Play therapy is an empirically supported intervention used to address a number of developmental issues faced in childhood. Through the natural language of play, children and adolescents communicate feelings, thoughts, and experiences. Schools provide an ideal setting for play therapy in many ways; however, several challenges exist in implementing…

The connections among language, writing system, and reading are part of what confronts a child in learning to read. We examine these connections in addressing how reading processes adapt to the variety of written language and how writing adapts to language. The first adaptation (reading to writing), as evidenced in behavioral and neuroscience…

Johnson and Easterling's original review was intended to underscore both the methodological challenges of disentangling the effects of parental incarceration from other adversities that often co-occur with parental incarceration and the need for conceptual models that can explain how and why parental incarceration may have unique effects on child…

This study examines face-scanning behaviors of infants at 6, 9, and 12 months as they watched videos of a woman describing an object in front of her. The videos were created to vary information in the mouth (speaking vs. smiling) and the eyes (gazing into the camera vs. cueing the infant with head turn or gaze direction to an object being…

Three experiments that demonstrate a novel constraint on infants' language skills are described. Across the experiments it is shown that as babies near their 1st birthday, their ability to respond to talk about an absent object is influenced by a referent's spatiotemporal history: familiarizing infants with an object in 1 or several nontest…

In this commentary, Martin Holtmann, discusses Doehnert and colleagues' article in this issue (Doehnert et al., 2013). Holtmann comments that the article illustrates the value of longitudinal electrophysiological and experimental approaches to disentangle different pathways underlying the phenotype of ADHD, and points out that their…

Joint attention has been suggested to contribute to children's development of cooperation; however, few empirical studies have directly tested this hypothesis. Children aged 1 and 2 years participated in two joint action activities to assess their cooperation with an adult partner, who stopped participating at a specific moment during the tasks.…

In this study, deaf children's understanding of their own emotions was compared with that of hearing peers. Twenty-six deaf children (mean age 11 years) and 26 hearing children, matched for age and gender, were presented with various tasks that tap into their emotion awareness and regulation (coping) regarding the four basic emotions (happiness,…

Recent studies on the acquisition of semantics have argued that knowledge of the universal quantifier is adult-like throughout development. However, there are domains where children still exhibit non-adult-like universal quantification, and arguments for the early mastery of relevant semantic knowledge do not explain what causes such…

Since WW2, degradation of our global natural systems has been on the increase. Much of this degradation has been communicated to the general public via mainstream media and yet human behaviours do not seem to have changed significantly as a result. It is argued in this paper that the manner in which our brains and minds work, in particular in…

The present study investigated the role of best friends in educational career development from adolescence to adulthood. Participants' (N=476) reciprocal best friendships were identified at age 15, while their educational attainment was investigated in early adulthood (age 26), their intelligence (IQ) at age 13, and parental education, educational…

A growing body of national research confirms that significant levels of learning and growth occur during early childhood, and that it is important, from a public policy perspective, to increase access to quality programs and services that support the development of skills and attitudes children need to succeed. Clearly, no one-size-fits-all…

The change detection task has been used in dozens of studies with adults to measure visual working memory capacity. Two studies have recently tested children in this task, suggesting a gradual increase in capacity from 5 years to adulthood. These results contrast with findings from an infant looking paradigm suggesting that capacity reaches…

Parenting is traditionally conceptualized as an exogenous environment that affects child development. However, children can also influence the quality of parenting that they receive. Using longitudinal data from 650 identical and fraternal twin pairs, we found that, controlling for cognitive ability at age 2 years, cognitive stimulation by parents…

In this paper, one of the most common disorders of childhood and adolescence, social anxiety disorder (SAD), is examined to illustrate the complex and delicate interplay between parent and child factors that can result in normal development gone awry. Our parent-child model of SAD posits a host of variables that converge to occasion the onset and…