Children who show elevated levels of indirect aggression (IA) from childhood to adolescence are at increased risks of experiencing detrimental outcomes. Some studies suggest that psychopathic traits could act as a predisposing vulnerability in the development of IA, but the contributions of all three dimensions of psychopathic traits in explaining…

The goal of the current study was to investigate whether children's social information processing (SIP) predicts their conversations with peers, including both their remarks to peers and peers' remarks to them. When children (N = 156; 55% male; United States; Representation by Race: 60% African American, 18% Mixed race, 15% European American, 7%…

Children make choices between generosity and greed every day. Often they must also choose between confession or denial of antisocial acts like greed, thereby displaying either honesty or hypocrisy. Such choices pose cognitive challenges that, in theory, might reflect children's developing social-cognitions and affect their daily social lives and…

This study examined the relations between normative developmental changes of familism values and later internalizing and externalizing behaviors in Latinx adolescents from an emerging immigrant community. The sample included 547 Latinx adolescents (55.4% female; baseline M[subscript age] = 12.80; SD = 1.03) residing in the Southeastern United…

Guided by paternal investment theory (PIT), the current research examines the effects of fathers on daughters' expectations for men in adulthood, and the role of these expectations in mediating women's short-term (casual or uncommitted) sexual behavior. Using a genetically informed differential sibling-exposure design (N = 223 sister pairs from…

Indirect aggression has been associated with antisocial personality traits like Machiavellianism, but there is a lack of evidence on their longitudinal development across adolescence. Therefore, the joint developmental trajectories of adolescent indirect aggression and Machiavellianism across 3 years of high school (Grades 10 to 12) were…

Data from 790 older school-age (M[subscript age] = 10.2 years, SD = 1.2 years) girls (N = 427) and boys from Barranquilla, Colombia (N = 449) and Montréal, Canada (N = 331) were used to replicate findings reported by Valdivia et al. (2005). This prior study revealed contextual variations in the association between two measures of social behavior,…

Parental conflict is a well-established predictor of child maladjustment. Most research, however, has not considered how the couple's positivity-negativity interaction ratio (i.e., the ability to compensate for negative behaviors with positive) may be linked with child adjustment. We examined interparental positivity-negativity interaction ratios…

Antisocial peer behavior and low parental knowledge of adolescents' activities are key interpersonal risk factors for adolescent substance use. However, how the magnitude of associations between these risk factors and substance use may vary across adolescence remains less well understood. The present study examined the age-varying associations of…

Models of differential susceptibility hypothesize that neural function may be a marker of differential susceptibility to context, but no studies have tested this hypothesis. Using a sample of 310 young men from low-income urban neighborhoods, this study investigated amygdala reactivity to facial expressions as a moderator of the relations between…

Callous-unemotional (CU) behavior has been linked to behavior problems in children and adolescents. However, few studies have examined whether CU behavior in "early childhood" predicts behavior problems or CU behavior in "late childhood". This study examined whether indicators of CU behavior at ages 2-4 predicted aggression,…

Although social difficulties have been identified as sequelae of children's experiences with interparental conflict and insecurity, little is known about the specific mechanisms underlying their vulnerability to social problems. Guided by emotional security theory, this study tested the hypothesis that children's emotional insecurity mediates…

An approach-avoidance model of social withdrawal (Asendorpf, 1990) identifies 3 types of social withdrawal including shyness, unsociability, and avoidance. Each appears to be uniquely associated with varying indicators of maladjustment in emerging adulthood (Nelson, 2013) but little, if any, work has been done to see how they might be linked to…

The current study examined longitudinal cross-lagged associations between prosocial TV (content and time) and prosocial and aggressive behavior during adolescence, and explored the mediating role of empathic concern and self-regulation. Participants were 441 adolescents who reported on their 3 favorite TV shows at 2 time points, approximately 2…

This longitudinal study investigated whether variation in the oxytocin receptor gene (OXTR) and early parent-child interactions predicted later empathic behavior in 84 toddlers at high or low familial risk for autism spectrum disorder. Two well-studied OXTR single-nucleotide polymorphisms, rs53576 and rs2254298, were examined. Parent-child…