William V Fabricius

• PhD
• Arizona State University

This chapter reviews several sources of evidence bearing on the question of whether equal parenting time with both parents is in the best interests of children of divorce. First, the scientific evidence consists of correlational findings that meet four conditions necessary for a causal role of parenting time: A legal context that constrains the pos...

An important part of children's social and cognitive development is their understanding that people are psychological beings with internal, mental states including desire, intention, perception, and belief. A full understanding of people as psychological beings requires a representational theory of mind (ToM), which is an understanding that mental...

Invited article in Advances in Child Development and Behavior. I discuss the status of Perceptual Access Reasoning (PAR) theory in reply to critics and commentators, and then consider how children develop from PAR to a representational theory of mind. Insights from philosophy of mind reveal the necessary role of introspection, and the necessity tha...

Karen Bartsch (2021), Charlie Lewis (2021), and Beate Sodian (2021) provided thoughtful commentaries on our Society for Research in Child Development Monograph, “Perceptual Access Reasoning (PAR) in Developing a Representational Theory of Mind” (Fabricius et al., 2021). The commentators suggested alternative accounts of our empirical findings, an a...

Acknowledgements Helpful comments and suggestions on an earlier draft were received from Abraham Sagi-Schwartz and Marinus van IJzendoorn. Abstract Attachment theory is the current standard model for how infants and toddlers develop emotional connections to their caregivers. This chapter is focused on implications that can be drawn from attachmen...

In this book, eminent scholars from varied disciplines detail how developmental science and the law shape one another across the lifespan. The chapters address fundamental questions about how human development influences laws and practices in the legal system and how the law and its practices influence development. The chapters also reveal how the...

Invited Response to Commentaries on our Society for Research In Child Development Monograph, "Perceptual Access Reasoning (PAR) in the Development of Representational Theory of Mind."

Objective To examine the psychometric properties of a scale of perceived mattering to (step)parents and its links to adolescent mental health. Background Parenting behaviors are important for adolescent development; less is known about the meanings adolescents attach to parents' behaviors. One fundamental meaning adolescents may intuit is that par...

Longitudinal measurement invariance is a major concern for developmental scholars who seek to evaluate the same underlying construct across time. Unfortunately, discontinuities in the expression of various psychological constructs, as well as essential changes in measurement that are necessitated by shifting developmental capacities and practice ef...

Authoritative parenting is typically considered the gold-standard parenting approach based on studies with largely European American (EA) samples. The current study evaluated a novel, “no-nonsense” parenting style in Mexican American (MA) and EA families, not captured by traditional classifications. Parenting styles of mothers and fathers, cultural...

This study employed a fully cross‐lagged, longitudinal model to examine reciprocal relations between representations of relationships with parents and romantic partners at ages 20 and 22. Representations were assessed with continuous measures of dismissing/avoidant and preoccupied relationship styles across the attachment and affiliation systems fo...

Equal parenting time, parent conflict, divorced fathers, parent-child relationships, legal presumptions

Drawing on five waves of longitudinal data from 392 families (52% female; mean age of wave 1 [ Mage_W1 ] = 12.89, standard deviation [ SD ] = .48; Mage_W5 = 21.95, SD = .77; 199 European American and 193 Mexican American families; 217 intact and 175 stepfather families), this study documented transactional relations of mothers’ and fathers’ depress...

Petitions by custodial parents to relocate children away from noncustodial parents present difficult choices for family courts. In the current study, the sample (N = 81) was randomly recruited through the children’s schools according to the following criteria: Children were 12 years old and at the time resided primarily with their mothers and mothe...

The current study presents the findings of an evaluation of Arizona’s 2013 revisions to the child custody statutes that directed courts to “maximize” the child’s parenting time with both parents. A state‐wide survey of the four family-law professions (i.e., conciliation court staff, judges, mental health providers, and attorneys) assessed their per...

This study assessed children's (N = 236) ability to introspect the mental states of seeing and knowing relative to their ability to attribute each state to others. Children could introspect seeing 10 months before they could introspect knowing. Two- and 3-year-olds correctly reported their own seeing states, whereas 3- and 4-year-olds correctly rep...

