Children develop expectations of caregivers' support-giving during early-life interactions. The present study examined whether caregivers' responsiveness would influence young children's expectations of caregivers' support-giving behavior and willingness under different situational stress levels. We manipulated the caregivers' responsiveness and…

Developing attention skills allow children to parse their complex world by orienting to a subset of especially salient or meaningful inputs. Infants and children are biased to orient to faces and have difficulty ignoring faces when they appear as distractors. Although these past findings suggest that faces are more salient than nonsocial stimuli,…

Attachment theory postulates that there is a particular style of caregiving that, because of its interaction with our evolved psychology, is most likely to result in healthy psychological development. Attachment research has been criticized because most studies have been conducted with Western populations. Critics argue this has (a) overemphasized…

Process praise (i.e., praise for effort) facilitates childhood persistence. However, less is known about the mechanism by which process praise influences persistence in infancy. Here, we propose that well-timed process praise reinforces the link between effort and success, thus promoting persistence in young children. In Experiment 1, U.S. infants…

Independent locomotion is associated with a range of positive developmental outcomes, but unlike cognitive, linguistic, and social skills, acquiring motor skills requires infants to generate their own input for learning. We tested factors that shape infants' spontaneous locomotion by observing forty 12- to 22-month-olds (19 girls, 21 boys) during…

Developmental research during COVID-19 suggests that pandemic-related disruptions in family relationships are associated with children's mental health. Most of this research has focused on 1 child per family, thereby obfuscating patterns that are differentially operative at the family-wide (i.e., between-family) versus child-specific (i.e.,…

During early childhood, reading books with one's caregiver (shared book reading) is a valuable means of supporting learning. Yet, there are gaps in our understanding of the influence of shared book reading on young children's science learning. The current research bridges this gap by examining the pedagogical quality of science books in…

Moral pride is a key component of virtue development. This study provides developmental insight into children's moral pride across cultures, and the potential for moral pride to underlie prosocial behavior. Participants included children and adolescents ages 6, 9, and 12 years from Canada (n = 186; 50% girls; ethnically diverse sample), Japan (n =…

Infants can help and share in the second year of life. However, there is limited knowledge as to variability in these behaviors as a function of target (e.g., caregiver vs. unfamiliar adult) and the influence of caregiver support on infant prosocial behavior. Infants (N = 268, 124 female) at 1-2 years of age (M = 1.47, SD = 0.27) and again at 2-3…

The extant literature on the use of autonomy support during caregiver-child conversations has focused primarily on conversations about fun, shared experiences, with limited consideration of unshared experiences or attention toward the role of conversation context. The present study examined how autonomy support, conversation context, and child age…

Learning to descend stairs requires motor and cognitive capacities on the part of infants and opportunities for practice and assurance of safety offered by caregivers. The American Academy of Pediatrics prescribes the age strategy to teach toddlers to safely descend stairs but without much consideration for individual differences in infants'…

Using data from a large longitudinal sample (N = 1,292) of children and their caregivers in predominantly low-income, nonurban communities, we investigated longitudinal relations between attuned caregiving in infancy, joint attention in toddlerhood, and executive functions in early childhood. The results from path analysis demonstrated that…

Despite the well-established protective functions of guilt across childhood, its underlying physiological mechanisms have received little attention. We used latent difference scores (LDS) to model changes in children's (N = 267; 4- and 8-year-olds, 51% girls) skin conductance (SC) and respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) while they imagined…

Children learn the words of their native language(s) from interactions with their caregivers. Although previous research has found that the language children hear during those interactions predicts vocabulary outcomes, few studies have investigated how qualitative features of social interactions work together to affect children's vocabulary…

Guided by models of family unpredictability, this study was designed to identify the distinctive sequelae of disorganized interparental conflict, a dimension of interparental conflict characterized by abrupt, inexplicable changes in parental emotional lability, conflict tactics, and verbalizations. Participants included 208 kindergarten children…