Child Development

This study examines how retributive motives-the desire to punish for the purpose of inflicting harm in the absence of future benefits-shape third-party punishment behavior across intergroup contexts. Six- to nine-year-olds (N = 151, Mage  = 8.00, SDage  = 1.15; 54% White, 18% mixed ethnicities, 17% Asian American; 46% female; from the USA) could punish ingroup, outgroup, or non-group transgressors by removing positive resources and allocating negative ones. Both punishments were described as retributive, yet allocating negative resources was perceived as more retributive than removing positive ones...

Historically, evidence of self-recognition in development has been associated with the "rouge test"; however, this has been often criticized for providing a reductionist picture of self-conscious behavior. With two event-related potential (ERP) experiments, this study investigated the origin of self-recognition. Six- to eight-month-old infants (42 males and 35 females, predominately White, tested in the UK in 2022-2023) were presented with images of their face, another peer's face, and their mother's face (N = 38, Exp...

Digital flourishing refers to the positive perceptions of digital communication use in five dimensions: connectedness, positive social comparison, authentic self-presentation, civil participation, and self-control. This three-wave panel study among 1081 Slovenian adolescents (Mage  = 15.34 years, 53.8% boys, 80.7% ethnic majority) explored the trajectories of their digital flourishing dimensions over 1 year (2021-2022). Latent class growth analysis identified two classes. Adolescents in the first class reported high levels of digital flourishing, which remained stable over time, whereas those in the second class reported low levels of digital flourishing with decreased self-control over time...

Executive functions and emotion regulation develop from early childhood to adolescence and are predictive of important psychosocial outcomes. However, despite the correlation between the two regulatory capacities, whether they are prospectively related in school-aged children remains unknown, and the direction of effects is uncertain. In this study, a sample drawn from two birth cohorts in Norway was biennially examined between the ages of 6 and 14 (n = 852, 50.1% girls, 93% Norwegian). Parents completed the Emotion Regulation Checklist, and teachers completed the Behavior Rating Inventory of Executive Function...

Can the experience of disagreement lead young children to reason in more sophisticated ways? Across two preregistered studies, four- to six-year-old US children (N = 136, 50% female, mixed ethnicities, data collected 2020-2022) experienced either a disagreement or an agreement with a confederate about a causal mechanism after being presented with ambiguous evidence. We measured (1) children's confidence in their belief before and after the (dis)agreement, and (2) how long children searched for information about the correct answer...

Most language use is displaced, referring to past, future, or hypothetical events, posing the challenge of how children learn what words refer to when the referent is not physically available. One possibility is that iconic cues that imagistically evoke properties of absent referents support learning when referents are displaced. In an audio-visual corpus of caregiver-child dyads, English-speaking caregivers interacted with their children (N = 71, 24-58 months) in contexts in which the objects talked about were either familiar or unfamiliar to the child, and either physically present or displaced...

Two studies examine how social object histories from collaborative experiences influenced North American children (N = 160, 5-10 years) thinking about the value of digital objects (48% male/51% female; 51% White/24% Black/11% Asian). With forced-choice judgments, Study 1 found (moderate-large effects) that children viewed digital and physical objects with social histories as more special than objects without such histories. On a 10-point scale, Study 2 found (large effects) that children rated digital objects with positive social histories as more special than objects with negative ones...

This study addressed whether combining tinkering with digital storytelling (i.e., narrating and reflecting about experiences to an imagined audience) can engender engineering learning opportunities. Eighty-four families with 5- to 10-year-old (M = 7.69) children (48% female children; 57% White, 11% Asian, 6% Black) watched a video introducing a tinkering activity and were randomly assigned either to a digital storytelling condition or a no digital storytelling condition during tinkering. After tinkering, families reflected on their tinkering experience and were randomly assigned to either engage in digital storytelling or not...

This study examined how adolescents make meaning of racist jokes and their impact on daily well-being using a sequential mixed-methods research design with interview (N = 20; 60% girls, 5% gender-nonconforming; 45% Asian American, 40% Latina/o/x, 10% Black, 5% biracial/multiethnic) and daily diary data (N = 168; 54% girls; 57% Latina/o/x, 21% biracial/multiethnic, 10% Asian American, 9% White, 4% Black). Qualitative results revealed that racist jokes were common, distinct from other overt forms of discrimination, and perceived as harmless when perpetrated by friends...

Although children exhibit curiosity regarding science, questions remain regarding how children evaluate others' curiosity and whether evaluations differ across domains that prioritize faith (e.g., religion) versus those that value questioning (e.g., science). In Study 1 (n = 115 5- to 8-year-olds; 49% female; 66% White), children evaluated actors who were curious, ignorant and non-curious, or knowledgeable about religion or science; curiosity elicited relatively favorable moral evaluations (ds > ...

