Child development最新文献

This study investigated how children evaluate people whose occupations involve intellectual or physical labor. Children made inferences about the traits (N = 66, ages 6-11, 33 female, 42% White, tested in 2024) and hierarchical positions (N = 66, ages 6-11, 33 female, 53% White, tested in 2024) of people with different occupations. Analyses revealed that children thought intellectual laborers were smarter and higher in social rank, while physical laborers were more hard-working. Children's tendency to view intellectual laborers as smarter and higher in social rank increased with age; their tendency to associate physical laborers with hard work lessened with age. The findings reveal children's early use of occupational information when evaluating others. Furthermore, this study offers a method for studying children's apprehension of social roles-a critical aspect of children's intuitive sociology.

This study used latent difference score modeling to identify parent- and child-reported discrepancies in parental cultural socialization (teaching about one's racial group) and preparation for bias (teaching about racism and coping) reports and relations to youth ethnic-racial identity in two samples of Black parent-adolescent dyads. Across Study 1 (collected 2016, cross--sectional, Ndyads = 604, youth Mage = 15.44, 47.5% girls, 84.6% mothers) and 2 (two waves, collected 2021-2022, Ndyads = 149, youth Mage = 14.93, 57% girls, 87.9% mothers), dyads did not report discrepant levels of parental cultural socialization. In Study 1, youth reported receiving more preparation for bias than parents reported giving; the opposite pattern emerged in Study 2. Between-study differences highlight complex relational processes underlying socialization and identity.

We examined potential processes by which children decide to make hard as opposed to easy choices to accomplish a goal. Five- to 7-year olds (N = 100, 52 girls, 61% White, 7% Hispanic or Latine, 5% Asian or Asian American, 5% Black or African American, 2% Native American, American Indian, or Alaskan Native, 13% Mixed Race, 7% not reporting) constructed a gear machine by choosing between easy and hard building instructions. Children chose to take on more difficult instructions based on their accuracy on previously difficult choices (OR = 3.60). Accuracy on easy choices did not relate to their subsequent decisions. These results suggest that children monitor performance on more challenging decisions and use this information to control their decision making about future efforts adaptively.

Little is known about how social network associations are tracked in cognition during adolescence, when social networks change in size and complexity. In 2023, 123 ethnically diverse adolescents and emerging adults (13-24 years; 52.9% female; 68.3% White; 18.7% Asian) completed a task measuring working memory (WM) differences for social and nonsocial network information. Additionally, this sample was combined with an existing sample recruited in the same year (N = 241, 18-65 years; 59.3% female; 64.7% White; 16.6% Asian) to investigate age-related differences in social and nonsocial WM performance. A WM advantage for social over nonsocial networks was observed across adolescence, emerging adulthood, and adulthood, especially for self-relevant social information (R2 = 0.01-0.02). Age was also positively associated with WM performance. Findings provide insights into how individuals learn about social relationships in adolescence and emerging adulthood, the successful formation of which has lasting impacts on wellbeing.