Our primary objective was to examine the extent to which moment-to-moment associations between preschool-aged children's behavior and maternal emotional support differed for mothers showing different levels of parasympathetic engagement. We used behavioral observations of maternal and child behavior and maternal changes in cardiac vagal tone…

The social communicative deficits and repetitive behaviours seen in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) may be affected by altered stimulus salience and reward attribution. The present study used eye tracking and a behavioural measure to index effort expenditure, arousal, and attention, during viewing of images depicting social scenes and…

At school, pupils often cooperate on common projects and must coordinate their different individual actions. However, grades are pervasively used even in cooperative situations, which make the pupils' differences in achievement and their relative rank salient and may reduce their inclination to work constructively with others. Thus, we…

Background: Changes in reward processing are thought to be involved in the etiology of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), as well as other developmental disorders. In addition, different forms of therapy for ADHD rely on reinforcement principles. As such, improved understanding of reward processing in ADHD could eventually lead to…

Task persistence, measured by a composite score of independent teacher, tester and observer reports, was examined using behavioral genetic analysis. Participants included 92 monozygotic and 137 same-sex dizygotic twin pairs in Kindergarten or 1st grade (4.3 to 7.9 years old). Task persistence was widely distributed, higher among older children,…