Young children tend to judge improbable events to be impossible, yet there is variability across age and across individuals. Our study examined parent-child conversations about impossible and improbable events and links between parents' explanations about those events and children's possibility judgments in a reasoning task. Regression analyses…

Preschoolers, as a group, are highly attuned to causality, and this attunement is known to facilitate memory, learning, and problem solving. However, recent work reveals substantial individual variability in the strength of children's "causal stance," as demonstrated by their curiosity about and preference for new causal information. In…

We documented what parents report as the cause of their child's academic and conduct setbacks and what they say they do in response. We recruited an opportunity sample of 479 parents and narrowed our sample to parents of children without disabilities between the ages of 5-18 (N = 312). Parents responded to open-ended questions, and we coded…

This meta-analytic review of 42 studies covering 8,009 participants (ages 4-20) examines the relation of moral emotion attributions to prosocial and antisocial behavior. A significant association is found between moral emotion attributions and prosocial and antisocial behaviors ("d" = 0.26, 95% CI [0.15, 0.38]; "d" = 0.39, 95%…

Research Findings: This study examined 56 young (prekindergarten through 2nd grade) urban-dwelling African American children's understanding of the affective attributions and consequences of 3 types of sociomoral rule systems: prosocial, active, and inhibitive morality. It also tested the relationship of affective attributions and consequences to…

We examined written expression performance in a sample of adolescents with ADHD and subthreshold ADHD using two different strategies: examining performance on standardized measures of written expression and using other indicators of written expression developed in this study. We examined associations between standardized measures of written…