Perceived control is an important psychosocial resource for health and well-being across the lifespan. Global control (i.e., overall perceived control) decreases over time in studies following people every few years to upwards of 10 years. Changes across wider intervals of the lifespan, however, have yet to be examined. Further, how perceived…

This study investigated children's and adolescents' predictions regarding intergroup inclusion in contexts where peers differed on two dimensions of group membership: race and wealth. African American and European American participants (N = 153; age range: 8-14 years, M[subscript age] = 11.46 years) made predictions about whether afterschool clubs…

The present study used a novel, well-controlled paradigm to investigate the development of cool, hot-positive, and hot-negative inhibitory control in a sample of children (6- to 11-year-old; N = 38, 21 females), adolescents (12- to 18-year-old; N = 38, 24 females), and adults (19- to 38-year-old; N = 38, 28 females; sample location: United…

Humans tend to avoid cognitive effort. Whereas evidence of this abounds in adults, little is known about its emergence and development in childhood. The few existing studies in children use different experimental paradigms and report contradictory developmental patterns. We examined effort-related decision-making in a sample of 79 five- to…

By approximately 6 years of age, children can use time-based visual selection to ignore stationary stimuli, already in the visual field and prioritize the selection of newly arriving stimuli. This ability can be studied using preview search, a version of the visual search paradigm with an added temporal component, in which one set of distractors…

We examined the development of numerical magnitude representations of fractions and decimals from fourth to 12th grade. In Experiment 1, we assessed the rational number magnitude knowledge of 200 Chinese fourth, fifth, sixth, eighth, and 12th graders (92 girls and 108 boys) by presenting fraction and decimal magnitude comparison tasks as well as…

Empathy and executive functions (EFs) are multimodal constructs that enable individuals to cope with their environment. Both abilities develop throughout childhood and are known to contribute to social behavior and academic performance in young adolescents. Notably, mentalizing and EF activate shared frontotemporal brain areas, which in previous…

Feeling inhibited and socially not at ease is reflected in the trait social inhibition (SI). SI is associated with psychopathology that arises in young adulthood, such as anxiety. We aim for a better insight into the genetic and environmental contributions to SI across the life span, and as such examine their contributions to SI stability and…

The present study examined individual differences in the development of sustained attention across toddlerhood, as well as how these individual differences related to the development of language and sleep. Toddlers (N = 314; 54% male) were assessed at 30, 36, and 42 months using multiple measures of attention, a standardized language assessment,…

Although many facets of social status (i.e., socioeconomic status, gender, race) are fairly stable, limited work has assessed how youths' identification with their status changes over time. Subjective social status (SSS) refers to one's perception of standing or rank relative to others, and for youth status is generally in the context of society…

The ability to prioritize remembering explicitly valuable information is termed value-based remembering. Critically, the processes and contexts that support the development of value-based remembering are largely unknown. The present study examined the effects of feedback and metacognitive differences on value-based remembering in predominantly…

Mind-mindedness (MM) refers to caregivers' proclivity to treat a child as having an active and autonomous mental life. It has been shown to be a powerful predictor of many developmental outcomes and to mitigate the impact of risk conditions. However, longitudinal studies on MM reporting changes over time and individual differences among mothers…

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…

Indirect aggression has been associated with antisocial personality traits like Machiavellianism, but there is a lack of evidence on their longitudinal development across adolescence. Therefore, the joint developmental trajectories of adolescent indirect aggression and Machiavellianism across 3 years of high school (Grades 10 to 12) were…

Most infants exhibit an attentional bias for faces and fearful facial expressions. These biases reduce toward the third year of life, but little is known about the development of the biases beyond early childhood. We used the same methodology longitudinally to assess attention disengagement patterns from nonface control pictures and faces…