Developmental Psychology

The COVID-19 pandemic presented many new challenges for families to navigate. The present study took place between May and September 2020 and included a racially diverse sample of adolescents (34% White/European, 30% Latine, 24% Black/African American, 9% multiracial/other race; N = 213, Mage = 15 years, 53% girls). Participants reported their affective responses to COVID-19 in a baseline survey and completed 14 days of ecological momentary assessments (3× daily) of the frequency, mode, and quality of communication with their parents and siblings, and their positive and negative affect. Adolescents with more COVID-19 negative affect reported more frequent digital communication with their siblings and reported the quality of their communication with parents and siblings as more negative. During hours when adolescents reported the quality of their communication with parents as more positive, they also reported higher positive affect and lower negative affect. During hours when adolescents reported the quality of their communication with siblings as more positive, they reported higher positive affect in the same hour. Relatedly, during hours with less negative communication with parents and siblings, adolescents reported more positive affect in the same hour. These associations were not contingent on if communication was digital or in-person. Results highlight the importance of the quality of family communication for understanding adolescents’ emotions during the pandemic.

With the aim of unraveling the developmental dynamics of executive functions (EF), this person-oriented longitudinal study investigated the stability and change of EF across 3 years from middle childhood into early adolescence. A community sample of 1,657 school children (52% female) completed behavioral tasks measuring three cool (inhibition, working memory updating, cognitive flexibility) and two hot EF facets (affective decision making [DM], delay of gratification) at three timepoints. Via random-intercept latent transition analyses, children were assigned to one of four profiles of EF performance at T1 (Mage = 8.36, SD = 0.95) and T2 (Mage = 9.11, SD = 0.93): all-average, low-delay, regulated-DM, and low-inhibition. At T3 (Mage = 11.06, SD = 0.92), the regulated-DM and low-inhibition profiles disbanded, and new high-hot EF and mixed-hot EF profiles emerged. Across 3 years, 35% of children remained assigned to their initial profile, whereas 22% of children experienced profile transitions reflecting increasing EF performance (e.g., all-average to high-hot EF), and 21% experienced decreasing performance (e.g., all-average to low-delay). Profile membership was differentially associated with age and binary sex. These results suggest substantial interindividual differences and intraindividual change across EF performance—particularly at the onset of adolescence and for hot facets. The findings offer new explanations for contradictory results from variable-oriented research on hot EF development. Furthermore, by disaggregating unique longitudinal EF transitions, differentiated patterns of stability and change were revealed. The findings provide a basis for future research and applications targeting individual EF strengths and weaknesses during development.

Studies of caregiver–child interactions in Western societies show that face-to-face communication, including verbal engagement and gaze, support child language outcomes. Ethnographic studies in agrarian non-Western communities, including in Africa, show that these face-to-face behaviors with children occur infrequently, with parents relying more on nonverbal and physical communication. However, observed cross-cultural differences in parenting styles often overlook important within-group variabilities in caregiver–child interactions, leading to the assumption that caregivers in particular cultural groups uniformly use similar parenting styles. This study examines interindividual variability in parenting in rural Senegal and how this variability relates to children’s language outcomes. Results yielded two clusters of caregivers: Caregivers in Cluster 1 had lower education levels and showed moderately high scores for face-to-face communication and some nonverbal communication. In contrast, caregivers in Cluster 2 had higher education levels and significantly higher scores in face-to-face communication, combined with lower scores in nonverbal communication. Physical touch scores were similar across clusters. Children of caregivers who used more face-to-face behaviors, including gaze and verbal engagement, had higher vocabulary and language milestones than children of caregivers who used less face-to-face behaviors. Correlational analysis indicated that the differences in child language outcomes were related to the frequency of mutual gaze, conversational turn-taking and verbal object stimulation. This suggests that face-to-face behaviors may be less frequent in non-Western cultures compared to Western cultures but can also support language skills in African settings.

Metacognitive abilities like source memory are useful for justifying our beliefs to others. Do they arise because of this need? Here, we test whether circumstances that require source reporting enhance source memory. We test this in circumstances in which children anticipate a disagreement and when children speak a language with obligatory linguistic evidential marking of source (Turkish). We asked 160 English- and Turkish-speaking 3- and 4-year-olds to recall how they knew something and what they knew when communicating with an agreeing or disagreeing interlocutor. Four-year-old English speakers and 3- and 4-year-old Turkish speakers correctly recalled firsthand sources (seeing the object themselves) better than secondhand sources (hearing about it from the experimenter) when they expected their interlocutor to disagree. Disagreement did not affect memory for perceptual features, suggesting its influence is specific to source memory. Together, these results highlight the importance of social and linguistic influences on metacognition, though with some important qualifications about the types of sources relevant for justifying one’s beliefs.

