Counterfactual emotions such as regret may aid future decision-making by encouraging people to focus on controllable features of personal past events. However, it remains unclear when children begin to preferentially focus on controllable features of such events. Across two studies, Australian 4-9-year-olds (N = 336, 168 females; data collected…

Social media facilitates a digital presentation of self and a curated identity that may differ from real-life portrayals. Being exposed to others 'highlight reel' may influence the way we perceive ourselves. Using collage with an unstructured interview, children's perceptions of how they portray their identity in digital spaces were explored. This…

Although children display strong individual differences in emotion expression, they also engage in emotional synchrony or reciprocity with interaction partners. To understand this paradox between trait-like and dyadic influences, the goal of the current study was to investigate children's emotion expression using a Social Relations Model (SRM)…

Background: There is a long research tradition on students' images of scientists based on their drawings. However, the dimension of scientists' emotions, as a critical aspect of these images has not been thoroughly investigated. Purpose: The present study aims to investigate scientists' emotions as depicted in children's drawings to shed light on…

In this article, the author introduces a series of socially engaged practices conducted between April 2019 and August 2020. In this project, titled "Project Superhero," children made meaning and projected their wishes through pretend play as superheroes. Their superhero gadgets were semiotic resources helping to reveal the children's…

Feeling loved by one's parents is critical for children's health and well-being. How can such feelings be fostered? A vital feature of loving interactions is reciprocal self-disclosure, where individuals disclose intimate information about themselves. In a proof-of-concept experiment, we examined whether encouraging reciprocal self-disclosure in…

We investigated whether child temperament (negative emotionality, 5 months) moderated the association between maternal stimulation (5 months--2½ years) and academic readiness and achievement (vocabulary, mathematics, and reading). We applied structural equation modeling to the data from the Quebec Longitudinal Study of Child Development (N =…

In times of disasters and adversity, children are among the most vulnerable. The "United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child" (1989) highlights the importance of protecting children from harm and making decisions in their best interests--matters that become heightened in an adverse context. From 2020 to 2023, the government of…

Optimism is linked to persistence and resilience in adults; however, how optimism might relate to children's evaluations of potentially challenging situations and risk-taking behaviors is unknown. This study examined the role of optimism in 4- to 8-year-old children's (N = 121) perceptions of and willingness to engage in physical activities that…

This research investigates positive future expectancies, particularly hope in children, which is comprised of agency thinking, perceiving oneself as capable of achieving goals, and pathways thinking, perceiving oneself as capable of discovering methods toward the desired goals. Two studies (n = 82) were conducted in the United States to examine…

Climate change education is associated with negative emotions. Picturebooks are considered powerful resources for teaching complex issues like climate change, partly for their capacity to be emotionally engaging and motivate learners. This article explores the positive emotional experiences supported by picturebook use in climate change education.…

Hong Kong experienced a period of significant social unrest, marked by protests, from June 2019 to February 2020. Media coverage was pervasive. In July 2020, children aged from 5 to 6 years attending kindergartens in areas both directly and less directly impacted by the protests were asked to draw and talk about what had taken place during the…

Background: Many people fear failure and making mistakes. This fear can be transmitted from parents to children, suggesting that parental communication regarding failures and setbacks may play a critical role in shaping a child's perception of mistakes. Aims: In this study, we investigated how everyday parent-child conversations about setbacks…

During the COVID-19 pandemic, health professionals had to spend much of their time working in hospitals, which may have caused psychological distress to their children. This study was in the form of a case study pattern, one of the qualitative research methods aimed to identify the psychosocial effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the primary…

An understanding of harm is central to social and cognitive development, but harm largely has been conceptualized as physical damage or injury. Less research focuses on children's judgments of harm to others' internal well-being (emotional harms). We asked 5- to 10-year-old children (N = 456, 50% girls, 50% boys; primarily tested in Central New…