Children and adults appreciate that physical action is typically the conduit between individuals' desires and the fulfillment of those desires. However, certain forms of petitionary thought -- e.g., wishing and praying -- are believed by many people to influence the external world and fulfill desires without direct physical action. We examine…

We examined differences among children in their endorsement of an adult's claim, their subsequent empirical investigation of that claim, and their resolution of any potential conflict between the claim and their empirical investigation. American and Chinese preschool (N = 171, M = 4.71 years) and elementary school (N = 128, M = 7.59 years)…

Family conversations about science-related topics, including those involving storybook reading, may set the stage for children's interest in science. We investigated how parents from two cultural backgrounds engaged in science talk while reading a science-related storybook with their preschool-aged daughters and sons. Consistent with our…

Children's development of executive function is a good candidate for studying cultural differences because it is a necessary capacity for becoming competent participants in cultural activities, and yet it is also likely to be shaped by culturally organized everyday experiences, with potential consequences for children's development and learning.…

To date, cross-cultural studies on Theory of Mind (ToM) have predominantly focused on preschoolers. This study focuses on middle childhood, comparing two samples of mainland Chinese (n = 126) and Australian (n = 83) children aged between 5.5 and 12 years. Strange Stories, the most commonly used measure of ToM, was employed. The study aimed to…

Social categories allow us to make sense of the social world and generate predictions about novel encounters. Yet, how people use particular social categories varies by culture. The current study examined how social categorization varies across traditionally individualistic and collectivistic societies among young children and adults. Using a…

In the current study, we investigated the relations among maternal emotion socialization practices and children's inhibitory control (IC) performance in Chinese and European American families. Fifty-three Chinese (Mage = 60 months) and 52 European American (Mage = 50 months) children and their mothers participated in this study. Maternal emotion…

This study examined the extent to which school-aged children's general narrative skills provide cognitive benefits for accurate remembering or enable good storytelling that undermines memory accuracy. European American and Chinese American 6-year-old boys and girls (N = 114) experienced a staged event in the laboratory and were asked to tell a…

Standard Australian reading assessment tests are criticized for being culturally inappropriate for use with Australian Indigenous children, particularly for those living in remote and very remote regions, as these tests are culturally biased towards mainstream Australian culture and imperceptive to Indigenous knowledge, language, concepts, and…

Parent-child reminiscing talk about positive and negative events provides children with unique opportunities to develop emotion competence. Very little work has involved families from low-income households and ethnically diverse backgrounds. We examined: 1) event valence (positive vs. negative) and ethnic differences in mother-child reminiscing…

The abilities of past and future episodic thinking develop hand in hand across the preschool years and are intimately connected in adults. Little is known, however, about the development of episodic thinking in middle childhood and how it is influenced by sociocultural factors. In the present study, one hundred sixty-seven 7- to 10-year-old…

The current article discusses the importance of increasing racial-ethnic and socioeconomic diversity in cognitive developmental research. It begins with discussion of the implications of the underrepresentation of ethnic minority children in cognitive developmental research. It goes on to suggest reasons underlying these omissions, such as the…

When speaking to infants, adults typically alter the acoustic properties of their speech in a variety of ways compared with how they speak to other adults; for example, they use higher pitch, increased pitch range, more pitch variability, and slower speech rate. Research shows that these vocal changes happen similarly across industrialized…

A growing number of studies suggests cultural differences in the attention and evaluation of information in adults (Hedden, Ketay, Aron, Markus, & Gabrieli, 2008; Markus & Kitayama, 1991; Masuda & Nisbett, 2001). One cultural comparison, between Westerners, such as Americans, and Easterners, such as the Japanese, suggests that…

This study examined maternal beliefs about the functions of memory sharing and the relations between these beliefs and mother-child reminiscing behaviors in a cross-cultural context. Sixty-three European American and 47 Chinese mothers completed an open-ended questionnaire concerning their beliefs about the functions of parent-child memory…