The ability to categorize emotions has long-term implications for children's social and emotional development. Therefore, identifying factors that influence early emotion categorization is of great importance. Yet, whether and how language impacts emotion category development is still widely debated. The present study aimed to assess how labels…

The manner in which mothers engage in emotional discussion, or reminisce, with their young children about past emotional experiences poses important ramifications for child socioemotional and cognitive development. Maltreating mothers may have difficulty engaging in emotionally supportive reminiscing. The current study examined the role of…

Humans possess a tendency to rapidly and consistently make character evaluations from mere facial appearance. Recent work shows that this tendency emerges surprisingly early: children as young as 3-years-old provide adult-like assessments of others on character attributes such as "nice," "strong," and "smart" based…

Publicly funded center-based preschool programs were designed to enhance low-income children's early cognitive and social-emotional skills in preparation for kindergarten. In the U.S., the federal Head Start program and state-funded public school-based pre-kindergarten (pre-k) programs are the two primary center-based settings in which low-income…

Emotion regulation is essential to cognitive, social, and emotional development and difficulties with emotion regulation portend future socioemotional, academic, and behavioral difficulties. There is growing awareness that many developmental outcomes previously thought to begin their development in the postnatal period have their origins in the…

Theories of social-cognitive development have attributed a foundational role to declarative joint attention. The present longitudinal study of 83 children, who were assessed on a battery of social-cognitive tasks at multiple measurement points from the age of 12 to 50 months, tested a predictive model of theory of mind (false-belief…

Adolescents become increasingly sensitive to social evaluation. Some previous studies have related this change to pubertal development. The present longitudinal study examined the role of sociocognitive development. We investigated whether or not the transition to recursive thinking, the ability to think about (others') thoughts, would be…

There is evidence that children of incarcerated parents are at risk of poor developmental and educational outcomes. However, much of this evidence is limited by biased samples, as studies must rely on opt-in recruitment. Administrative data present an opportunity to overcome this challenge, as they capture information on all incarcerated…

The authors hypothesized that a social and emotional learning (SEL) program involving mindfulness and caring for others, designed for elementary school students, would enhance cognitive control, reduce stress, promote well-being and prosociality, and produce positive school outcomes. To test this hypothesis, 4 classes of combined 4th and 5th…

On the basis of longitudinal data across 9 years, this study examined the contribution of sustained attention and executive function to the poor cognitive and socioemotional adjustment of school-age children whose mothers had depressive symptoms during the child's infancy. Mothers (N = 1,364) reported depressive symptoms across their child's…

Using data ("n" = 3,790 with 2,119 in the 3-year-old cohort and 1,671 in the 4-year-old cohort) from 353 Head Start centers in the Head Start Impact Study, the only large-scale randomized experiment in Head Start history, this article examined the impact of Head Start on children's cognitive and parent-reported social-behavioral outcomes…

Psychologists have long debated the role of early experience in social and cognitive development. However, traditional approaches to studying this issue are not well positioned to address this debate. The authors present simulations that indicate that the associations between early experiences and later outcomes should approach different…

When adults make a joint commitment to act together, they feel an obligation to their partner. In 2 studies, the authors investigated whether young children also understand joint commitments to act together. In the first study, when an adult orchestrated with the child a joint commitment to play a game together and then broke off from their joint…

P. M. Greenfield's new theory of social change and human development aims to show how changing sociodemographic ecologies alter cultural values and learning environments and thereby shift developmental pathways. Worldwide sociodemographic trends include movement from rural residence, informal education at home, subsistence economy, and…

Research on differential susceptibility to rearing suggests that infants with difficult temperaments are disproportionately affected by parenting and child care quality, but a major U.S. child care study raises questions as to whether quality of care influences social adjustment. One thousand three hundred sixty-four American children from…