Directional associations between civic engagement and happiness were explored with longitudinal data from a community sample surveyed four times from age 22 to 43 (n = 690). Autoregressive cross-lagged models, controlling for cross-time stabilities in happiness and civic engagement, examined whether happiness predicted future civic engagement,…

Premature infants have significant risk for later behavior problems. This study examined growth trajectories of three problem behaviors across five developmental age points from preschool to early adulthood in a well-characterized sample of premature infants. The effects of neonatal risk, gender, and socioeconomic context were modeled on these…

Previous studies have found evidence for gender and racial/ethnic differences in depressive symptoms in adolescence; however, the mechanisms driving this relationship are poorly understood. The goal of this study was to examine the role of individual differences in dispositional coping in the relationships between gender and depressive…

Findings from previous cross-sectional studies showed that while toddlers around their first birthday imitate selectively, that is, they systematically omit some kinds of target action steps or they copy only the goal, but not the means of the modeled actions, older toddlers imitate more exactly. The aim of the present article is to provide…

Children's and adolescents' narratives of interpersonal experiences can inform our understanding of developmental shifts in the use of personhood concepts. We present results from two studies ("n"s = 90, 112) with children aged five to 16 years. In the first study, children were asked to describe one positive and another negative…

We investigated the ability to detect a face among other visual objects in a complex visual array in 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old children, as well as in adults. To this end, we used a visual search paradigm implemented on a touch-tablet device. Subjects (N = 100) saw up to eighty 3 × 3 visual search arrays and had to find and tap upon a target--a face…

Theory of mind is one of the most important cognitive factors in social information-processing, and deficits in theory of mind have been linked to aggressive behavior in childhood. The present longitudinal study investigated reciprocal links between theory of mind and two forms of aggression--physical and relational--in middle childhood with three…

Situation selection--choosing to enter or avoid situations based on how they will likely make you feel--is theorized to be a useful emotion regulation strategy, especially in older age. However, research on the use of situation selection for emotion regulation is limited, and the existing findings about age differences are mixed, with some studies…

This study examined interrelations between three indicators of main challenges during adolescence: academic achievement, self-perceived peer acceptance, and self-esteem. An additional aim was to investigate whether the findings hold for girls and boys and across school types (academically oriented track vs. non-academically oriented track). We…

Being surrounded by peers who are accepting of aggression is a significant predictor of the development and persistence of aggression in childhood and adolescence. Whereas past research has focused on social reinforcement mechanisms as the underlying processes, the present longitudinal study analysed the role of external control beliefs as an…

The current study investigated the development of global and domain (academic, physical, same-sex peer relationship, opposite-sex peer relationship) self-esteem from age 10 to 16 in a sample of Mexican-origin adolescents. Participants' (N = 674) responses on the Self-Description Questionnaire (SDQ; Marsh, 2005) II-S showed moderate rank-order…

The goal of the current investigation was to test emotion dysregulation as a mechanism explaining the longitudinal association between peer rejection and depressive symptoms across 1 school year in middle childhood and to determine whether this process differed based on gender and grade. Youth in Grades 3 through 6 (N = 131; 71 girls) and their…

Children younger than three years old are able to detect hidden rules in numerical sequences, and this ability matches that of adults by age seven. However, the developmental trajectory of this ability during the ages of four to six remains unknown. The present study adopted a modified Brixton task to address this issue. In this task, children…

We address how to conceptualize and measure intentional self-regulation (ISR) among adolescents from four cultures by assessing whether ISR (conceptualized by the SOC model of Selection, Optimization, and Compensation) is represented by three factors (as with adult samples) or as one "adolescence-specific" factor. A total of 4,057 14-…

Although research suggests an interplay between identity development and self-esteem, most studies focused on the role of identity commitment and measured only level of self-esteem. This study examined longitudinal associations between Berzonsky's (2011) styles of identity exploration and two distinct features of self-esteem: level of self-esteem…