Twenty-eight 4-month-olds' and twenty-two 20-year-olds' attention to object-context relations was investigated using a common eye-movement paradigm. Infants and adults scanned both objects and contexts. Infants showed equivalent preferences for animals and vehicles and for congruent and incongruent object-context relations overall, more fixations…

Psychologists have long debated the role of early experience in social and cognitive development. However, traditional approaches to studying this issue are not well positioned to address this debate. The authors present simulations that indicate that the associations between early experiences and later outcomes should approach different…

Research on preschoolers' selective learning has mostly been conducted in English-speaking countries. We compared the performance of Turkish preschoolers (who are exposed to a language with evidential markers), Chinese preschoolers (known to be advanced in executive skills), and English preschoolers on an extended selective trust task (N = 144).…

In the current study, the author tested a model of risk for anxiety in fearful toddlers characterized by the toddlers' regulation of the intensity of withdrawal behavior across a variety of contexts. Participants included low-risk 24-month-old toddlers (N = 111) followed longitudinally each year through the fall of their kindergarten year. The key…

Some children show emotion that is not consistent with normative appraisal of the context and can therefore be defined as context inappropriate (CI). The authors used individual growth curve modeling and hierarchical multiple regression analyses to examine whether CI anger predicts differences in hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis activity, as…

Maintains that (1) research questions must address intra- and extraorganism contextual relations and must be multidisciplinary in scope; (2) research must be sensitive to contextual variability and individual differences; and (3) scholars must develop empirically generative models linking the development of human beings with changing contexts. (BC)

Analyzed the situational specificity of the differential development of inhibition in three social settings. Inhibition toward strangers was stable during the preschool and kindergarten years, even for an unselected sample of children. Inhibition toward peers showed a lower stability over the same age period, indicating differential and…

A biopsychosocial model of the development of adolescent chronic conduct problems is presented and supported through a review of empirical findings. The model posits that biological dispositions and sociocultural contexts place certain children at risk in early life but that life experiences with parents, peers, and social institutions increment…

This study examined role of shared family context in understanding differential parenting. Findings indicated that child age was the strongest child-specific predictor of positivity and differential positivity. Lower SES, marital dissatisfaction, and larger family size related to higher differential positivity. Children's temperament related to…

Two experiments tested a self-regulation model of risk-taking among third through eighth graders in which inappropriate risk taking is associated with overconfidence, succumbing to dysregulating influences, and insensitivity to outcomes. Found that ability beliefs, preference for thrill seeking, peer nomination, competitiveness, and interest…