Two studies examined the development of constructivist theory of mind (ToM) during late childhood and early adolescence. In Study 1, a new measure was developed to assess participants’ understanding of the interpretive and constructive processes embedded in memory, comprehension, attention, comparison, planning, and inference. Using this measure, S...

The primary goal of the current study was to test whether parent and adolescent preference for a common language moderates the association between parenting and rank-order change over time in offspring substance use. A sample of Mexican-origin 7th-grade adolescents (Mage = 12.5 years, N = 194, 52% female) was measured longitudinally on use of tobac...

Whether children of separated parents 2 years of age and younger should have frequent overnight parenting time with noncustodial fathers has been the subject of much debate but little data. Contrary to some previous findings, the current study found benefits to both parent-child relationships associated with overnights (a) up to and including equal...

Parent–child relationships can critically affect youth physiological development. Most studies have focused on the influence of maternal behaviors, with little attention to paternal influences. The current study investigated father engagement with their adolescents in household (shopping, cooking) and discretionary leisure activities as a predictor...

We examined the mediational roles of multiple types of adolescents’ emotional security in relations between multiple aspects of the interparental relationship and adolescents’ mental health from ages 13 to 16 (N = 392). General marital quality, nonviolent parent conflict, and physical intimate partner violence independently predicted mental health....

The states differ substantially among themselves as to what their guideline systems specify about reducing child support awards as a function of the division of parenting time after divorce. Most adopt a “cliff-model”, whereby no reductions are accorded until the parenting time to the noncustodial parent reaches some “shared parenting” threshold, g...

Using a sample of 193 Mexican American adolescents (M age at Wave 1 = 14 years) and three waves of data over 2 years, this study longitudinally examined the effects of parent–youth acculturation differences, relative to no differences, on parent–adolescent relationship quality and youth problem behavior. We examined parent–youth differences in over...

Allocations of child custody postdivorce are currently determined according to the best interest standard; that is, what is best for the child. Decisions about what is best for a child necessarily reflect cultural norms, at least in part. It is therefore useful as well as interesting to ask whether current understandings of the best interest standa...

We studied young adolescents' seeking out support to understand conflict with their co-resident fathers/stepfathers, and the cognitive and affective implications of such support-seeking, phenomena we call guided cognitive reframing. Our sample included 392 adolescents (Mage = 12.5, 52.3% female) who were either of Mexican or European ancestry and l...

We evaluated maternal gatekeeping attitudes as a mediator of the relation between marital problems and father-child relationships in 3 waves when children were in Grades 7-10. We assessed each parent's contribution to the marital problems experienced by the couple. Findings from mediational and cross-lagged structural equation models revealed that...

Little attention has been paid to how early adolescents make attributions for their fathers' behavior. Guided by symbolic interaction theory, we examined how adolescent gender, ethnicity, family structure, and depressive symptoms explained attributions for residential father behavior. 382 adolescents, grouped by ethnicity (European American, Mexica...

A mixed-method study identified profiles of fathers who mentioned key dimensions of their parenting and linked profile membership to adolescents' adjustment using data from 337 European American, Mexican American and Mexican immigrant fathers and their early adolescent children. Father narratives about what fathers do well as parents were thematica...

Adolescents may seek to understand family conflict by seeking out confidants. However, little is known about whom adolescents seek, whether and how such support helps youth, and the factors that predict which sources are sought. This chapter offers a conceptual model of guided cognitive reframing that emphasizes the behavioral, cognitive, and affec...

Introduction The psychological divorce literature includes many findings and recommendations that are useful, but many others that are out of date, that are based on measures of questionable validity, or that fail to test theories to explain how things really work. One well-known recommendation that was seen by the public and policy makers alike a...

Defining Various Sibling and Family TypesTheories of Sibling and Family RelationshipsResearch Findings Regarding Sibling Relationships in Blended FamiliesA Model of the Quality of Sibling Relationships in Blended FamiliesPreliminary Data Probing the ModelConclusion and Future Directions

Two questions often confront family law courts and policymakers: “Is the quantity or the quality of parenting time more important for children’s outcomes?” and “Should parenting time be limited in high-conflict families?” Most discussions in the research literature give the following answers: The quality of parenting time is more important for chil...

