The Implicit Association Test (IAT) is increasingly used in developmental research despite minimal evidence of whether children's IAT scores are reliable across time or predictive of behavior. When test-retest reliability and predictive validity have been assessed, the results have been mixed, and because these studies have differed on many…

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…

The goal of this study was to determine whether peer social competence (SC), defined as the capacity to use behavioral, cognitive, and emotional resources in the service of achieving personal goals within preschool peer groups, was related to the type of affiliative subgroups to which children belonged. Two hundred forty Portuguese preschool…

How individuals construct narratives involving attachment figures (e.g., parents) should reflect their representation of those individuals as either comforting or unsupportive (Bowlby, 1969). Similarly, how individuals talk about parents' childhood experiences may also reflect their attachment representation. Sixty-five 13- to 16-year-old…

Conceptual change requires learners to restructure parts of their conceptual knowledge base. Prior research has identified the fragmentation and the integration of knowledge as 2 important component processes of knowledge restructuring but remains unclear as to their relative importance and the time of their occurrence during development. Previous…