Both parasympathetic nervous system regulation and receipt of social support from close relationships contribute to prosocial development, although few studies have examined their combined influences in adolescence and particularly within racially and ethnically minoritized populations. In this longitudinal study of 229 U.S. Mexican-origin…

Developmental science suggests that the consequences of mental health problems for life-course outcomes may depend on the timing of their onset. This study investigated the extent to which mental health predicted educational attainment at ages 17, 20, and 25 and whether gender moderated the links between mental health and educational attainment.…

Receptive vocabulary development was examined in 313 children (151 girls; 78% White) as a function of infant attention and maternal education (66% of mothers held a college degree or higher). Attention was measured at 10 months using a dynamic puppet task and receptive vocabulary was measured at 3-, 4-, 6-, and 9 years of age using the Peabody…

Youth with greater levels of narcissism face a wide array of difficulties in interactions with others. However, there exists a curious lack of research on their close relationships, such as friendships. In this study, we examined associations between narcissism and friendship features over time. Participants were 261 eighth and ninth graders (112…

The current study examined the Five Cs model of positive youth development (PYD; Lerner et al., 2005) in U.S. Mexican-origin youth (N = 674, 50% female) and tested the extent to which ethnic pride, familismo, and respeto, as an index of cultural orientation, predicted PYD across midadolescence. PYD was modeled using a bifactor structure, which…

Observers experience complex patterns of visual motion in daily life due to their own movements through space, the movement of objects, and the geometry of surfaces in the visible world. Motion information shapes behavior and brain activity beginning in infancy. And yet most prior behavioral research has focused on how children process only one…

Past meta-analyses show that both child-mother and child-father attachment insecurity are independently and jointly associated with more externalizing behaviors in children. Little is known, however, on the ways that different types of insecure attachment independently and jointly predict the development of externalizing behaviors over time.…

Adolescents are tasked with navigating competing priorities, including whether to marry, have children, pursue a job/career, go to college, and contribute to society. The developmental task of building expectations for the future is especially complex for Cambodian adolescents living within a society that strongly prioritizes family obligations…

The role of executive function skills and motivation in supporting children's academic achievement is well-documented, but the vast majority of evidence is from high-income countries. Classrooms in sub-Saharan Africa tend to be large, teacher-driven, and lecture-focused, which may provide extra challenges for children to stay engaged in the…

This study quantified changes in self-reported sexual orientation from adolescence to early adulthood, and whether childhood gender nonconformity (GNC) predicted sexual orientation changes. Youth (2,678 boys and 3,359 girls; 96.09% ethnically White) from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC) were included. Self-reported…

Accidents caused by human errors illustrate the fragility of cognitive processing and its coordination by executive functions against stress. To better understand how core executive functions change over time, influence each other, and are affected by chronic stress exposure, a prospective cohort study was conducted from 2016 to 2019. Five hundred…

Extensive evidence and theory suggest that the development of motor skills during infancy and early childhood initiates a "developmental cascade" for cognitive abilities, such as reading and math. Motor skills are closely connected with the development of spatial cognition, an ability that supports deductive reasoning. Despite the…

This longitudinal study of Australian families (n = 1,884, from age 6-12) examined how fathers' and mothers' quantitative involvement (time spent on childcare) and qualitative involvement (specific parenting behaviors) relate to children's emotional adjustment development. We used dynamic structural equation modeling to disentangle stable…

In contrast to a large body of work concerning the effects of physiological stress reactivity on children's socioemotional functioning, far less attention has been devoted to understanding the effects of such reactivity on cognitive, including mnemonic, functioning. How well children learn and remember information under stress has implications for…

We explored how gender and gender similarity affects friendship dissolution following the transition to middle school. We predicted that both gender and gender similarity (measured by perceived similarity to own-gender and other-gender peers) explain dissolution trends and that less own-gender similarity or more other-gender similarity predicts…