The present study examined the association between pre-service teachers' mindfulness and critical thinking dispositions, as indexed by engagement, cognitive maturity, and innovativeness in critical thinking. A total of 72 Chinese pre-service teachers were recruited from Hong Kong to complete an online questionnaire cross-sectionally. Hierarchical…

Education plays a central role in preparing young people to engage thoughtfully in civic and community issues and to wrestle with complex dilemmas in the public domain. As a democracy, our system of governance offers multiple pathways through which people living in the country can influence how civic issues and dilemmas are addressed.…

Parent-grandparent coparenting is a common phenomenon in mainland China; however, little is known about its relationship with children's cognitive development. This study investigates the links between parent-grandparent coparenting and young children's executive function (EF) and examines the potential mediating role of maternal parenting between…

Adults automatically infer a person's social disposition and future behavior based on the many properties they observe about how they look and sound. The goal of the current study is to explore the developmental origins of this bias. We tested whether 12-month-old infants automatically infer a character's social disposition (e.g., whether they are…

The success of human culture depends on early emerging mechanisms of social learning, which include the ability to acquire opaque cultural knowledge through faithful imitation, as well as the ability to advance culture through flexible discovery of new means to goal attainment. This study explores whether this mixture of faithful imitation and…

The essay integrates the psychometric intelligence approach with the cognitive-developmental approach or the stage theory erected by Piaget and his disciples. The latter led to Piagetian Cross-Cultural Psychology and the accumulation of an immense body of data. It shows that different IQ levels are indicative of the peculiar stages of cognitive…

Dabrowski's theory of positive disintegration describes patterns and explains mechanisms of human development and has been successfully applied to understanding of gifted individuals. This article shows how the concepts of chaos theory and self-organization such as the sensitivity to initial conditions, positive and negative feedback, bifurcation…

Although childhood generalized anxiety disorder is generally understudied, worry, the cardinal feature of GAD, appears to be relatively common in youth. Despite its prevalence, there are few conceptual models of the development of clinical worry in children. The current review provides a framework for integrating the developmental psychopathology…

Dr. Mary Margaret Wood is best known for developing psychoeducational programs that integrate mental health and special education interventions for children with emotional and behavioral disorders (EBD). Developmental Therapy (DT) includes comprehensive assessment of student behavior, communication, social, and cognitive development,…

Among other mechanisms, behavioral and cognitive development entail, on the one hand, contextual scaffolding and, on the other hand, neuromodulation of adaptive neurocognitive representations across the life span. Key brain networks underlying cognition, emotion, and motivation are innervated by major transmitter systems (e.g., the catecholamines…

A recent study by Apperly et al. (2006) found evidence that adults do not automatically infer false beliefs while watching videos that afford such inferences. This method was extended to examine true beliefs, which are sometimes thought to be ascribed by "default" (e.g., Leslie & Thaiss, 1992). Sequences of pictures were presented in which the…

Objective: Child and adolescent psychiatry is rife with examples of the sustained effects of early experience on brain function. The study of behavioral genetics provides evidence for a relation between genomic variation and personality and with the risk for psychopathology. A pressing challenge is that of "conceptually" integrating findings from…

This study examined contributions of maternal personality and infant temperament to infant vocabulary and cognitive development both directly and indirectly through parental stress. Participants were recruited at birth and included 63 infant twin pairs and their mothers. Assessments were completed at 6, 9, 12, and 18 months of age and included…

Personality is defined as the dynamic organization, within an individual, of the systems that determine his or her characteristic behavior or thought. The study of personality involves many aspects of human behavior. Four approaches used to study personality are presented in this document: (1) Social Learning theory; (2) Trait theory; (3)…

A total of 219 male and female college students returned questionnaire measures relating to cognitive complexity, dogmatism, and repression-sensitization. Analyses revealed very complex interactions among the variables. (Author/SB)