This study examined the development of caregiver mind-mindedness--defined as the propensity to see one's child as an agent with an independent mind--across the first 1,000 days of life. At four timepoints (i.e., third trimester of pregnancy, 4, 14, and 24 months postpartum), 384 first-time mothers (M[subscript age] = 32.55, SD = 3.63 years) and…

While considerable research has examined gender development in middle childhood, little longitudinal work has been conducted at this time to indicate whether, for example, youth who show more or less gender conformity at one point continue to do so later. The present study investigated the consistency of gender identity and preferences for…

The role of executive function skills and motivation in supporting children's academic achievement is well-documented, but the vast majority of evidence is from high-income countries. Classrooms in sub-Saharan Africa tend to be large, teacher-driven, and lecture-focused, which may provide extra challenges for children to stay engaged in the…

Early spatial skills predict the development of later spatial and mathematical skills. Yet, it is unclear how comprehension of the words that capture spatial relations, words like behind and under, might be associated with children's early spatial and mathematics skills. The current study addressed this question by conducting a moderated mediation…

Extensive evidence and theory suggest that the development of motor skills during infancy and early childhood initiates a "developmental cascade" for cognitive abilities, such as reading and math. Motor skills are closely connected with the development of spatial cognition, an ability that supports deductive reasoning. Despite the…

The thrifty phenotype and fetal overnutrition hypotheses are two developmental hypotheses that originated from the "developmental origins of health and disease" (DOHaD) perspective. The DOHaD posits that exposures experienced prenatally and early in life may influence health outcomes through altering form and function of internal organs…

Inhibitory control has been widely studied in association with social and academic adjustment. However, prior studies have generally overlooked the potential heterotypic continuity of inhibitory control and how this could affect assessment and understanding of its development. In the present study, we systematically considered heterotypic…

Numerous event-related potential (ERP) studies have examined adults' neural responses to child emotional expressions to understand the neurobiological mechanisms contributing to caregiving. It is unclear, however, whether one emotion evokes an enhanced response across components, and whether this pattern differs based on parent status or other…

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,…

This study examines the relations among parental beliefs and practices about mathematics, children's beliefs about mathematics, participants' gender, and family socioeconomic status (SES). The study was conducted in Chile, a country with significant gender gaps in standardized test results in mathematics, with boys receiving significantly higher…

Little is known about the naturalistic development of mindfulness in adolescence and how it relates to changes in emotional well-being. The current longitudinal study examined the development of one dimension of mindfulness, nonreactivity to difficult inner experience (or in more colloquial terms, being able to notice, but "take a step…

This study explores whether adolescents' societal explanations regarding the causes of poverty are associated with distributive justice reasoning. Survey data were collected from 425 6th-12th graders who answered questions concerning the causes of poverty and a vignette depicting a hypothetical class project designed to assess the degree to which…

Decision-making impairments during emerging adulthood confer risk for challenges in social and occupational roles and may increase the odds of developing health problems. Childhood maltreatment is related to maladaptation in cognitive and affective domains (e.g., executive functioning, emotion regulation) implicated in the development of…

This study examines developmental change across adolescence in the similarity of friends versus nonfriends. This differential in similarity is a key aspect of the organization of the peer context of development: The stronger the correlation between friends for an attribute, the more the attribute delineates clustering and divisions of friendships.…

This study is a conceptual replication of a widely cited study by Moffitt et al. (2011) which found that attention and behavior problems in childhood (a composite of impulsive hyperactive, inattentive, and impulsive-aggressive behaviors labeled "self-control") predicted adult financial status, health, and criminal activity. Using data…