There is a vast literature on "executive functioning," or the control of one's thoughts and actions in pursuit of a goal. This broad construct is conceptualized as comprising multiple executive functions (EFs) that support academic achievement and other important life outcomes. However, there is a lack of consensus regarding what,…

Antifascists have developed action-oriented principles and practices for collective resistance to fascism. In this article, we discuss antifascism as "praxis," which is the nexus of theory and practice through collective reflection and action. Antifascist praxis can inform developmental science at individual and contextual levels of…

Developmental researchers commonly utilize longitudinal data to decompose reciprocal and dynamic associations between repeatedly measured constructs to better understand the temporal precedence between constructs. Although the cross-lagged panel model (CLPM) is commonly used in developmental research, it has been criticized for its potential to…

One of the most vexing challenges facing developmental researchers today is the statistical modeling of two or more behaviors as they unfold jointly over time. Although quantitative methodologists have studied these issues for more than half a century, no widely agreed-upon principled strategy exists to empirically analyze codevelopmental…

In this paper, Christian Morgner provides a critical reading of Niklas Luhmann's thinking as ignoring human beings or even as antihumanist. Here, he presents an alternative view that centers on Luhmann's idea of the child or human being as a medium. To explain Luhmann's use of these ideas to conceptualize the child and the consequences for…

Research on the development of active learning and information search behaviors has been growing rapidly, drawing interest from multiple disciplines, from developmental psychology to cognitive science and artificial intelligence. These different perspectives can open pathways to understanding how preschool-age children grow into adaptive and…

This article analyzes links between the origins of higher education institutions and the university "faculty development" movements. University faculty development programs surged during the peak of Cold War geopolitics. Thus, we trace the genealogy of higher education institutions to the surge in faculty development programs,…

Playful learning has garnered supporters and research evidence, and also can be seen as nebulous and, therefore, reliant on practitioners' intuitions in early education settings. In this paper, we offer an explicit theoretical account, grounded in developmental psychology of how play might support the acquisition of broad skills and dispositions…

Jeremy Sawyer recounts that, after Lev S. Vygotsky's death, Jean Piaget conceded the Russian psychologist correctly understood the social origins, functions, and developmental trajectory of children's egocentric speech (now called private speech) but dismissed this work as irrelevant to children's egocentrism or nondifferentiation of perspectives.…

In this article, I comment on the prospect of integrating an intersectionality perspective into the developmental sciences. I do this by sharing impressions, insights, and questions that have emerged whilst attempting to look at and to look through an intersectionality lens. My comments focus on three main topics. First, I speculate what forms…

Bjorklund synthesizes promising research directions in developmental psychology using an evolutionary framework. In general terms, we agree with Bjorklund: Evolutionary theory has the potential to serve as a metatheory for developmental psychology. However, as currently used in psychology, evolutionary theory is far from reaching this potential.…

In this commentary on the special issue on emotional development, I focus on the papers by Holodynski and Seeger (2019) and by Hoemann, Xu, and Barrett (2019). I suggest that although understanding our emotions is an important part of emotional development; emotional development cannot be reduced to concept development, even when such concepts…

Developmental researchers often have research questions about cross-lag effects--the effect of one variable predicting a second variable at a subsequent time point. The cross-lag panel model (CLPM) is often fit to longitudinal panel data to examine cross-lag effects; however, its utility has recently been called into question because of its…

Foundational to Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) was the influence of Marx's theory of historical materialism. Vygotsky's work radically rejected the traditional approaches of developmental psychology. The ZPD centralized the importance of potential development not only by measuring or testing what a child could perform, but a tool to…

Emotions remain something of a mystery for most of us even when we accept their centrality to development in general and to infancy in particular. I make 2 arguments in this paper. One: that the most crucial thing about emotions is that they allow mutuality of engagement with other emotional beings--not only evoking responses, but also provoking…