Parents' cultural beliefs are associated with their children's socialization and development. Researchers have examined these associations through the lens of parents' ethnotheories, which refer to parents' implicit beliefs about children's developmentally appropriate behavior. In contrast to prior work focused on parents' ethnotheories of…

Higher accepted friends are known to influence the alcohol misuse of lower accepted friends, but not the reverse. The present study was designed to address the origins of this influence: Are higher accepted friends particularly "influential" or are lower accepted friends particularly "susceptible" to influence? To address this…

To study the role of executive function (EF) in the early development of aggression, the role of cool and hot EF skills at 5 years old, in the development of physical and relational aggression between 5 and 6 years old, was explored. Typically developing children (N = 80) completed tasks assessing their cool (inhibition, working memory, planning)…

Human observations can only capture a portion of ongoing classroom social activity, and are not ideal for understanding how children's interactions are spatially structured. Here we demonstrate how social interaction can be investigated by modeling automated continuous measurements of children's location and movement using a commercial system…

Changes in best friendship quality during adolescence coincide with the emergence of romantic relationships. This study aimed to examine the extent to which changes in friendship quality (intimacy, conflict, emotional support) between the ages of 16 and 22 varied according to four romantic involvement patterns (Late, Sporadic, Long-Term, Frequent)…

Social norms are vital for the functioning of adolescent peer groups; they can protect the well-being of groups and individual members, often by deterring harmful behaviors, such as aggression, through enforcement mechanisms like peer victimization; in adolescent peer groups, those who violate aggression norms are often subject to victimization.…

This study examined variations in the development of classroom aggression popularity norms, as well as the role of homeroom teachers' aggression beliefs and students' perceptions of teachers' support as predictors of such variations. To achieve this goal, a sample of 63 classrooms were assessed at four time points during a school year, in nine…

This article examined the psychometric properties and validity of a new self-report instrument for assessing the social norms that coordinate social relations and define self-worth within three normative systems. A survey that assesses endorsement of honor, face, and dignity norms was evaluated in ethnically diverse adolescent samples in the U.S.…

The current study investigated whether children's conformity to a majority testimony influenced their willingness to revise their own erroneous counting knowledge. The content of the testimonies focused on conventional rules of counting, by means of pseudoerrors (i.e., unconventional counts) occurring during a detection task. In this work…

We investigated the ability to detect a face among other visual objects in a complex visual array in 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old children, as well as in adults. To this end, we used a visual search paradigm implemented on a touch-tablet device. Subjects (N = 100) saw up to eighty 3 × 3 visual search arrays and had to find and tap upon a target--a face…

Evidence of cultural comparisons of gender-identity-measurement scales is scarce. The present study aims to assess the scalar invariance of two dimensions of a widely used gender identity scale (Egan and Perry's Multidimensional Gender Identity Inventory) across two cultural contexts. Fourth, sixth, and fifth graders from Barranquilla (Colombia)…

This study examined emotion understanding and reconciliation in 47 (24 girls) 4-6-year-old preschool children. Participants first completed emotion recognition tasks and then answered questions regarding reconciliation tendencies and affective perspective-taking in a series of overt and relational aggressive conflict scenarios. Children's teachers…

Parental anxiety and depression are associated with antisocial behaviour of children. Several mechanisms may mediate this association. The aim of this study was to test whether parenting is a mediator of the association of parental anxiety and depression with the antisocial social behaviour of preschool children. The analysis was based on…

This study examined adolescent coercive and prosocial resource control strategies in relation to various indices of peer-reported behaviors and peer regard ("N" = 384; 12-14 years). Coercive control was uniquely positively related to physical and relational aggression and peer disliking, and negatively to prosocial behaviors when…

Institutional care has been shown to lead to insecure and disorganized attachments and indiscriminate friendliness. Some children, however, are surprisingly resilient to the adverse environment. Here the protective role of the long variant of the serotonin receptor gene (5HTT) is explored in a small hypothesis-generating study of 37 Ukrainian…