Current theories of loneliness posit that biases in social information processing play a key role in the development and maintenance of loneliness. However, this assumption has rarely been tested in longitudinal research in adolescence. The current study concentrated on two constructs associated with such biases, that is, fear of negative…

Listening to speech in a noisy background is difficult for everyone. While such listening has historically been considered mainly in the context of auditory processing, the role of cognition has attracted considerable interest in recent years. This has been particularly true in the context of life-span research and the comparison of younger and…

Many interventions are characterized by repeated observations on the same individuals (e.g., baseline, mid-intervention, two to three post-intervention observations), which offer the opportunity to consider differences in how individuals vary over time. Effective interventions may not be limited to changing means, but instead may also include…

Exposure to deviant friends has been found to be a powerful source of influence on children's and adolescents' aggressive behavior. However, the contribution of deviant friends may have been overestimated because of a possible non-accounted gene-environment correlation (rGE). In this study, we used a cross-lagged design to test whether friends'…

The associations between parenting practices and adolescent anxiety symptoms were examined in both individual and monozygotic (MZ) twin differences levels. Participants were 804 pairs of Chinese MZ adolescent twins aged 10-18 years (M = 13.57, SD = 2.67, 52% females). Twins' anxiety symptoms were assessed by self- and parent-reports. Twins also…

Previous studies have found evidence for gender and racial/ethnic differences in depressive symptoms in adolescence; however, the mechanisms driving this relationship are poorly understood. The goal of this study was to examine the role of individual differences in dispositional coping in the relationships between gender and depressive…

Premature infants have significant risk for later behavior problems. This study examined growth trajectories of three problem behaviors across five developmental age points from preschool to early adulthood in a well-characterized sample of premature infants. The effects of neonatal risk, gender, and socioeconomic context were modeled on these…

While factors influencing maternal emotional availability (EA) have been well investigated, little is known about the development of child EA. The present longitudinal study investigated the role of frontal brain asymmetry in young children with regard to child EA (child responsiveness and involvement) in mother-child interaction in a sample of 28…

Most of the individual difference variance in the population is found "within" families, yet studying the processes causing this variation is difficult due to confounds between genetic and nongenetic influences. Quasi-experiments can be used to test hypotheses regarding environment exposure (e.g., timing, duration) while controlling for…

The ability to read is essential for cognitive development. To deepen our understanding of reading acquisition, we explored the neuroanatomical correlates (cortical thickness; CT) of word-reading fluency and sentence comprehension efficiency in Chinese with a group of typically developing children (N = 21; 12 females and 9 males; age range…

This investigation was aimed at studying the relations between executive functions (EFs) and categorical emotion understanding while controlling for preschoolers' IQ, language ability and theory of mind (ToM). Specifically, we wanted to analyse the association between emotion understanding and set shifting, due to the lack of studies with this EF.…

The current study examined the stability of temperament over time. Observers and mothers rated child behavior at eight timepoints across three assessment waves (8, 15, and 30 months of age). Internal consistency reliability of aggregates of the eight observer reports and eight mother reports were high. When considering single timepoint…

The fields of psychology and human development are experiencing a resurgence of scientific inquiries about phenomena that unfold at the level of the individual. This article addresses the issues of analyzing intraindividual psychological/developmental phenomena using standard analytical techniques for interindividual variation. When phenomena are…

The study examined the contribution of reinforcement sensitivity to childhood personality at three levels of the hierarchical structure, mid-level traits, the Big Five and two higher-order factors, and the moderating role of sex and age in a sample of 3-18-year-olds. The canonical correlation analyses indicated that reinforcement sensitivity and…

We investigated the development of ego-control (EC) and ego-resiliency (ER) over a 13-year period in a cohort of Swedish children first assessed at 2 years of age. Children became more ego-controlled over time although individual differences in EC remained stable. Children's levels of resiliency increased from 2 to 3 years of age and then declined…