People reflect on their own aging, and this subjective awareness has an influence on developmental outcomes. Scholars have recently operationalized subjective aging in terms of awareness of age-related change (AARC), which captures awareness of both gains and losses. We examined associations of AARC-gains and AARC-losses with physical functioning,…

The interaction between a mother and child stands as one of the most profound and intricate human connections, weaving a rich tapestry of behavioral and emotional bonds during the formative years. Although mother-child interactions have received substantial attention in the developmental science literature, few studies have tapped into the…

Stimulus over-selectivity is said to have occurred when only a limited subset of the total number of stimuli present during discrimination learning controls behavior, thus, restricting learning about the range, breadth, or all features of a stimulus. The current study investigated over-selectivity of 100 typically developing children, aged 3-7…

Identifying developmental patterns in intergroup contact and its relation with bias is crucial for improving prevention strategies around intergroup relations. This study applied time-varying effects modeling (TVEM) to examine age-based changes in relations between contact and bias in a divided community that included 667 youth (M age = 15.74, SD…

Emotion comprehension (EC), theory of mind (ToM), and language are particularly important aspects of child development. In recent years, there has been increasing interest in understanding how these three variables are related to preschool children. However, results have been contradictory, and it is not clear how EC, ToM, and language are…

Solitude occurs from childhood to old age. In this special issue introduction, we offer a lifespan perspective on matters of solitude with the aim to point to pertinent issues in the field. We propose that solitude serves important functions that may vary across different times in life and that solitude needs to be considered in the context in…

Findings from previous cross-sectional studies showed that while toddlers around their first birthday imitate selectively, that is, they systematically omit some kinds of target action steps or they copy only the goal, but not the means of the modeled actions, older toddlers imitate more exactly. The aim of the present article is to provide…

We discuss the major processes involved in individuals' motivation and self-regulation of goal striving throughout the life course. While much is regulated based on the biological and societal scaffolding of lifespan development, certain challenges for motivation and self-regulation are more substantial and need to be managed by the individual,…

The current study demonstrates the application of an analytic approach for incorporating multiple time trends in order to examine the impact of cohort effects on individual trajectories of eight drugs of abuse. Parallel analysis of two independent, longitudinal studies of high-risk youth that span ages 10 to 40 across 23 birth cohorts between 1968…

The study of development vacillates between a focus on change (i.e., studying how and why infants are so different from adults) and excitement about early competence and continuity (i.e., studying how capable infants are, and marveling at how similar they turn out to be to adults). The study of memory development has been no exception. This…

Research on the development of emotion regulation has become a prominent topic in developmental science covering a broad age range from infancy to old age because of its theoretical importance and practical implications. This introductory essay of this special section includes reflections on some of the conceptual themes of this research field and…

Infants' preference for faces was investigated in a cross-sectional sample of 75 children, aged 3 to 11 months, and 23 adults. A visual preference paradigm was used where pairs of faces and toys were presented side-by-side while eye gaze was recorded. In addition, motor activity was assessed via parent report and the relation between motor…

Efforts to identify biological correlates of internalizing symptoms in childhood have involved examinations of HPA-axis functioning, namely Cortisol Awakening Response (CAR). However, research has not assessed the relationship between CAR and internalizing problems among children younger than 8 years. Findings with older samples have been somewhat…

Despite the growing research on emotion regulation, the empirical evidence for normative age-related emotion regulation patterns is rather divergent. From a life-span perspective, normative age changes in emotion regulation may be more salient applying the same methodological approach on a broad age range examining both growth and decline during…

Sensitivity to spacing information within faces improves with age and reaches maturity only at adolescence. In this study, we tested 6-16-year-old children's sensitivity to vertical spacing when the eyes or the mouth is the facial feature selectively manipulated. Despite the similar discriminability of these manipulations when they are embedded in…