Empathy and sympathy play crucial roles in much of human social interaction and are necessary components for healthy coexistence. Sympathy is thought to be a proxy for motivating prosocial behavior and providing the affective and motivational base for moral development. The purpose of the present study was to use functional MRI to characterize…

Results from a study of 100 Head Start children and their teachers suggested that teacher-child relationship quality was associated with children's classroom behaviors. Specifically, teacher-child conflict was strongly related to children's externalizing behaviors. Based on these findings, we present recommendations for the development of policies…

This study examined developmental associations between growth in domain-general cognitive processes (working memory and attention control) and growth in domain-specific skills (emergent literacy and numeracy) across the prekindergarten year and their relative contributions to kindergarten reading and math achievement. One hundred sixty-four Head…

Vulnerable children in Michigan face intersecting disparities, with race, class and geographic location often combining to limit access to health, education and economic security. Addressing this reality requires reliable and comprehensive data that can guide thoughtful action within communities and among institutions alike. To this end, the W. K.…

Why is play important in the lives of children? What crucial aspects of learning are being neglected in the current near-elimination of recess time in public schools? "Playing for Keeps", co-authored by the well-known writer and educational leader Deborah Meier, and two colleagues with equally long experience in schools, explores these…

Human neonates prefer listening to speech compared to many nonspeech sounds, suggesting that humans are born with a bias for speech. However, neonates' preference may derive from properties of speech that are not unique but instead are shared with the vocalizations of other species. To test this, thirty neonates and sixteen 3-month-olds were…

Three experiments investigated whether 14- and 15-month-old infants use information for both friction and slant for prospective control of locomotion down slopes. In Experiment 1, high- and low-friction conditions were interleaved on a range of shallow and steep slopes. In Experiment 2, friction conditions were blocked. In Experiment 3, the…

Children's relationship with food in early childhood programs is often a complex topic. Families have concerns about "picky eaters" and teachers feel pressure to make sure that children eat enough while in their care. Children bring snacks that teachers describe as junk food and believe this negatively impacts children's behavior. Foods marketed…

We review and relate two literatures on the development of attention in children: one concerning flexible attention switching and the other concerning selective attention. The first is a growing literature on preschool children's performances in an attention-switching task indicating that children become more flexible in their attentional control…

Conceptual change is often described as a causal process in which changes in an embraced system of beliefs result in a new system of beliefs. Here, it is argued that conceptual change is better understood as an intentional activity with regard to the learner, that is, what the learner is doing when trying to understand something. Children were…

Research has revealed that fetuses can learn from events in their environment. The most convincing evidence for fetal learning is habituation to vibroacoustic stimulation (VAS) in human fetuses and classical conditioning in rat fetuses. However, these two research areas have been independent of each other. There have been few attempts at classical…

The cross-overs between monolingual-bilingual and typically atypically developing children are a goldmine for research on language development. The four permutations of language exposure and language abilities create "natural experimental conditions" for investigating the nature of the language capacity and how this is shaped by input in typical…

The main research question of this study is whether children's emotional responses to specific stress-evoking situations (anger or anxiety) and the coping strategies they would use are related. Furthermore, it is asked if these relationships are consistent over a specific age range. A total sample of 432 second graders participated in a…

Research Findings: This study, undertaken in Nicosia, Cyprus, sought to evaluate some of the hypothesized developmental benefits of developmentally appropriate practices (DAP) by investigating how the pedagogical attitudes and practices of Greek/Cypriot parents (n = 142) and teachers (n = 16) relate to 4- to 7-year-olds' (n = 142) social-emotional…

Objectives: To longitudinally describe prosocial behaviour development from childhood to adolescence, using multiple informants within Canadian and Italian samples. Method: Participants in Study 1 were 1037 boys from low socioeconomic status (SES) areas in Montreal, Canada, for whom yearly teacher and mother reports were obtained between the ages…