In everyday life, individuals often need to make choices about the difficulty level of tasks they wish to perform. Here, we investigate age- and gender-related differences in the monitoring of discrepancies between the difficulty of a given task and one's own performance level, and in the likelihood to select task difficulties that match one's…

To illuminate individual differences in the development of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) symptoms in the general population, psychometric measures are needed that can capture general population-level symptom variation reliably, validly, and comparably from childhood through to the transition to adulthood. The ADHD subscale of the…

We conducted a meta-analytic review of 53 studies published between 2000 and 2020 to quantify associations of parents' emotion regulation with parenting behavior and children's emotion regulation and internalizing and externalizing symptoms. Twelve meta-analyses, which included between 4 to 22 effect sizes (N from 345 to 3609), were conducted to…

Previous studies show that newborn infants and adults orient their attention preferentially toward human faces. However, the developmental changes of visual attention captured by face stimuli remain unclear, especially when an explicit top-down process is involved. We capitalized on a visual search paradigm to assess how the relative strength of…

Little is known about whether a widely used mindfulness measure in adults--the Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire (FFMQ)--is also reliable and valid in adolescents. The current study evaluated the psychometric properties of a 20-item short-form FFMQ in a sample of 599 high school students (M[subscript age] = 16.3 years; 49% female) living in the…

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…

Three decades of research have examined children's challenge and threat appraisals, yet unresolved issues remain. This study provides new insight about three central, open questions in this field: How do challenge and threat appraisals relate to events eliciting discrete negative emotions? How do challenge appraisals develop across childhood, and…

Online exchange of sexual content ("sexting") is associated with potentially negative consequences, especially for girls. We investigated possible associations between family functioning and girls' sexting. Italian teenage girls (N = 250; M[subscript age] = 16.36 years; SD[subscript age] = 1.88) completed online surveys that evaluated…

Drawing from dispositional mindfulness research and stress and coping theories, we tested whether adolescents' dispositional mindfulness was associated with perceptions of peer victimization and exclusion and internalizing symptoms. We further explored the role of dispositional mindfulness as a protective factor buffering the impact of peer…

This study was designed to determine the factor(s) that influence the choice of the foot throughout the lifespan. To achieve this purpose, 86 right-footed participants (young children (5-- 8), adolescents (10-14), young adults (18-25) and older adults (over 50) were tested on two tasks of different levels of difficulty, performed in three spatial…

This study examined age-related changes in friend similarity on delinquency to determine whether deviant behavior homophily peaks during mid-adolescence. A community sample of 1,663 male and 1,826 female Swedish youth from Grade 5 (M = 11.21 years) to Grade 10 (M = 16.25 years) provided self-reports of delinquency. Friendships were identified from…

Children's and adolescents' narratives of interpersonal experiences can inform our understanding of developmental shifts in the use of personhood concepts. We present results from two studies ("n"s = 90, 112) with children aged five to 16 years. In the first study, children were asked to describe one positive and another negative…

Peer sexual harassment (PSH) occurs frequently and across contexts during adolescence. The current study examined the relations among PSH in school, psychological distress, sexual experimentation, and sexual risk-taking in a sample of African American middle and high school girls. Results indicate that negative body appraisals mediated the…

Time attitudes (TA) are evaluative feelings toward the past, present and future. Given the role of TA in psychological and behavioral outcomes, the aim of this study was to analyze the adequacy of the Adolescent Time Inventory-Time Attitudes (ATI-TA) scale among adolescents and young adults in Italy. The scale was administered to 638 students in…

The majority of episodic memory (EM) tests are far removed from what we experience in daily life and from the definition of this type of memory. This study examines the developmental trajectory of the main aspects of episodic memory--what, where, and when--and of feature binding in a naturalistic virtual environment. A population of 125…