When conducting parenting plan evaluations, mental health professionals must have an understanding of the most current findings in developmental research, behavioral psychology, attachment theory, and legal issues to substantiate their opinions. This online resource focuses on translating the research associated with the most important topics withi...

False belief tasks have enjoyed a monopoly in the research on children’s development of a theory of mind. They have been granted this status because they promise to deliver an unambiguous assessment of children’s understanding of the representational nature of mental states. Their poor cousins, true belief tasks, have been relegated to occasional s...

In a pair of studies, we examine lay people's judgments about how hypothetical cases involving child custody after divorce should be resolved. The respondents were citizens called to jury service in Pima County, AZ. Study 1 found that both male and female respondents, if they were the judge, would most commonly award equally shared custody arrangem...

Data were collected when children were 42, 54, and 72 months of age (Ns = 210, 191, and 172 for T1, T2, and T3, respectively). Children's emotion understanding (EU) and theory of mind (ToM) were examined as predictors of children's prosocial orientation within and across time. EU positively related to children's sympathy across 2.5 years, and T1 EU...

The current study investigated how fathering behaviors (acceptance, rejection, monitoring, consistent discipline, and involvement) are related to preadolescent adjustment in Mexican American and European American stepfamilies and intact families. Cross-sectional data from 393 7(th) graders, their schoolteachers, and parents were used to examine lin...

In 3 studies (N = 188) we tested the hypothesis that children use a perceptual access approach to reason about mental states before they understand beliefs. The perceptual access hypothesis predicts a U-shaped developmental pattern of performance in true belief tasks, in which 3-year-olds who reason about reality should succeed, 4- to 5-year-olds w...

In a pair of studies, we examine lay people’s judgments about how hypothetical cases involving child custody after divorce should be resolved. The respondents were citizens called to jury service in Pima County, AZ. Study 1 found that both male and female respondents, if they were the judge, would most commonly award equally shared custody arrangem...

This study examined the relations between perceptions of 133 early adolescents in stepfamilies concerning how much they mattered to their stepfathers and nonresidential biological fathers and adolescents' mental health problems. Mattering to nonresidential biological fathers significantly negatively predicted mother-, teacher-, and youth-reported i...

The authors tested a biopsychosocial model in which young adults' long-term relationships with fathers and ongoing distress surrounding their parents' divorces mediated the relationship between disrupted parenting (i.e., exposure to parent conflict before the divorce and up to 5 years after, and amount of time with father postdivorce) and indicator...

Already a staple of urban high schools, peer mediation programs are now proliferating in inner-city elementary and middle schools. Our research questions whether young children, regardless of their location in the urban landscape, have the cognitive capacities to use the problem-solving technology of mediation. Moreover, it challenges the claim tha...

We performed several re-analyses of data presented in Braver, Ellman, and Fabricius (2003) to examine whether their findings that parental relocation after divorce was associated with negative long-term outcomes in their grown children could be due to pre-existing levels of parent conflict and domestic violence. Conflict and violence might have cau...

Seventy-seven college students varying in degree of drug use experience rated the perceived similarities of all possible combinations of 16 drug classes (cigarettes, other tobacco, alcohol, marijuana, barbiturates, minor and major tranquilizers, amphetamines, amphetamine derivatives, cocaine, heroin, opiates, hallucinogens, inhalants, PCP, anti-dep...

There is increasing consensus that the perspectives of children need to be taken into account in decisions made by divorcing parents and the courts and that young adults who have lived through their parents' divorces can be an important source of information about children's perspectives. In this study, the authors assessed the perspectives of 820...

To identify legitimate defensive gun uses (DGUs), and provide a reality check on previous estimates of the rate of DGUs by using a novel approach based on newspaper reports and police and court records. Previous estimates have relied on self report, differ by a factor of 10 or more, and are viewed as highly controversial. The reported uses of firea...

In their critique, Garfinkel, McLanahan, and Wallerstein raise concerns about the representativeness of the authors' sample, benchmark approach methodology, and historical review of guidelines, all of which lead them to discount the evidence presented opposing the cliff-model assumption of father expenditures on children, and to laud instead child...

Despite advances in our understanding of fatherhood, most social and behavioral science research is based on data from white, middle-class, European-American families. In this chapter, the authors argue for including Latino families in fatherhood studies and highlight some special issues in the assessment of Latino men's family involvement that hav...

