The present study was designed to test whether the beneficial effects of emotion regulation (ER) have less to do with the use of singular, "adaptive" strategies and more to do with using a range of strategies. Using a community sample of adolescents (N = 177, M = 13.6 years), groups based on five measures of ER (reappraisal, suppression,…

The goals of this study were to examine the additive and interactive effects of cumulative risk and child negative emotionality on children's social competence in the transition from preschool to school and to test whether these associations were mediated by child emotion regulation within a sample of 310 low-income, ethnically diverse boys.…

Experimental studies of children's responses to apologies often present participants with hypothetical scenarios. This article reports on an experimental study of children's reactions to experiencing an actual disappointment and subsequent apology. Participants (ages four to seven) were told that another child was supposed to share some attractive…

This paper provides an introduction to a recently developed conceptual framework--the dimensional-categorical spectrum--for utilizing general factor mixture models to explore the latent structures of psychological constructs. This framework offers advantages over traditional latent variable models that usually employ either continuous latent…

This paper presents a meta-analytic review of 33 studies, with a total of 29,552 participants, that examined the concurrent association between peer victimization and academic achievement. The results revealed a small but significant negative correlation between peer victimization and academic achievement under both the random-effects model (r =…

This study aimed to support the theory of popularity contagion, which posits that popularity spreads among friends spontaneously and regardless of behavioral changes. Peer nominations of status and behavior were collected annually between 6th and 12th grades from a total of 1062 adolescents. Longitudinal hypotheses were mostly supported using path…

Aggressive behavior has been well studied in terms of interindividual differences among aggressors and victims, but has been understudied, especially within naturalistic contexts, in terms of aggressor-victim relationships. The social relations model (SRM) is a powerful conceptual and analytic tool for studying dyadic phenomena, and we describe…

Social skills and symbol skills are positively associated in middle childhood, but the relation between these domains is less clear in newly verbal toddlers. Vygotsky proposed that symbols are both tools for interaction and mental tools for thought. Do symbols help even very young children build skills for interacting with and conceptualizing the…

Developmental and gender effects in the transmission of information about a tool-use task were investigated within a "diffusion chain" design. One hundred and twenty-seven children (65 three-year-olds and 62 five-year-olds) participated. Eighty children took part in diffusion chains in which consecutive children in chains of five witnessed two…

Recent studies of the relationship between parenting and child development have included a focus on the parent's capacity to treat the child as a psychological agent. Several constructs have been developed to refer to this capacity, for example maternal mind-mindedness, reflective functioning, and parental mentalizing. In this review article, we…

Three models regarding the relation between maternal (in)sensitivity, negative discipline, and child aggression were examined in a sample of 117 mother-child pairs with high scores on child externalizing behavior: (1) Sensitivity and discipline are uniquely related to child aggression (the additive model); (2) the relation between discipline and…

Guided by Belsky's and Eisenberg, Cumberland, and Spinrad's heuristic models, we tested a process model with hypothesized paths from parents' effortful control (EC) and family chaos to indices of parenting to children's EC, and finally children's externalizing problem behavior. Parents reported on all constructs and children (N = 188; M age = 9.55…

This study investigated the associations among psychologically controlling parenting, relational aggression, friendship quality, and loneliness during adolescence. A model was proposed in which relational aggression plays an intervening role in the relations between both parental psychological control and friendship outcomes. In a sample comprised…

Are children as young as 2 years old able to interact in groups of three? The study applied the family triad model first introduced by Parke, Power, and Gottman (1979) to the case of peer interaction. In Experiment 1, the model was refined for use in studies of peer interaction and applied to an existing dataset of 16 triads of newly acquainted…

The purpose of this study was to test direct, additive, and mediation models involving family, neighborhood, and peer factors in relation to emerging antisocial behavior and social skills. Neighborhood danger, maternal depressive symptoms, and supportive parenting were assessed in early childhood. Peer group acceptance was measured in middle…