The purpose of this study was to identify predictors of friendship quality in adolescents with and without ADHD. The participants were 115 adolescents (61 ADHD, 54 non-ADHD), ages 13-18. The adolescents completed questionnaires assessing the quality of their relationships with their best friends, social perspective taking, anxiety and depression.…

Perspective-taking plays an important role in daily life, allowing consideration of other people's perspectives and viewpoints. This study used a large sample of 265 community-based participants (aged 20-86 years) to examine changes in perspective-taking abilities--a component of "Theory of Mind"--across adulthood, and how these changes…

Basic perspective taking and mentalizing abilities develop in childhood, but recent studies indicate that the use of social perspective taking to guide decisions and actions has a prolonged development that continues throughout adolescence. Here, we aimed to replicate this research and investigate the hypotheses that individual differences in…

This study investigated children's narrative evaluations about jealousy in relation to performance on a higher-order perspective-taking task and assessments of receptive vocabulary and nonverbal intelligence. Eighty children (5;0-11;11) narrated a wordless picture book about a jealous frog, answered probe questions about the plot, and generated a…

This study provides qualitative and quantitative evidence of how an emotion explanation task can reflect African American preschoolers' pragmatic skills. We used an emotion explanation task to assess pragmatic skills among 19 children (aged 3-5 years) related to (1) engaging in conversational turn-taking, (2) answering "Wh-" questions,…

A critical skill in emergent writing is the developing ability to take the perspective of different readers; however, the precursors of this skill have not yet been identified. In this longitudinal study, 105 children (90 after attrition) were tested at 3 time points: pre-kindergarten (3-4 years old, n = 105), kindergarten (5 years old, n = 97),…

It has been argued that children who possess an advanced theory of mind (ToM) are more likely to act prosocially, yet the empirical findings are mixed. To address this issue definitively, a meta-analytic integration of all prior literature that met appropriate inclusion criteria was conducted. In total, 76 studies including 6,432 children between…

The relations among various spatial and mathematics skills were assessed in a cross-sectional study of 854 children from kindergarten, third, and sixth grades (i.e., 5 to 13 years of age). Children completed a battery of spatial mathematics tests and their scores were submitted to exploratory factor analyses both within and across domains. In the…

This research examined links among academic ability, social-perspective coordination, and friendship quality, within the context of gifted adolescents' friendships. The sample consisted of 120 early adolescents (59 girls, 61 boys), 81 of whom were identified as gifted. Academic ability, sex, and grade significantly predicted social-perspective…

"Time to Act," a 2009 report of the Carnegie Corporation's Council on Advancing Adolescent Literacy, concludes that U.S. students are ill-prepared for the literacy challenges of 21st century higher education, employment, and citizenship. Word Generation (WG) is a research-based vocabulary program for middle school students designed to…

Peer sexual harassment is a stressor for many girls in middle and high school. Prior research indicates that approach strategies (seeking support or confronting) are generally more effective than avoidance strategies in alleviating stress. However, the deployment of effective coping behaviors depends partly on how individuals evaluate different…

Classic theories of self-development suggest people define themselves in part through internalized perceptions of other people's beliefs about them, known as reflected self-appraisals. This study uses functional magnetic resonance imaging to compare the neural correlates of direct and reflected self-appraisals in adolescence (N = 12, ages 11-14…

This study examined the development of cognitive perspective taking skills and the lack of consistency across perspective taking measures in earlier studies. Four perspective taking measures were administered to 56 children between 4 and 10 years of age under two testing conditions. The high structure condition included multiple presentation of…

Cognitive perspective-taking has attracted considerable attention in the mainstream developmental literature, and is most commonly studied under the rubric of Theory of Mind. The current article reviews the levels of understanding of informational states that are believed to underlie cognitive perspective-taking from this conceptual framework. An…

This study investigated the interrelationships among the development of role-taking skills, moral judgments, and sharing behavior of boys and girls in K-3. A total of 160 lower middle class white children (20 boys and 20 girls from each grade) participated in the study. Data were collected on four measures: (1) sharing candy with a friend, (2)…