I adopted a strategy approach to examine the role of emotions in children’s arithmetic and investigated how this role changes during childhood. Participants estimated sums of two-digit addition problems under emotionally neutral and negative conditions in three experiments (Ns = 127, 148, and 132). The results showed that negative emotions (a) impaired arithmetic performance, especially while solving harder problems and while executing harder strategies, (b) changed how often children used available strategies and how often they selected the better strategy on each problem, (c) did not change how many or what types of strategies children of all age groups used, (d) had similar influence on how often children of all age groups used available strategies and selected the better strategy on each problem, and (e) impaired strategy execution less and less strongly as children grow older. These findings illustrate the usefulness of investigating the role of emotions on children’s cognition with a strategy approach. They also have important implications for further our understanding of how emotions influence children’s arithmetic performance in particular and cognitive performance in general, as well as how this influence changes during children’s development.

Despite increasing awareness of sample, author, and editor representation and measurement equivalence in developmental psychology (DP), implicit and nuanced unevenness in the knowledge production consolidating the persisting Minority World dominance remains less explored. Inspired by Chen’s (2010) “Asia as Method,” this commentary introduces and investigates interreferencing among Majority World countries as a methodological approach that could potentially break through the Minority World dominance. A survey of 3,879 empirical articles from four top DP journals (Developmental Psychology, Child Development, Developmental Science, International Journal of Behavioral Development) up to 2022 showed that the total volume and proportion of studies including any Majority World sample(s) grew from the 2003–2013 period (11.41%) to the 2018–2022 period (14.72%). Nevertheless, studies including multiple Majority World samples (and potentially, using each other as points of reference) remain rare (1.31%), and existing interreferencing studies appear to be the fruits of exceptional teams rather than routinized scholarly practices. While challenging, interreferencing among Majority World countries is important as it can help demonstrate the contextual diversity within the Majority World; identify and test border-crossing processes and their developmental impacts; generate new scholarly insight; avoid essentialist or nationalist interpretation of research findings; and alleviate power imbalance in international research teams. Without excluding Minority World scholarship or undervaluing studies that include single Majority World samples, interreferencing can help Majority World scholars accumulate a greater presence, build allegiance, and develop a stronger sense of subjectivity that would lead to theoretical and methodological breakthroughs in the long run.

In this study, we explored whether the key benchmarks of working memory processing identified in adults by Oberauer et al. (2018a) also apply to children, using data from a large adaptive learning environment. Over 9,000 children from Dutch primary schools (age between 6 and 12) played two serial recall tasks (verbal domain and visuospatial domain), providing a means for studying working memory processing in students’ regular educational environment. Using Bayesian multilevel modeling, we found that the difficulty of the over 2,000 lists was affected by characteristics related to response facilitation, spatial grouping, and set size. Set size and spatial grouping also affected the accuracy of students’ responses. Furthermore, we investigated primacy and recency effects and found that, as expected, the effect of serial position of items varies across set size. This result is also in line with previous findings on developmental changes in working memory processing, where primacy and recency effects change as children grow older. Finally, key benchmark findings on error categorization were replicated, revealing that children were more prone to omission and intrusion errors than transposition errors. However, as children matured, the proportion of transposition errors increased. Additionally, we found limited evidence for an infill effect in transpositions in the verbal working memory tasks and substantial evidence for locality constraints on transpositions in both tasks. Our findings provide an understanding of the development of working memory processing in children and highlight the robustness of classical working memory findings in online educational data.

