Infant and Child Development

Theory of mind refers to the ability to reason about others' beliefs and to understand others' behaviour in terms of those beliefs. A large body of previous research has examined theory of mind reasoning in young children using false belief tasks, but tasks to examine this capacity during infancy have only been developed more recently. This research used stimuli developed by Kovács, et al., Science , 2010, 330, 1830-1834, to measure looking time to an agent with a false belief in infants aged 6 and 7 months...

References to internal states (e.g., thoughts, feelings, and desires) indicate children's appreciation of people's inner worlds. Many children spend time playing video games; however, the nature of children's speech when doing so has received little attention. We investigated the use of internal state language (ISL) as 251 seven-year-olds played with toy figures and a video game designed for the study. Although children used ISL more when playing with toy figures, children used ISL in both contexts, highlighting video game play as a context where children demonstrate their appreciation of inner worlds...

High-quality, centre-based education and care during the early years benefit cognitive development, especially in children from disadvantaged backgrounds. During the COVID-19 pandemic and its associated lockdowns, access to early childhood education and care (ECEC) was disrupted. We investigate how this period affected the developmental advantages typically offered by ECEC. Using parent-report data from 189 families living in the UK, we explore associations between time spent in ECEC by 8-to-36-month-olds, their socioeconomic background, and their growth in language and executive functions between Spring and Winter 2020...

Maternal depression is associated with disrupted responsiveness during mother-infant dyadic interactions. Less research has evaluated whether responsivity between mother and offspring is altered in interactions during the preschool years, a period of vast socio-emotional development. In the current study, 72 mothers and preschoolers engaged in a positive emotion-eliciting task, in which they drew and talked about a recent fun experience, and independent coders separately rated mother and child emotion in 10-second intervals...

The waist-to-hip ratio (WHR) is correlated with health and associated with sex, attractiveness, and age judgments by adults. We examined the development of sensitivity to the WHR by testing 3.5-month-old infants' ( N = 71) preference between images depicting different WHRs. Female 3.5-month-olds exhibited a preference for the WHR associated with attractiveness and mate value by adults (0.7) over a larger WHR (0.9). This preference was exhibited when infants were tested on upright stimuli but not when they were tested on inverted stimuli, indicating that low-level differences (e...

The relation between maternal behavior and neurocognitive development is complex and may depend on the task context. We examined 5-month-old infant frontal EEG, maternal intrusiveness (MI) evaluated during two play contexts at 5 and 10 months, and a battery of executive function (EF) tasks completed at 48 months to evaluate if MI during infancy and infant neural function interacted to predict later cognition. Infant frontal EEG was a predictor of 4-year EF. MI during structured play at both 5 and 10 months predicted preschool EF, and MI during unstructured did not have a main effect on EF but showed a potential moderating effect of infant EEG on later EF...

When children transition to school between the ages of 4 and 6 years, they must learn to control their attention and behavior to be successful. Concurrently, executive function (EF) is an important skill undergoing significant development in childhood. To understand changes occurring during this period, we examined the role of parenting in the development of children's EF from 4 to 6 years old. Participants were mother and child dyads (N = 151). Children completed cognitive tasks to assess overall EF at age 4 and age 6...

Attention control (AC) is thought to play an important role in the development of inhibitory control (IC) in children, yet there are few longitudinal studies of this association. This study used a prospective parent-child adoption design ( N = 361 children) to examine whether maternal warmth at child age 27 months moderated the link between AC during infancy and IC during childhood. Tobit regression analyses indicated that low levels of infant AC at 9 months predicted low levels of IC at 6 years, controlling for birth parent IC, prenatal risk, infant distress to limitations, child sex, and openness of adoption...

The current investigation examines the relation between perinatal complications and social anxiety incorporating the potential indirect effect of child temperament. Participants were 149 children 9 to 12 years of age (Mage =9.97, SDage =1.00) screened for behavioral inhibition (BI) and assessed for social anxiety symptoms using parent- and child-report. Participating families also reported on the presence of perinatal complications. Results indicated that children who experienced perinatal complications were higher in BI and social anxiety, compared to children who did not experience complications...

The study examines the concurrent and longitudinal associations between ratings-based measures (parents, secondary caregivers, observers) and performance-based measures of focused attention in toddlers aged 30- ( n = 147), 36- ( n =127), and 42-months ( n =107). Parents and secondary caregivers rated focused attention behaviors using the Children's Behavior Questionnaire (Rothbart et al., 2001), and observers rated toddlers' focused attention during a series of laboratory tasks using the Leiter-R Examiner Rating Scale (Roid & Miller, 1997)...

