Developmental science suggests that the consequences of mental health problems for life-course outcomes may depend on the timing of their onset. This study investigated the extent to which mental health predicted educational attainment at ages 17, 20, and 25 and whether gender moderated the links between mental health and educational attainment.…

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,…

When making decisions, the amount of time remaining matters. When time horizons are long, exploring unknown options can inform later decisions, but when time horizons are short, exploiting known options should be prioritized. While adults and adolescents adapt their exploration in this way, it is unclear when such adaptation emerges and how…

Previous research on identity development among adolescents has focused on the processes involved. However, it is unclear how the sense of identity (synthesis and confusion) develops and how it relates to life satisfaction. This study aims to examine the relationship between sense of identity and life satisfaction among Japanese youth living in…

Our ability to perceive our own and other people's bodies is critical to the success of social interactions. Research has shown that adults have a distorted perception of their own body and those of other adults. However, these studies ask perceivers to estimate for adults with a similar bodily make-up. This study explored the developmental…

The specific strategies that individuals use to regulate their emotions have shown strong associations with various indices of well-being. However, theoretical accounts suggest that strategy use, and the associations between strategy use and well-being, may change across the life span. Attempts have been made to assess whether levels of strategy…

By approximately 6 years of age, children can use time-based visual selection to ignore stationary stimuli, already in the visual field and prioritize the selection of newly arriving stimuli. This ability can be studied using preview search, a version of the visual search paradigm with an added temporal component, in which one set of distractors…

Observers experience complex patterns of visual motion in daily life due to their own movements through space, the movement of objects, and the geometry of surfaces in the visible world. Motion information shapes behavior and brain activity beginning in infancy. And yet most prior behavioral research has focused on how children process only one…

Prior research has demonstrated that religiousness is associated with and potentially facilitative of self-regulation, though most of the research has been cross-sectional. The present longitudinal study examined dynamic relations between religiousness development and self-regulation formation from early adolescence into young adulthood. The…

This research examined how 5-, 8-, and 11-month-olds with female primary caregivers mentally represented faces using a familiarization procedure similar to real-world experience in which infants have greater exposure to female faces aged 21-39 years than other face types. We predicted infants would form weighted representations of faces (i.e.,…

The authors examined the development of self-esteem across the life span. Data came from a German longitudinal study with 3 assessments across 4 years of a sample of 2,509 individuals ages 14 to 89 years. The self-esteem measure used showed strong measurement invariance across assessments and birth cohorts. Latent growth curve analyses indicated…

To examine whether implicit social cognition is developmentally stable or variable, this study investigated three primary types of implicit social cognition (self-esteem, the gender-science stereotype, and racial attitude) across 2 years in a sample of Chinese adolescents and emerging adults (N = 608; 56% female; 15- to 27-year-olds). Rank-order…

When navigating unfamiliar social environments, it is important to identify who is powerful. Determining who has power can be challenging because observers may have limited social information, and because people achieve influence for many reasons. In experiments with 3- to 5-year-old children (n = 192) and adults (n = 32), we investigated the…

Using data from the first national probability sample of Black, White, and Latinx sexual minority people in the United States, we examined whether and how sexual identity development timing and pacing differs across demographic subgroups at the intersections of cohort, sex, sexual identity, and race/ethnicity. Among a sample of 1,491 participants…

Guided by the life course perspective, this study investigated the developmental antecedents of contact, closeness/warmth, and negativity in young adults' relationships with their parents. Taking the developmental systems approach, we considered interindividual differences in not only initial levels of parenting quality in early adolescence (Grade…