Child development最新文献

The current study sought to understand gender differences in how much children value personal attractiveness, whether age is associated with valuing personal attractiveness, and the role of gender identity development. Three- to five-year-olds (N = 170; 89 girls, 81 boys, 0 other genders; primarily Latiné, multiethnic, and non-Hispanic White American) were recruited from child centers across the Los Angeles and Orange County metropolitan areas. Across several indicators (e.g., self-report, preference for appearance-related female-typed occupations and fancy gender-typed outfits, memory for fancy gender-typed clothing, and spontaneous reasons for liking a media character), girls highly valued personal attractiveness. Girls also valued personal attractiveness and tied their gender to personal attractiveness to a greater extent than boys. We discuss implications for later well-being and health.

Parental chronic pain is associated with adverse outcomes in children, but the mechanisms of transmission are largely untested. Mothers with chronic pain (N = 400, M_age = 40.3 years, 90.5% White) and their children (M_age = 10.33 years, 83.3% White, 50.2% female) were recruited in 2016–2018 to test longitudinal pathways of risk transmission from maternal chronic pain to children's psychological symptoms, examining roles of parenting, maternal depression, and child distress tolerance. Maternal pain was associated with positive (β = .28) and pain-specific (β = .10) parenting behaviors. Maternal depression was associated with lower child distress tolerance (β = −.03), which was associated with greater child psychological symptoms (β = −.62). Parenting and maternal pain were not prospectively associated with child outcomes. When considering the dual-generational impacts of chronic pain, physical and psychological functioning should be examined.

Studying within-person variability in children's behavior is frequently hindered by challenges collecting repeated observations. This study used wearable accelerometers to collect an intensive time series (2.7 million observations) of young children's movement at school (N = 62, M_age = 4.5 years, 54% male, 74% Non-Hispanic White) in 2021. Machine learning analyses indicated that children's typical forward acceleration was strongly correlated with lower teacher-reported inhibitory control and attention (r = −.69). Using forward movement intensity as a proxy for impulsivity, we partitioned the intensive time series and found that (1) children modulated their behavior across periods of the school day, (2) children's impulsivity increased across the school week, and (3) children with greater impulsivity showed greater variability in behavior across days.

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, M_age = 8.00, SD_age = 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. We predicted that children would punish outgroups more so than ingroups and that this effect would be especially pronounced when punishment is perceived as particularly retributive. The results did not align with this prediction; instead, children similarly punished all agents.

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 (M_age = 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. Autonomy-supportive restrictive, autonomy-supportive active, and controlling active parental mediation styles, together with high parental digital skills, predicted adolescents' belongingness to the (more digitally flourishing) first class.

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.1), and images of their own face morphed into another peer's face (N = 39, Exp.2). Results showed an enhanced P100 in infants' ERP response to their own face compared to others' faces (Exp.1 only), suggesting the presence of an enhanced attentional mechanism to one own's face as early as 6 months.

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. A random intercept cross-lagged panel model revealed that improved emotion regulation predicted increased executive functioning to the same extent throughout development, whereas enhanced executive functioning was unrelated to future changes in emotion regulation.

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. Disagreement, especially with an expert (Experiment 2), reduced overconfidence and prompted children to search longer for information, compared to agreement. Together, our findings suggest possibilities for interventions aimed at fostering humility and learning across the lifespan.

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. Overall, the studies found that children's tendencies to use object history to understand object value extends into digital contexts. They also reveal how an unexplored kind of history—social history—affects judgments.

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. The analysis of the range of vocal, manual, and looking behaviors caregivers produced suggests that caregivers used iconic cues especially in displaced contexts and for unfamiliar objects, using other cues when objects were present.