Parental warmth and hostility are two key dimensions of parenting for child development, but the differential effects of these parenting dimensions on child prosocial and antisocial development has not been adequately investigated. The current study hypothesized that parental warmth would be uniquely related to child callous-unemotional traits and…

Forming social evaluations of others is a core component of social cognition. In this study, the relationship between bilingual experience and social evaluations was investigated in 8-month-old infants. We compared monolingual and bilingual infants' responses to third-party interactions where characters performed prosocial and antisocial actions…

This study compared sibling interactions between 24-month-old children and their older sibling with ASD (high-risk; n = 24) with 24-month-old children and their typically developing older sibling (low-risk; n = 32). First, high-risk sibling pairs showed lower levels of positive behaviour and younger siblings of children with ASD imitated their…

Lying is an interpersonal exercise that requires the intentional creation of a false belief in another's mind. As such, children's development of lie-telling is related to their increasing understanding of others and may reflect the acquisition of basic social skills. Although certain types of lies may support social relationships, other types of…

Here we describe the performance of children with autism, their siblings, and typically developing children using the Florida Apraxia Battery. Children with autism showed the lowest performance in all sections of the test. They were mostly impaired in pantomime actions execution on imitation and on verbal command, and in imitation of meaningless…

In typical development there is a bias to orient visual attention to social information. Children with ASD do not reliably demonstrate this bias, and the role of attention orienting has not been well studied. We examined attention orienting via the inhibition of return (IOR) mechanism in a spatial cueing task using social-emotional cues; we…

Nordic welfare states have been very successful at reducing poverty and inequality among their citizens. However, the presence of a strong social safety net in these countries has not solved the problem of "socioeconomic exclusion", manifesting in such outcomes as chronic unemployment and welfare dependency. In an effort to understand…

Socially disruptive behavior during peer interactions in early childhood is detrimental to children's social, emotional, and academic development. Few studies have investigated the developmental underpinnings of children's socially disruptive behavior using genetically sensitive research designs that allow examination of parent-on-child and…

Background: The relationship between parenting and the development of antisocial behavior in children is well established. However, evidence for associations between dimensions of parenting and callous-unemotional (CU) traits is mixed. As CU traits appear critical to understanding a subgroup of youth with antisocial behavior, more research…

Background: Growing research on children's traits as moderators of links between parenting and developmental outcomes has shown that variations in positivity, warmth, or responsiveness in parent-child relationships are particularly consequential for temperamentally difficult or biologically vulnerable children. But very few studies have…

Skin conductance level reactivity (SCLR) was examined as a moderator of the association between harsh parenting at age 8 years and growth in child externalizing behavior from age 8 to age 10 (N = 251). Mothers and fathers provided reports of harsh parenting and their children's externalizing behavior; children also provided reports of harsh…

The present study examines the quality of peer relations as a mediator between exposure to IPV (intimate partner violence) and internalizing behaviors in a sample of 129 preadolescents and adolescents (ages 10-18), who were interviewed via telephone as part of a multigenerational, prospective, longitudinal study. Relational victimization is also…

To describe the early phenotype of girls with full mutation fragile X, we used 54 observations of 15 girls between the ages of 6 months and 9 years to examine developmental trajectories as measured by the Battelle Development Inventory. In this sample, autistic behavior was associated with poorer developmental outcomes, primarily due to…

Objective: Evidence is steadily accumulating that a preventable environmental hazard, child maltreatment, exerts causal influences on the development of long-standing patterns of antisocial behavior in humans. The relationship between child maltreatment and antisocial outcome, however, has never previously been tested in a large-scale study in…

The notion that vitamins, minerals, and other "supplemental" nutrients profoundly change behavior, mood, and intellect has origins as old as recorded history. Research has indeed suggested connections between nutrient deficiencies and behavior problems, but correlations are not the same as causality. This "Abell Report" is an…