Autonomy and personal choice are seen as basic psychological needs, yet the boundaries of these choices vary in different cultural contexts. The present study examined Turkish mothers’ perspectives on young children’s autonomy and personal choice and the role of socioeconomic status (SES), child age, and gender in their responses. We surveyed 256 mostly well-educated mothers (M = 36.61 years, SD = 4.66) of 4- to 8-year-olds in Turkey about hypothetical and real-life personal, prudential, and conventional issues. In both contexts, Turkish mothers generally reported granting their children autonomy over personal issues while maintaining authority over prudential and conventional matters, based primarily on concerns about potential harm to the child or others. Higher SES mothers reported providing more autonomy, exerting less control, and having less conflict with their children than lower SES mothers. Mothers reported little use of punitive strategies to resolve conflicts, but negotiation and persuasion were used predominantly by higher SES mothers. Boys were granted more decision-making autonomy than girls, and preschool girls were viewed as more attention seeking than boys, a pattern that reversed among school-aged children. Turkish mothers balanced granting autonomy and maintaining authority, with more support for autonomy and negotiation over conflicts among higher than lower SES mothers.

Although adults commonly tell moral stories to children with the aim of teaching important lessons, they often fail to extract the intended moral themes of these stories. Few interventions to date have successfully addressed this problem. The present study examined the effects of pretesting on children’s learning from moral stories. We assigned sixty 5- to 6-year-olds to either a pretesting condition, where they attempted pretest questions about a to-be-learned moral before hearing a moral story, or a control condition, where they only heard the story. After hearing the story, pretested children were significantly more likely than the control group to generate the intended moral theme on open-ended questions asking about the story’s lesson. They did not perform any better, however, on tasks that involved selecting the theme in a forced-choice format or applying it to novel scenarios. Hence, the present findings partially support the hypothesis that pretesting improves children’s theme extraction from moral stories—that is, enhancing the ability to reproduce the correct theme but not enhancing generalization to other circumstances. Overall, this study reveals that pretesting can enhance the effectiveness of moral stories as an educational tool, at least in terms of helping children to learn important moral lessons, and presents directions for further research to investigate real-life applications of these lessons.

Disciplines across the social and behavioral sciences have documented the critical role of early peer connections in children’s development, yet mechanisms facilitating these connections have not been tested in controlled laboratory settings. The present experiment manipulated the context in which unacquainted pairs of children interacted for the first time. We randomly assigned 288 5- to 11-year-old U.S. children (girls: n = 142, boys: n = 145, nonbinary: n = 1; American Indian or Alaska Native: n = 2, Asian or Asian American: n = 24, Black or African American: n = 8, Hispanic or Latino: n = 17, White or Caucasian: n = 200, Multiracial: n = 33, other: n = 2, not provided: n = 2) to interact in pairs with a same- or different-gender partner who matched their age. Randomly assigned peer interactions occurred in one of three conditions: interaction without support (baseline condition) or interaction preceded by adult support that scaffolded children’s active (active experimental condition) or passive (passive experimental condition) participation in a self-disclosure activity. Adult coders rated children’s connections during the interaction, and children later rated their feelings about their partner. Results revealed that the experimental conditions facilitated children’s connections relative to baseline and eliminated gender ingroup favoritism in children’s connections; the active experimental condition was particularly effective relative to the passive experimental condition. With its focus on testing mechanisms of connection, this research introduces a new experimental approach that is capable of informing theories and practices surrounding the formation of young children’s peer connections.

This preregistered 30-day diary study investigated reciprocal, time-lagged, within-family associations between maternal helicopter parenting and emerging adults’ affective well-being (i.e., positive and negative affect). Dynamic Structural Equation Models examining reports from 146 first-year university students (Mage = 18.74, 55.5% female) revealed positive next-day associations between changes in perceived maternal helicopter parenting and negative affect, on average. No average effects existed for positive affect. Examining within-person effect heterogeneity identified four subgroups of emerging adults’ affective responses to their perceived maternal helicopter parenting: detrimental (e.g., decreased/unchanged positive affect and increased negative affect; 51.4%), beneficial (21.9%), mixed-effects (increased positive and negative affect; 6.9%), and noneffectual (13.7%). Established subgroups did not differ on participants’ endorsement of traditional Chinese family and cultural values. Results indicate largely detrimental effects of helicopter parenting among Chinese emerging adults. These effects were heterogeneous, however, underscoring the need for family-specific investigations.

