Several studies suggest that children's learning and engagement with the content of play activities is affected by the ways parents and children interact. In particular, when parents are overly directive and set more goals during play with their children, their children tend to play less or are less engaged by subsequent challenges with the…

Physiological synchrony is an important biological process during which parent-child interaction plays a significant role in shaping child socioemotional adjustment. The present study held a context-dependent perspective to examine the conditional association between parent-child physiological synchrony and child socioemotional adjustment (i.e.,…

Conversational turn-taking is a complex communicative skill that requires both linguistic and executive functioning (EF) skills, including processing input while simultaneously forming and inhibiting responses until one's turn. Adult-child turn-taking predicts children's linguistic, cognitive, and socioemotional development. However, little is…

Parental socioeconomic status (SES) is a well-established predictor of children's neurocognitive development. Several theories propose that specific cognitive skills are particularly vulnerable. However, this can be challenging to test, because cognitive assessments are not pure measures of distinct neurocognitive processes, and scores across…

Researchers have demonstrated the important contribution of mothers' sensitive parenting to children's developing cognition over the first 5 years of life, yet studies examining sensitivity beyond the early years, controlling for earlier effects, are limited. In this exploratory study, we examined the developmental pathways through which mothers'…

To examine the effects of childhood parent-child separation with varying duration and form on later cognitive performance and psychopathological problems over a 6-year period, we use data from the China Family Panel Study (CFPS), which is an ongoing, prospective nationally representative study across 25 provinces in China. Of the 4033 children…

Feeling loved by one's parents is critical for children's health and well-being. How can such feelings be fostered? A vital feature of loving interactions is reciprocal self-disclosure, where individuals disclose intimate information about themselves. In a proof-of-concept experiment, we examined whether encouraging reciprocal self-disclosure in…

While previous studies have demonstrated correlations between children and adolescents' evaluations of lies and lie-telling behaviors, the temporal order of these associations over time and changes across this developmental period remain unexamined. The current study examined longitudinal associations among children and adolescents' (N = 1128;…

Children vary in how sensitive they are to experiences, with consequences for their developmental outcomes. In the current study, we investigated how behavioral sensitivity at age 3 years predicts mental health in middle childhood. Using a novel repeated measures design, we calculated child sensitivity to multiple psychological and social…

Despite the importance of self-control for well-being and adjustment, its development from early childhood to early adolescence has been relatively understudied. We addressed the development of mother-reported self-control in what is likely the largest and longest longitudinal twin study of the topic to this day (N = 1889 individual children with…

Children's knowledge of arithmetic principles is a key aspect of early mathematics knowledge. Knowledge of arithmetic principles predicts how children approach solving arithmetic problems and the likelihood of their success. Prior work has begun to address how children might learn arithmetic principles in a classroom setting. Understanding of…

Cognitive science has demonstrated that we construct knowledge about the world by abstracting patterns from routinely encountered experiences and storing them as semantic memories. This preregistered study tested the hypothesis that caregiving-related early adversities (crEAs) shape affective semantic memories to reflect the content of those…

Recent evidence suggests that deaf children with CIs exposed to nonnative sign language from hearing parents can attain age-appropriate vocabularies in both sign and spoken language. It remains to be explored whether deaf children with CIs who are exposed to early nonnative sign language, but only up to implantation, also benefit from this input…

Bilingual children experience more variation in their language environment than monolingual children and this impacts their rate of language development with respect to monolinguals. How long it takes for bilingual children learning English as a second language (L2) to display similar abilities to monolingual age-peers has been estimated to be 4-6…

Low socioeconomic status (SES) is associated with greater risk for symptoms of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). One mechanism through which SES may confer risk for ADHD is by influencing brain structure. Alterations to cortical thickness, surface area and subcortical volume have been associated with low SES and with the presence of…