People frequently need to cooperate despite having strong self-serving motives. In the current study, pairs of 5- and 7-year-olds (N = 160) faced a one-shot coordination problem: To benefit, children had to choose the same of 3 reward divisions. They could not communicate or see each other and thus had to accurately predict each other's choices to…

From the moment infants are born, they seem to prefer orienting to social stimuli, over objects and non-social stimuli. This preference lasts throughout adulthood and is believed to play a crucial role in social-communicative development. By following up a group of infants at the age of 6, 8, and 12 months, this study explored the role of social…

When adults make a joint commitment to act together, they feel an obligation to their partner. In 2 studies, the authors investigated whether young children also understand joint commitments to act together. In the first study, when an adult orchestrated with the child a joint commitment to play a game together and then broke off from their joint…

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…

Neural correlates of social-cognition were assessed in 9- to- 17-year-olds (N = 34) using functional magnetic resonance imaging. Participants appraised how unfamiliar peers they had previously identified as being of high or low interest would evaluate them for an anticipated online chat session. Differential age- and sex-related activation…

Using data from the first 2 phases of the NICHD Study of Early Child Care, the authors examine the links between maternal employment in the first 12 months of life and cognitive, social, and emotional outcomes for children at age 3, at age 4.5, and in first grade. Drawing on theory and prior research from developmental psychology as well as…

The present study examined the emergence of flattery behavior in young children and factors that might affect whether and how it is displayed. Preschool children between the ages of 3 and 6 years were asked to rate drawings produced by either a present or absent adult stranger (Experiments 1 and 2), child stranger (Experiments 2 and 3), classmate,…

The problems examined in this study were (1) age differences in grasp of psychological causality during middle childhood, (2) the exploration of possible mediating abilities of a physical-logical nature accounting for such age differences and (3) relations between cognition of psychological causality and intentionality in moral judgment.…

We argue for the importance of processes of shared intentionality in children's early cognitive development. We look briefly at four important social-cognitive skills and how they are transformed by shared intentionality. In each case, we look first at a kind of individualistic version of the skill--as exemplified most clearly in the behavior of…

Evidence is presented that argues for distinguishable, sequential stages in the structuring of political attitudes among students and that partially supports a developmental interpretation of political learning. (Author/AM)

Investigated the accuracy with which subjects of different ages can encode several kinds of cues commonly found in social interactions. Mean ages for the four groups of subjects were 5.5, 7.4, 9.5 and 20.5 years. (Author/SDH)

Data are presented which show: (1) that differences between adult and child psyches have important implications for age-stratified interaction process; and (2) that adult-child interactional differences cannot be solely attributable to genetic or psychological differences but that they are in part due to social factors. The data are based on…

This document is an English-language abstract (approximately 1,500 words) of a three-part volume on the psychology of child personality development. In part one, the author shows that psychology is one of the most important scientific disciplines on which education is based, particularly because of its contribution to the scientific planning of…

Using "Patterns of Childrearing," by Sears, Maccoby and Levin (1957) as a starting point, this paper touches on the schism between developmental and social psychology and attempts to assess the progress of research in social development during the past quarter century with respect to five major perspectives that are at once evolutionary,…