Parent–child interactions can vary in different contexts contributing to differences in children’s behaviors. Using a short-term longitudinal design, we examined whether caregiver emotional consistency (CEC) moderated the relation between children’s temperament and preoperative anxiety in a unique real-world, ecologically salient context: the surgical setting. Participants were 102 children (Mage = 10.5 years, SDage = 1.7, range = 8–13 years, 46.1% boys, 67.6% White) who underwent elective surgery and their caregivers (the majority of whom were their biological parents). Children’s temperamental shyness and parents’ trait anxiety were self-reported 7–10 days prior to surgery during a preoperative clinic visit (Time 1). During the day of surgery (Time 2), children’s preoperative state anxiety and parents’ state anxiety were self-reported in the hospital prior to surgery, and parents’ state anxiety was directly observed in the operating room leading up to surgery. CEC was operationalized as separate difference scores between changes in parent trait anxiety at Time 1 to parent state anxiety during the day of surgery and observed state anxiety in the operating room at Time 2. We found that the CEC measure moderated the relation between children’s temperamental shyness and preoperative anxiety during the day of surgery. Shy children were more anxious on the day of surgery when their parents had relatively low CEC than shy children with relatively high CEC parents, whereas low-shy children were relatively unaffected by parents’ CEC levels. These findings provide evidence for a diathesis–stress model underlying the relation between individual differences in children’s temperament and anxiety in a real-world, ecologically salient stressful context, extending prior work reported in traditional settings.

Although it is well-established that child abuse precedes and predicts poorer executive functioning (EF), the potential mechanisms are not well understood. We thus used counterfactual mediation analysis to test how perceived control (lower personal mastery or higher perceived uncontrollability) mediated maternal or paternal child abuse, predicting lower future EF scores. Community adults from two separate samples (N = 3,291 and 2,550 in Samples 1 and 2) completed a retrospective parental child abuse self-report at Time 1 (T1), a trait-level perceived control self-report at T2, and performance EF tests at T3. Time intervals spanned approximately 6 months and 9 years in Samples 1 and 2. Stronger T1 maternal and paternal child abuse consistently predicted higher T2 uncontrollability (Cohen’s d = 0.232–1.175), which then predicted lower T3 EF scores (d = −0.411 to −0.244). Higher uncontrollability consistently mediated the effect of higher maternal and paternal child abuse predicting poorer EF scores (d = −0.229 to −0.164). Although mastery mediated the effect of maternal, but not paternal, abuse on future EF in Sample 1, this mediation effect did not survive in Sample 2. Sensitivity analyses testing for nonlinearities and adjusting for age and the predictor–mediator interaction implied similar findings in both samples. Uncontrollability, instead of mastery, might be a key mechanism accounting for the pathway from early-life parental abuse to EF outcomes. Assessing and targeting perceived uncontrollability and EF and harnessing precision medicine approaches in prevention programs and treatments might optimize psychotherapies for individuals exposed to child abuse.

Intergenerational transmission of emotion dysregulation (ED) has strong implications for psychopathology risk. Past research has neglected assessing parenting-specific domains of ED and the transactional nature of these processes in early development. This study tested longitudinal relations among mothers’ nonacceptance of their own emotions (ED), mothers’ experiential avoidance of their child’s emotions (EA), and early manifestations of child ED (negative affect [NA]). Participants were 186 mothers (91.9% White, 95.7% non-Hispanic/Latina) of children (44.6% female, 83.3% White, 93% non-Hispanic/Latinx, diverse socioeconomic status) who participated when children were ages 1 (T1), 2 (T2), and 3 (T3) years. Mothers reported on variables of interest at each time point. A random intercept cross-lagged panel model delineated within- versus between-family effects among variables across time, allowing for a variable-centered examination of both individual differences and bidirectional effects. Regarding the between-family component, ED positively covaried with both EA and NA such that mothers endorsing higher nonacceptance of their emotions tended to also endorse their child’s greater NA and greater avoidance of child emotions. Though within-family autoregressive relations trended positively, no stability effects emerged. Within-time point and cross-lagged effects tended to be nonsignificant, with the exception of EA and NA positively covarying at T3, such that when mothers had more stability (less fluctuation) in their EA at child age 3, they also endorsed more stability in their child’s NA. Findings also prospectively indicated greater trait-like stability in the maternal versus child emotion traits and in between-family relations relative to within-family processes.