The current study evaluated family process variables associated with markers of physical health vulnerability. Retrospective reports of parental caring, conflict, and divorce-specific factors were examined in reference to hostility, somatic symptoms, and illness reports in young adults from divorced (n=253) and intact (n=552) families. Contrary to...

I review new findings on (a) college students' perspectives on their living arrangements after their parents' divorces, (b) their relations with their parents as a function of their living arrangements, (c) their adjustment as a function of their parents' relocation, and (d) the amount of college support they received. Students endorsed living arra...

We designed several modified false belief tasks to eliminate a confound present in the traditional tasks. The confound would allow children to answer correctly without reasoning about beliefs, by using a "perceptual access" approach to knowing in which they reason that a person who has not seen the true state of affairs will not know and will act i...

Relocation cases, in which a divorced parent seeks to move away with the child, are among the knottiest problems facing family courts. The recent trend is to permit such moves, largely because of Wallerstein's (1995) controversial amica curiae brief, which a recent court (Baures v. Lewis, 2001) interpreted as supporting the conclusion that "in gene...

Most states' child support guidelines adopt a “cliff” model in providing credits or adjustments for time spent in the nonresidential parent's home. Such guidelines implicitly or explicitly assume that no appreciable expenditures are made directly by obligors for child-rearing expenses at levels of contact or visitation beneath some threshold value,...

Relocation cases, in which a divorced parent seeks to move away with the child, are among the knottiest problems facing family courts. The recent trend is to permit such moves, largely because of Wallerstein's (1995) controversial amica curiae brief, which a recent court (Baures v. Lewis, 2001) interpreted as supporting the conclusion that “in gene...

Reliable, quantitative, and current information is needed to inform the policy debate about whether parents, most commonly noncustodial parents, should be compelled to provide support for their children's higher education. We report data from a large study of the financial support college students reported receiving from their divorced mothers and...

Metacognitive causal explanations reflect a child's understanding about how or why a strategy works. Two studies examined the growth of metacognitive causal explanations over time. Study 1 found an increase in the sophistication of early elementary school children's causal explanations over a 3-year period, although the mean intelligence score in t...

In order to understand the contribution of increased cognitive abilities to children's naive theories of mind, children of high and average verbal intelligence rated their understanding of the interrelationships between and among mental activities and verbs. In Study 1, participants rated the similarity of pairs of prototypical mental activity scen...

Reports an error in "Developing organization of mental verbs and theory of mind in middle childhood: Evidence from extensions" by Paula J. Schwanenflugel, Robbie L. Henderson and William V. Fabricius (Developmental Psychology, 1998[May], Vol 34[3], 512-524). In this article, Figures 2 and 4 were inadvertently switched. The figure appearing on page...

The purpose of the study was to assess developments in the theory of mind suggested by changes in the organization of cognitive verb extensions during the elementary school years. Adults and 3rd- and 5th-grade children were provided with a set of mental activity scenarios and were asked to select the best verbs from a list of cognitive verbs that m...

Seventy-seven college students varying in degree of drug use experience rated the perceived similarities of all possible combinations of 16 drugs classes (cigarettes, other tobacco, alcohol, marijuana, barbiturates, minor and major tranquilizers, amphetamines, amphetamine derivatives, cocaine, heroin, opiates, hallucinogens, inhalants, PCP, anti-de...

Two experiments examined the development of a theory of mind in middle childhood by examining changes in the organization of mental verbs of knowing. In both experiments, children and adults rated the similarity of pairs of mental verbs in terms of the way they felt they used their mind in each one. Experiment 1 used thirty-six 8- and thirty-four 1...

The purpose of the study was to expand our knowledge of older children's understanding of the unique features and potential relations existing among mental activities. 8- and 10-year-olds as well as adults were asked to rate the similarity of pairs of mental activity scenarios in terms of how their mind would be used for each one. The scenarios inv...

This chapter discusses the discussion of the older child's theory of mind. This research has dealt with important issues such as when young children are able to understand the representational nature of beliefs, that human behavior is caused by beliefs and desires, and even that mental phenomena are distinct from physical phenomena. The chapter foc...