This study tested intuitions about ownership in children of Dani people, an indigenous Papuan society (N = 79, Mage  = 7, 49.4% females). The results show that similar to studies with children from Western societies, children infer ownership from (1) control of permission, (2) ownership of the territory the object is located in, and (3) manmade versus natural origins of the object. By contrast, they did not (4) infer ownership from the first observed possession of an object. Additionally, Papuan children showed (5) an absolute first possession heuristic, whereby they assigned ownership to a person who achieved a goal, in contrast to a person who was first to pursue this goal but failed to be the first to claim it...

Memory enables generalization to new situations, and memory specificity that preserves individual episodes. This study investigated generalization, memory specificity, and their overnight fate in 141 4- to 8-year-olds (computerized memory game; 71 females, tested 2020-2021 in Germany). The results replicated age effects in generalization and memory specificity, and a contingency of generalization on object conceptual properties and interobject semantic proximity. Age effects were stronger in generalization than in memory specificity, and generalization was more closely linked to the explicit regularity knowledge in older than in younger children...

Independent decision making requires forming stable estimates of one's preferences. We assessed whether adolescents learn about their preferences through choice deliberation and whether depressive symptoms disrupt this process. Adolescents aged 11-18 (N = 214; participated 2021-22; Female: 53.9%; White/Black/Asian/Mixed/Arab or Latin American: 26/21/19/9/8%) rated multiple activities, chose between pairs of activities and re-rated those activities. As expected, overall, participants uprated chosen and downrated unchosen activities (dz = ...

The family and classroom are important contexts that can contribute to the socialization of ethnic prejudice. However, less is known about their unique, relative, and synergic contributions in influencing youth's affective and cognitive prejudice. The current longitudinal study examined these processes and possible moderators among 688 Italian youth (49.13% girls; Mage  = 15.61 years), their parents (nmothers  = 603, nfathers  = 471; Mage  = 49...

This meta-analysis linked relative and absolute parental differential treatment (PDT) with internalizing and externalizing behavior of children and adolescents. Multilevel meta-analysis data represented 26,451 participants based on 2890 effect sizes coming from 88 sources, nested within 43 samples. Participants were between 3.18 and 18.99 years of age (Mage  = 12.64, SD = 3.89; 51.31% female; 82.23% White; 54.68% from the United States). Less-favored treatment (relative PDT) was linked to more internalizing and externalizing behavior...

This study examined how socioeconomic status (SES) influences on decision-making processing. The roles of anticipatory/outcome-related cardiac activity and awareness of task contingencies were also assessed. One hundred twelve children (Mage  = 5.83, SDage  = 0.32; 52.7% female, 51.8% low-SES; data collected October-December 2018 and April-December 2019) performed the Children's Gambling Task, while heart rate activity was recorded. Awareness of gain/loss contingencies was assessed after completing the task...

This study investigated associations of the Incredible Years (IY) parenting program with children's DNA methylation. Participants were 289 Dutch children aged 3-9 years (75% European ancestry, 48% female) with above-average conduct problems. Saliva was collected 2.5 years after families were randomized to IY or care as usual (CAU). Using an intention-to-treat approach, confirmatory multiple-regression analyses revealed no significant differences between the IY and CAU groups in children's methylation levels at the NR3C1 and FKBP5 genes...

This study examined the link between classroom ethnic diversity, cross-ethnic friendships, and children's theory of mind. In total, 730 children in the United Kingdom (54.7% girls, 51.5% White) aged 8 to 13 years completed measures of theory of mind in 2019/2020. Controlling for verbal ability, executive function, peer social preference, and teacher-reported demographic characteristics, greater classroom ethnic diversity provided opportunities for cross-ethnic friendships, and children with cross-ethnic friendships performed better than peers without cross-ethnic friendships on theory of mind...

Why is instructional gesture ineffective in some contexts? And what is it about learners that predicts whether they will learn from gestures? This between-subjects linear measurement training study compares gesture instruction to two controls-operant action and transient action-in a diverse sample of first-grade students (N = 174, Mage  = 7.01 years; Nfemale  = 84; Nmale  = 90, 10% Latinx-identified; 70% White; 6% Black; 6% Asian; 18% multiple racial categories, Mincome  = $59,750, SDincome  ≈ $25,000; data collected 03/16-03/19)...

This study investigated the neural basis of letter and speech sound (LS) integration in 53 typical readers (35 girls, all White) during the first 2 years of reading education (ages 7-9). Changes in both sensory (multisensory vs unisensory) and linguistic (congruent vs incongruent) aspects of LS integration were examined. The left superior temporal cortex and bilateral inferior frontal cortex showed increasing activation for multisensory over unisensory LS over time, driven by reduced activation to speech sounds...