When children encounter information about the world that is descriptive (e.g., frequency distributions) or prescriptive (e.g., value judgments), can they keep track of both types of information together? Do they, like adults, integrate these two kinds of information to come up with the “first thing that comes to mind”? Can children separate these types of information when needed? In two experiments, we examined how children (N = 397, ages 4–9 years, fluent English speakers mostly from North America, recruited online) and adults (N = 189, U.S. English speakers, recruited online) produce both “first-to-mind” judgments and predictions about random samples. In Experiment 1, providing information about whether being longer or shorter made a fictional tool better or worse led adults to provide first-to-mind judgments that were biased toward the prescriptive ideal, but unbiased random sample predictions. However, 6–9-year-old children provided judgments that were biased by the prescriptive ideal in both cases. In Experiment 2, with 6–9-year-olds and adults, we manipulated whether the prescriptive information focused exclusively on positive (i.e., only “better”) or negative (i.e., only “worse”) properties. In the positive-focus condition, all age groups showed an effect of prescriptive ideal on first-to-mind judgments, but only 6–7-year-olds showed an effect of prescriptive ideal on random sample predictions. However, in the negative-focus condition, there was no effect of prescriptive information on either type of judgments for any age group, including adults. We discuss what changes in development in the ability to represent different kinds of information and apply the best kind of information to a specific task.

Grandmothers play a vital role as caregivers of young children, especially in the majority world, yet studies of caregiver–child book-sharing have typically focused on mothers. This study examines intergenerational differences between grandmothers and mothers in book-sharing styles and goals, and the relations of book-sharing styles with toddlers’ verbal contributions during book-sharing. Participants included 70 families (59 grandmothers, 65 mothers) with toddlers (Mage = 23.49 months; SD = 2.22; 47% girls) in urban China. Grandmother–toddler and mother–toddler dyads were video-recorded during a book-sharing activity after which caregivers were interviewed about their book-sharing goals. Transcripts of the book-sharing activity were coded for the number and type of utterances from caregivers and toddlers. Cluster analyses yielded similar book-sharing styles for grandmothers and mothers: a follower style (maintains the flow of conversation) and a storyteller–follower style (maintains the flow and adds information about the book story). Grandmothers prioritized the goal of learning words and characters, while mothers emphasized the goal of learning to read. Book-sharing styles and goals were associated among mothers, but not among grandmothers. Mothers who adopted a follower style were more likely to prioritize the goal of learning to read. Additionally, only mothers’ book-sharing style (not grandmothers’) was associated with toddlers’ verbal contributions. Toddlers of mothers adopting a follower style produced more unelicited narrative provisions, while those of mothers adopting a storyteller–follower style made more narrative conversational comments. Findings highlight both intergenerational similarities and differences in how Chinese caregivers support children’s language during book-sharing, offering insights into how sociocultural changes shape caregiver–child interactions.

Few studies have used a holistic, person-centered approach to identify the stability of distinctive profiles across multiple elements of parent socialization. We aimed to test consistency, stability, and predictors of longitudinal emotion socialization profiles. Data collected in 2019 (N = 869) and 2020 (N = 567) were drawn from The Child and Parent Emotion Study, a longitudinal cohort study of multinational families. The present study included parents of children aged 4–10 years (M = 7.3, SD = 1.9). We tested whether three emotion socialization profiles (emotion coaching, emotion disengaged, and emotion dismissing) derived from a previous person-centered study (https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1161418) remained evident 12 months later. Stability and consistency of the profiles from 2019 to 2020 were tested via a latent transition analysis. Using binary logistic regression, we tested whether contextual factors were associated with profile stability. The 2019 profiles were evident in the 2020 data and were largely stable over time, with the majority of parents assigned to the same profile at both timepoints (87%). Parents with an emotion coaching profile were least likely to change profiles. Parents who changed from emotion coaching to disengaged or to dismissing reported higher levels of stress. There was also evidence that parents who changed from emotion coaching to dismissing also reported lower levels of psychological distress, although this effect was small. These findings suggest that parents’ experience of stress/psychological distress may be a factor associated with less stability in their emotion socialization. In the future, person-centered studies should focus on more diverse samples of parents.