The placenta adapts to maternal environment and its alterations may have a lasting impact on child's temperament development. Prenatal stress has been linked to both a downregulation of monoamine oxidase A (MAOA) gene expression in the placenta and to difficult temperament. Capitalizing on an ongoing longitudinal study, we analysed data from 95 mother-child dyads to investigate whether MAOA mediates the association between prenatal stress and infant temperament. Prenatal stress was defined as exposure to Superstorm Sandy (Sandy) during pregnancy...

This study examined children's morning HPA axis activation as a moderator of links between hostile, over-reactive parenting at age 4.5 years and children's skills for success in school (higher executive function and literacy, and less externalizing behavior) at age 6. Participants included 361 adoptive families. Parenting was self-reported. HPA axis activation was measured by basal levels in morning cortisol. Executive function and literacy were assessed via standardized tasks. Externalizing behavior was reported by teachers...

This study examined whether parenting moderated the association between cumulative risk and preschool children's adjustment problems, social competence and academic readiness. The sample consisted of 306 families representing the full range of income, with 29% at or near poverty and 28% lower income. Cumulative risk and observed maternal parenting behaviors were assessed when the children were 36-40 months, and teachers rated outcomes at 63-68 months. Greater cumulative risk was more strongly related to higher adjustment problems when scaffolding was low, and unrelated when it was high, suggesting a protective effect...

The present study examined differences in social criticism and maternal distress and in household, maternal, and infant characteristics between families who co-slept with their infants beyond 6 months and those who moved their infants to a separate room by 6 months. Data for infant sleeping arrangements, preferences for their sleeping arrangement choices, criticism, depressive and anxiety symptoms, and worries about infant sleep were collected from 103 European American mothers during the infant's first year...

For parents, online platforms where their children interact with others often feel like a "black box" in terms of what exactly is happening. In this study, we developed an ecologically valid online computer game in which a (computer-generated) peer teammate tried to provoke frustration, in order to examine (a) adolescents' responses and (b) how indices of self-evaluation (i.e., sense of coherence and self-esteem) and demographic variables (i.e., gender and ethnicity) matter to these responses. Like gender, being a member of a minority or majority group may influence how provocations by peers are interpreted, influencing how one responds...

Executive attention, the attention necessary to reconcile conflict among simultaneous attentional demands, is vital to children's daily lives. This attention develops rapidly as the anterior cingulate cortex and prefrontal areas mature during early and middle childhood. However, the developmental course of executive attention is not uniform amongst children. Therefore, the purpose of this investigation was to examine the role of individual differences in the development of executive attention by exploring the concurrent and longitudinal contributions to its development at 8 years of age...

Emotional availability (EA) characterizes a warm, close relationship between caregiver and child. We compared patterns (clusters) of EA on risk factors, including those for borderline personality disorder (BPD). We sampled 70 children aged 4 to 7 years from low-socioeconomic backgrounds, 51% of whose mothers had BPD. We coded filmed interactions for EA: mothers' sensitivity, structuring, non-intrusiveness, non-hostility, and children's responsiveness to, and involvement of, mothers. We additionally coded children's over -responsiveness and over -involvement...

This study investigated relations among children's Theory-of-Mind (ToM) development, early sibling interactions, and parental discipline strategies during the transition to siblinghood. Using a sample of firstborn children and their parents (N = 208), we assessed children's ToM before the birth of a sibling and 12 months after the birth, and sibling interactions (i.e., positive engagement and antagonism) and parental discipline strategies (i.e., child-centred and parent-centred discipline) at 4 and 8 months in the first year of siblinghood...

Emotion expression is a central aspect of social-emotional functioning. Theorists assert that emotion expression undergoes significant changes in the preschool period. There is, however, limited observational evidence of those changes, which may vary by interpersonal context and gender. The present longitudinal study examined developmental changes in emotion expressions from ages 3 to 5 years in 120 children from rural economically strained families. Children's facial, vocal, and postural sadness, anger, and happiness expressions were observed in frustrating tasks in 3 social contexts (a perfect circles task with an experimenter, a toy wait task with mother, a locked box task when alone)...

Using data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study Kindergarten Class of 2010-2011 (ECLS-K: 2011; n = 11,000), this study examined the developmental outcomes of 5-year-old children in multi-grade classrooms (combined pre-kindergarten and kindergarten classrooms serving 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds) compared with 5-year-olds attending kindergarten-only classrooms serving primarily 5-year-olds. Results from regression and propensity score analyses revealed that 5-year-old children who attended multi-grade classrooms with pre-kindergarteners made smaller gains in math and literacy skills and demonstrated less optimal executive function at the end of the school year as compared with children who attended kindergarten-only classrooms...