Adolescence is a critical developmental period that is marked by drastic changes in face recognition, which are reflected in patterns of bias (i.e., superior recognition for some individuals compared to others). Here, we evaluate how race is perceived during face recognition and whether adolescents exhibit an own-race bias (ORB). We conducted a…

Kim and Opfer (2017) report data that demonstrate children produce a negatively accelerating (e.g., logarithmic) response pattern in the unbounded number-line task. This pattern of results is the opposite of those generally reported for the unbounded number-line task (e.g., Cohen & Blanc-Goldhammer, 2011; Cohen & Sarnecka, 2014). We…

Knowing the temporal direction of causal relations is critical for producing desired outcomes and explaining events. Existing evidence suggests that children start to grasp that causes must precede their effects (the temporal priority principle) by age 3; however, whether younger children also understand this has, to our knowledge, not previously…

Past research has demonstrated that both consequentialist motives (such as deterrence) and deontological motives (such as "just deserts") underlie children's and adults' punitive behavior. But what motives do we ascribe to others who pursue punishment? The present work explores this question by assessing which punitive motives children…

This study investigated 8- to 14-year-old U.S. children's (N = 202, 47% girls, and 49% White) evaluations of statements reflecting individual and structural attributions for the causes of racial inequality between Black and White people in the United States, the epistemic characteristics they used to seek out more information on this topic, and…

Do children always conform to a majority's testimony, or do the pragmatics of that testimony matter? We investigated the influence of pragmatics on conforming to a majority across 2 domains: when learning about object labels and when learning about causal relationships. Four- and 5-year-olds (N = 250) were given a choice between an object endorsed…

Previous work has shown the robust nature of gender bias in both children and adults. However, much less attention has been paid toward understanding what factors shape these biases. The current preregistered study used parent surveys and child interviews to test whether parents' conversations with their children about and modeling of gender…

Although it has long been known that time is a cue to causation, recent work with adults has demonstrated that causality can also influence the experience of time. In "causal reordering" (Bechlivanidis & Lagnado, 2013, 2016) adults tend to report the causally consistent order of events rather than the correct temporal order. However,…

Symptoms of anxiety and depression are commonly comorbid and partially share a genetic etiology. Mean levels of anxiety and depression increase over the transition to adolescence, particularly in girls, suggesting a possible role of pubertal development in the activation of underlying genetic risks. The current study examined how genetic and…

This investigation examines the spread of problem behaviors (substance use and delinquency) between twin siblings. A sample of 628 twins (151 male twin pairs and 163 female twin pairs) drawn from the Quebec Newborn Twin Study completed inventories describing delinquency and substance use at ages 13, 14, and 15. A 3-wave longitudinal actor-partner…

This study explores how feature salience and feature centrality influence inductive generalization in 4- and 5-year-old children and adults. Recent reports indicate that enhancing the salience of a feature--specifically, a creature's head--by making it move shifts children's inductions so that they ignore labels and make inferences that are…

Adolescence is a vulnerable period for the initiation and peak of many harmful risk-taking behaviors such as smoking, which is among the most addictive and deadliest behaviors. Generic metatheories like the theory of triadic influence (TTI) suggest that interrelated risk factors across multiple domains (i.e., intrapersonal and…

Common sense suggests that romantic partners tend to be interdependent in their well-being and self-esteem. The authors tested the degree to which codevelopment in romantic partners (i.e., development in similar directions) is due to mutual influence between partners or due to the effects of shared environment, using longitudinal data from 5…

The relation between nonword repetition and vocabulary has been the focus of a theoretical controversy for several decades. The point of contention is whether the ability underlying nonword repetition drives vocabulary growth or vice versa. The present study examines longitudinal interrelations between nonword repetition and vocabulary from age 3…

This study explored how nonpromotional school changes, a potentially major event for children, were associated with 3 forms of social maladjustment: isolation/withdrawal, affiliation with maladjusted peers, and aggression toward peers. Given that school mobility frequently co-occurs with family transitions, the moderating role of these transitions…