrums in late childhood (ages 8-10) and to trace the continuities and consequences of this behavioral style across the subsequent 30 years of their lives. Life course continuities in behavioral style were found for both sexes. (Author/BN)

Purposes of study were (1) to explore differences in quality of child-child and adult-child interactions and (2) to examine preschool children's reasoning about their own compliant behaviors. Data are discussed in support of theorists' assertions regarding difference in peer and adult interaction and literature on children's reasoning and…