Parents’ critical consciousness has been theorized to facilitate race conversations that center on how social structures, policies, and historical factors perpetuate inequities, but few studies have investigated this link empirically. The current analysis examines the associations between Black and white parents’ critical consciousness and their anti-racist socialization amid the 2020 Black Lives Matter movement. Participants were 725 parents (344 Black, 381 white, Mage = 38.08, SD = 7.00) of 8- to 11-year-old children who completed an online survey between October 2020 and January 2021, following the murder of George Floyd. Using latent profile analysis, the results show how Black and white parents’ critical consciousness profiles are differentially related to whether and how they discussed Black Lives Matter with their children. Overall, both Black and white parents with higher levels of critical consciousness were more likely to engage in anti-racist socialization that countered dominant white supremacist and anti-Black ideologies, though fewer white parents did so than Black parents. The article discusses the implications of the findings for fostering critical racial socialization practices and offers a (re)conceptualization of racial socialization as a form of critical action for parents.

This study investigated the construction of shortened Five Cs measures of positive youth development (PYD) for middle adolescents in the Taiwanese context. Based on a three-cohort sequential design, a total of 855 adolescents (55.6% Han and 44.4% Indigenous; mean ages were 12.98, 13.92, and 14.83, respectively, for the seventh-, eighth-, and ninth-grade data) were included. Respective Positive Youth Development–Short Form (PYD-SF) and Positive Youth Development–Very Short Form (PYD-VSF) Five Cs measures were constructed specifically for Han and Indigenous Taiwanese adolescents. The Five Cs bifactor structure was evident and appeared to be generally similar across grades for the PYD-SF during middle adolescence, whereas a Four Cs (Confidence, Connection, Character, Caring) structure emerged for the PYD-VSF for both Han and Indigenous groups. The exclusion of Competence in the VSF structure particularly highlights the specific scholastic context in Taiwan. The general PYD factor was associated with greater chances of helping behaviors and community involvement and fewer depressive symptoms for both groups in PYD-SF and PYD-VSF, supporting the validity of these forms and the use of the general PYD factor as an indicator for positive development for youth in the Majority World. Despite the limitations discussed, we believe our results may serve as an exemplar for the optimization of the measurement of PYD in today’s diverse youth.

Early mathematical skills lay an important foundation for later academic success. Substantial variation in mathematical skills can be observed in young children, and these differences have been related to family socioeconomic circumstances (SEC). The type and frequency with which parents engage in home mathematical activities (HMAs) with their children have been suggested as a key mechanism explaining inequalities in early mathematical skills; they may also be a potential target to narrow attainment gaps. However, evidence for the relation between HMAs and mathematical skills, and whether there is an SEC gradient in HMA engagement, remains mixed. In the present preregistered study, we conducted harmonization and latent profile analyses on nine U.K.-based data sets, containing n = 969 dyads: mean child age = 46.83 (SD = 5.41) months; child age range = 35–69 months. These analyses identified three profiles based on the frequency of engaging in HMAs (i.e., low, intermediate, high). Children in the high HMA category had significantly higher mathematical skills than those in the intermediate and low categories. While SEC correlated with mathematical skills, no SEC differences were found in engagement with HMAs. This suggests that families that engage in a higher frequency of HMAs have children that tend to have higher mathematical skills, but SEC does not predict engagement with HMAs. We discuss the implications of these findings for narrowing early attainment gaps and how to best measure and capture the home mathematical learning environment.

When making social judgments, children prefer confidence over uncertainty. At the same time, they also value calibration and accuracy. How, then, do children reason about calibrated uncertainty, or intellectual humility, versus unwarranted confidence, or intellectual arrogance? Here we examined whether 4- to 11-year-olds evaluated intellectually humble individuals as more likable, more knowledgeable, nicer, and smarter than intellectually arrogant individuals. Across two studies involving 229 children (Study 1: N = 111, 59% White, 39% girls; Study 2: N = 118, 66% White, 49% girls), we found that children, by the age of 5.5 years, preferred an intellectually humble over an intellectually arrogant individual, with this preference strengthening over development. Moreover, children preferred intellectual humility over intellectual arrogance both when an intellectually humble individual appeared to be accurate (Study 1) and when it was unclear whether they were accurate (Study 2). Altogether, these findings indicate that children do not prioritize unwarranted confidence more than calibrated uncertainty in their social judgments. We conclude by highlighting pressing directions for future research surrounding what makes children prefer intellectual humility and why.

