This study evaluates the Children's Worlds Psychological Well-Being Scale (CW-PSWBS) within a diverse international cohort of children aged 10 and 12, utilising Classical Test Theory (CTT) and Item Response Theory (IRT) methodologies. Through a detailed psychometric analysis, this research assesses the CW-PSWBS's structural integrity, focusing on…

Research on the role of moral emotions in moral judgment, both in hypothetical dilemmas and in real-life moral decision making, has focused on preschool and elementary school age, with few studies spanning a larger age range, into adolescence and adulthood. The present special issue addresses a neglected area, the development of moral emotions and…

The question of when moral identity first develops in childhood deserves more considered investigation. In this article, we examine the claim that moral identity first emerges in middle-childhood (8-12 years). An approach is taken here whereby a tendency to attribute moral shame under conditions entailing moral identity failure is considered as…

Caregivers' sensitive responses to infant cry have long-term consequences for adaptive child development. Although mounting evidence suggests that parents who experience high emotionality to infant cry respond less sensitively to infant cry, there is a dearth of knowledge on potential mechanisms underlying individual differences in emotionality to…

For research on emotional development, defining emotions as psychological systems of appraisals, expressions, body reactions, and subjective feelings in all phases of ontogenesis raises tricky methodological issues. How can we measure single emotions when appraisals and feelings cannot be assessed from outside, when expressions do not seem to be…

For decades, scholars have examined how children first recognize emotional facial expressions. This research has found that infants younger than 10 months can discriminate negative, within-valence facial expressions in looking time tasks, and children older than 24 months struggle to categorize these expressions in labeling and free-sort tasks.…

In everyday life, we use folk theories about the mind and behavior to understand ourselves and others. An important part of our folk theory of mind is our intuitions about the role of the self in mental functioning--namely, whether the self is able to control each mental operation. The current study explored beliefs about the nature of control…

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…

Worry in adults has been conceptualized as a thinking process involving problem-solving attempts about anticipated negative outcomes. This process is related to, though distinct from, fear. Previous research suggested that compared to adults, children's experience of worry is less strongly associated with thinking and more closely related to fear.…

The purpose of the study was to examine grade-level differences in coping behaviors among adolescents using a probabilistic multidimensional scaling (MDS) single-ideal-point model. Using data from students in middle school and at college, this article illustrated the MDS single-ideal-point model as an alternative to examine students' typical…

To chart the developmental path of children's attribution of pride to others, we presented children (4 years 0 month to 11 years 11 months of age, N = 108) with video clips of head-and-face, body posture, and multi-cue (both head-and-face and body posture simultaneously) expressions that adults consider to convey pride. Across age groups, 4- and…

Being able to wait is an essential part of self-regulation. In the present study, the authors examined the developmental course of changes in the latency to and duration of target-waiting behaviors by following 65 boys and 55 girls from rural and semirural economically strained homes from ages 18 months to 48 months. Age-related changes in latency…

The central question we addressed was whether mothers' adjustment might vary systematically by the developmental stages of their children. In an Internet-based study of over 2,200 mostly well-educated mothers with children ranging from infants to adults, we examined multiple aspects of mothers' personal well-being, parenting, and perceptions of…

The present study examined the impact of the developmental timing of trauma exposure on posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms and psychosocial functioning in a large sample of community-dwelling older adults (N = 1,995). Specifically, we investigated whether the negative consequences of exposure to traumatic events were greater for traumas…

Recent developmental cognitive neuroscience research has supported the notion that puberty and adolescence are periods of profound socio-emotional development. The current study was designed to investigate whether the onset of puberty marks an increase in the awareness of complex, or "mixed," emotions. Eighty-three female participants (aged 9-16…