Early reading acquisition skills have been linked to verbal short-term memory (STM) capacity. However, the nature of this relationship remains controversial because verbal STM, like reading acquisition, depends on the complexity of underlying phonological processing skills. This longitudinal study addressed the relation between STM and reading…

This article reports the effectiveness of two universal prevention programs in reducing externalizing behavior in elementary school children. A sample of 1,675 first graders in 56 Swiss elementary schools was randomly assigned to a school-based social competence intervention, a parental training intervention, both, or control. Externalizing…

How people process and represent magnitude has often been studied using number comparison tasks. From the results of these tasks, a comparison distance effect (CDE) is generated, showing that it is easier to discriminate two numbers that are numerically further apart (e.g., 2 and 8) compared with numerically closer numbers (e.g., 6 and 8).…

We investigated whether induced mood influenced the social information processing steps of goal clarification and response decision in 480 1st-3rd graders, and in more selected groups of low accepted-aggressive (n = 39), average accepted-nonaggressive (n = 103), and high accepted-nonaggressive children (n = 68). Children participated in two…

This article begins by revisiting an old dispute between the children's writer Chukovsky and the child psychologist Vygotsky on whether and how child literature should mediate development. It then considers child language language lessons in South Korea for clues about how such mediation might happen, and finds the development of rote language,…

Background: In this study, psychosocial functioning of different groups of young children with learning problems was investigated using a diverse set of psychosocial variables (including behaviour problems, academic motivation, social preference, and self-concept). Methods: For this purpose, children with low academic achievement, with a specific…