Memory-derived predictions help us to anticipate incoming sensory evidence. A mismatch between prediction and evidence leads to a prediction error (PE). Previous research suggested that PEs enhance memory of the surprising events. Here, we systematically investigated the effect of PE on episodic memory in children (10–12 years old), younger adults (18–30 years old), and older adults (66–70 years old). Participants learned visual object pairs over 2 days. On Day 3, new objects were shown among the pairs, either after the first item of a pair (violation items), that is, instead of the second item, or between pairs (nonviolation items), that is, when no specific predictions were possible. Our results did not reveal a significant boosting effect of PE on memory in any of the age groups. In contrast, in children, violations resulted in lower memory specificity compared with nonviolations. Older adults showed lower memory specificity than the other age groups across violations and nonviolations. We conclude that the beneficial effect of PE on episodic memory may be less consistent than theoretically postulated and may not always be observed in experimental settings involving statistical learning and item-specific violations, and that children’s memory specificity may even suffer from PE.

Researchers have been interested in the role of social reputation in shaping individual behaviors and adjustment. Whereas the significance of academic reputation has been demonstrated for students’ performance, the role of reputation remains unclear in the socioemotional domain. This 2-year longitudinal study focused on perceived likeability to capture the reputational aspect of peer likeability and examined its relations with school performance and psychological problems in comparison with those for sociometric likeability. Participants included students (N = 4,850; 2,395 boys), initially in fourth and seventh grades (Mage = 10 and 13 years), in China. Data were obtained from multiple sources including peer assessments, teacher ratings, self-reports, and school records. Among the results, perceived likeability predicted later academic performance more robustly than sociometric likeability. Whereas sociometric likeability negatively predicted later psychological problems in elementary school students, perceived likeability negatively predicted later psychological problems in middle school students. The results indicate distinct patterns of contributions of sociometric likeability and perceived likeability to adjustment and the role of social reputation in strengthening the function of peer likeability, particularly in middle school students.

This article examined children’s positive affect and effortful control as mediators of associations between their exposure to constructive interparental conflict (IPC) and their social, emotional, and behavioral adjustment. Study 1 participants consisted of 243 mothers and their partners and preschool children (Mage = 4.60 years; 56% female; 54% Black or multiracial; 16% Latinx). Study 2 participants were 238 mothers, their partners, and their preschool children (Mage = 4.38 years; 52% female; 28% Black or multiracial; 16% Latinx). Both studies utilized multimethod, multi-informant assessment batteries within a longitudinal design. Findings from the two-wave design in Study 1 supported the hypothesis that children’s effortful control at Wave 1 was a mediator of the associations between Wave 1 constructive IPC and their greater social competence and lower externalizing symptoms at Wave 2 after controlling for Wave 1 child functioning. The more rigorous three-wave design of Study 2 produced a comparable pattern of findings. Lagged, autoregressive tests of mediational paths indicated that Wave 1 constructive IPC was a significant predictor of children’s effortful control at Wave 2. Effortful control, in turn, predicted children’s greater social competence and lower externalizing symptoms at Wave 3. Although children’s positive affect was not a mediator in either study due to its negligible associations with constructive IPC, positive affect predicted lower levels of internalizing symptoms across both studies. Results were consistent across studies with and without the inclusion of several covariates.

Following a school-based community sample of U.S. Latino/a adolescents surveyed at seven time points from eighth to 11th grade, we examined within- and between-person effects of school adult discrimination on adolescent engagement in emotional, dire, and compliant forms of prosocial behaviors across semester and school transitions. Participants were 547 U.S. Latino/a adolescents (Mage = 13.70 years; 45% boys; 90% U.S. born) in suburban Atlanta, Georgia, a new immigrant destination. We conducted analyses using random-intercept cross-lagged panel models. Within-person effects across all time points indicated that, when an adolescent’s report of discrimination at one time point exceeded their average discrimination score across all time points, the adolescent reported fewer dire prosocial behaviors at a subsequent time point. Additionally, from the fall of eighth grade through the spring of ninth grade, adolescents who reported greater school adult discrimination compared with their own cross-time averages reported lower engagement in emotional prosocial behaviors at subsequent time points. Importantly, tests of indirect effects demonstrated that discrimination experienced before and after the transition to high school had lasting spillover effects on emotional and dire prosocial behaviors later in high school. Between-person effects indicated that adolescents with higher average scores for discrimination across all time points engaged in fewer compliant and emotional prosocial behaviors, on average. The findings highlight that discrimination from adults at school may contribute to declines in Latino/a adolescent prosocial behaviors but in unique ways depending upon the form of prosocial behavior and school transitions.