Folk theories of knowing in North American adults were studied by examining the organization of mental verbs in two tasks: (a) a Similarity Judgment Task in which subjects rated the similarity of verb pairs in terms of the way the mind is used, and (b) a Verb Extension Task in which subjects identified the mental verbs applicable to a variety of sc...

The study presented here investigates Mandler's (1983) claim that memory for scenes is qualitatively similar in children and adults. We assessed 5- to 7-year-olds' and adults' memory for inventory information in scenes as assessed by type changes, in which one object is replaced by a conceptually different object. We tested for effects of three sch...

In the present studies, we investigated 4- and 5- to 6-year-old's ability to compare the distances covered by a direct route to a location and an indirect route to the same location. The distances ranged between 16 and 22 feet. The routes were visible from a single vantage point, and objects serving as landmarks were sometimes located along the rou...

255 college students in different categories of drug use (abstainers, low alcohol users, high alcohol users, cigarette users, marijuana users, and cocaine users) rated the harmfulness of several factors of drug use, including type of drug (cigarettes, alcohol, marijuana, and cocaine), frequency of use (weekly vs daily), location of use (never at wo...

255 college students in different categories of drug use (abstainers, low alcohol users, high alcohol users, cigarette users, marijuana users, and cocaine users) rated the harmfulness of several factors of drug use, including type of drug (cigarettes, alcohol, marijuana, and cocaine), frequency of use (weekly vs daily), location of use (never at wo...

8-year-olds', 10-year-olds', and adults' concepts of mental activities involved in acts of knowing were examined in an attempt to gain insight into developmental changes in underlying theories of mind. Subjects rated the similarity of how the mind is used in a variety of common activities, each of which primarily involved either memory, comprehensi...

An aspect of children's knowledge about memory strategies that has generally been overlooked in the metamemory literature involves children's notions about how memory strategies work to improve recall. The present study investigated 4-, 5-, and 6-year-olds' causal-explanatory conceptions about how a labeling strategy works. Children showed 2 types...

Previous evidence suggesting that young children have some ability to plan by means of forward search suffers from typical findings that individual performance is inconsistent and group performance is low. In the present study, evidence is sought that children's imperfect performance results from unstable execution of the correct component processe...

Two studies are reported describing the early development in two-and three-year-old children of an ability to consider every one of an array of instances. Children were tested on several tasks unlike either counting or searching tasks. Young children, by about three years of age, attempted to consider each item once and only once. They did so by em...

Young children's ability to evaluate the logical necessity of 2 types of inferences was studied in 2 experiments involving 68 3-7-year-olds. Children searched the doors of model houses in order to determine whether a house matched a description specifying certain numbers and types of occupants. A search task used in Experiments 1 and 2 allowed chil...

27 1st graders and 24 2nd graders were exposed to a memory task in which their recall performance varied as a function of their incidentally elicited sorting behavior. When asked what had affected their recall, only some Ss at each grade identified sorting as a causal factor, although all had used sorting. Attributions about sorting could not be ac...

Memory development after the preschool years largely involves the acquisition of strategies for using one's memory rather than structural changes in the brain. This article reviews recent memory development research and four general principles of strategy development: (a) strategy acquisition occurs throughout the school years; (b) younger children...

Little is known about young children's ability to plan ahead to solve problems. In the current research, the transition from nonplanful to planful problem solving approaches was investigated in five studies involving 262 children aged 3 to 5 1/2 years. The task used involved searching a number of locations arrayed in a large space. The primary depe...

To understand the logic of effective cue utilization, one must know not only that cues are useful but that a specific cue is useful only if it is located where one will be when it is time to remember, and placed so one will encounter it automatically. This experiment investigated 16 1st, 16 2nd, and 16 5th graders' knowledge of the use of retrieval...

An understanding of Piaget’s theoretical position on the knowing process is necessary in order to appreciate fully the impact of his research. His theory of knowledge has many significant points in common with that of the German philosopher Kant. This article sketches the epistemologies of the 17th and 18th century movements of rationalism, empiric...

Little is known about young children's ability to plan ahead to solve problems. In the current research, the transition from nonplanful to planful problem solving approaches was investigated in five studies involving 262 children aged 3 to 5 1/2 years. The task used involved searching a number of locations arrayed in a large space. The primary depe...