Children from lower socioeconomic status (SES) families are at increased risk for anxiety problems, though knowledge of the pathways by which SES predicts children's anxiety outcomes remains scant. Limited work suggests SES as a moderator of links between early development and anxiety outcomes but has not used a longitudinal framework or a…

Children's socioeconomic status (SES) is linked to disparate access to resources and affects social behaviors such as inclusion and resource allocations. Yet it is unclear whether children's essentialized view of SES (i.e., believing SES is immutable) or subjective social status (SSS) influences behavioral biases toward high- versus low-SES peers.…

Future-oriented decision-making is an important adaptive behavior. In the present study, we examined whether decision-making varies as a function of socioeconomic status (SES) using the Children's Gambling task (CGT). We administered the CGT to 227 children (49% female, 48% low SES) between the ages of 5 and 7 years. After completing the CGT, we…

The role of executive function skills and motivation in supporting children's academic achievement is well-documented, but the vast majority of evidence is from high-income countries. Classrooms in sub-Saharan Africa tend to be large, teacher-driven, and lecture-focused, which may provide extra challenges for children to stay engaged in the…

Little is known about how developmental experiences spanning early childhood through adolescence prepare children and youth to engage with society, and even less so for ethnically diverse Black children and youth. Building from work linking positive youth development (PYD) to civic engagement, this study examined how socialization trajectories…

This study examined how Argentine adolescents' judgments about the fairness of their society are related to their perceptions of actual and ideal societal wealth distribution, just world beliefs, and trust in political institutions. Six hundred ninety-nine Argentine adolescents from three age groups (12-14 years, 15-16 years, and 17-18 years) in…

An increasing body of research on critical consciousness explores how youth understand and react to inequality in their social contexts. The operationalization of critical consciousness remains inchoate, however. Developmental psychology traditionally conceptualizes critical consciousness as three components (critical reflection, political…

Nordic welfare states have been very successful at reducing poverty and inequality among their citizens. However, the presence of a strong social safety net in these countries has not solved the problem of "socioeconomic exclusion", manifesting in such outcomes as chronic unemployment and welfare dependency. In an effort to understand…

Open-ended responses of an ethnically and socioeconomically diverse sample of 593 12- to 19-year-olds (M = 16 years old, SD = 1.59) were analyzed to explain why some people in the United States are poor and others are rich. Adolescents had more knowledge and a more complex understanding of wealth than of poverty and older adolescents had more…

Two studies examined whether differences in the lexical explicitness with which languages (English, Spanish, Portuguese, Turkish) express false belief and preschoolers' socioeconomic status (SES) influenced children's performance on standard false belief tasks. Found that lexical explicitness influenced responses on the "think" false…

African American mothers' and fathers' availability, caregiving, and social behaviors toward their infants in and around their homes were examined. Twenty lower, 21 middle, and 21 upper socioeconomic families and their 3- to 4-month-old infants were observed for 4 3-hr blocks between 8:00 a.m. and 8:00 p.m. on 4 different weekdays. With increasing…

Examined whether African American first- through sixth-graders' perceptions of occupational status and their own vocational interests were affected by racial segregation of the workforce. Found that for familiar jobs, children's judgments related to their knowledge of racial segregation in these jobs. Novel occupations depicted with African…