Developmental Psychology最新文献

The high occurrence of social content in children's fiction may provide opportunities for practicing and refining emerging understanding of others' thoughts, feelings, and desires, referred to as "theory of mind" (ToM). The aim of the present study was to test this potential developmental benefit by longitudinally examining ToM development in middle childhood and adolescence, as well as examining associations between children's reading experience and ToM. Reading experience and ToM were assessed in 234 children at five time points between ages 12.5 and 16 (56% girls). Of this sample, 16% of children were eligible for free school meals, and 9% spoke English as additional language. To examine longitudinal associations between ToM and reading experience, we tested development and stability over time and tested cross-lagged associations between these constructs. Results showed that there was meaningful improvement in ToM in this age range, but no significant variance in growth trajectories. Our data also showed rank-order stability in individual differences in ToM, suggesting that variation in theory-of-mind performance is genuine. There were bidirectional associations between ToM and reading experience, but these effects disappeared after controlling for verbal ability, gender, and parent education. Future research should include more direct tests of potential underlying mechanisms of the benefits of narrative exposure for our understanding of others. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

The family stress model outlines that parents' economic pressure can lead to a cascade of family stress processes, which in turn can lead to child internalizing and externalizing behavior. In the current preregistered study, we investigated to what extent the relation between prenatal economic pressure and child internalizing and externalizing behavior at child age 6 can be explained through the sequential mediating processes of parents' psychological distress and harsh parenting at child age 3. In our models, we accounted for the influence of both mothers and fathers. We also tested the moderating role of social support at child age 6 months on two specific paths within the family stress model. We conducted (moderated) multiple mediator models on multi-informant, longitudinal data from 2,705 families enrolled in the Generation R Study, a large prospective birth cohort in the Netherlands. After accounting for mothers' economic pressure and family stress processes, only fathers' economic pressure was indirectly and positively associated with child externalizing, but not internalizing behavior, through higher levels of paternal psychological distress and paternal harsh parenting. We did not find support for the moderating role of social support in the pathways we examined within the family stress model. Our findings highlight the potential cascading influence of fathers' prenatal economic pressure, through increased family stress processes, on child externalizing behavior in early childhood. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

The acquisition of mental language understanding is crucial for social-cognitive development. While there is evidence for the production of epistemic terms in the third year of life, the comprehension of different degrees of speaker (un-)certainty has not yet been systematically investigated at this age. In the present longitudinal study, we developed an eye-tracking task and measured preferential looking as an indicator of an implicit understanding of the epistemic verbs "know" and "think" in toddlers twice at the ages of 27 (N = 199) and 36 months (N = 131). Toddlers were faced with two agents who indicated the location of a hidden object (right vs. left box), with a narrator attributing contrasting degrees of certainty to their statements ("know" vs. "think") before asking the toddlers about the object's location. We measured the extent to which children fixated the box associated with the agent described as knowing the target's location. At both 27 and 36 months of age, we observed systematic differences in their looking behavior toward this box across the trial. Children appeared to display a spontaneous preference for the box associated with the agent who knew the target's location, relative to the agent who only thought the target was in their box in the prequestioning phase. Subsequently, their preference switched in the postquestioning phase; however, this effect was smaller. These results indicate that toddlers in their third year of life distinguish different degrees of speaker (un-)certainty, expressed by the verbs "know" and "think." (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Arithmetic skills are needed at any age. In everyday life, children to older adults calculate and deal with numbers. The processes underlying arithmetic seem to change with age. From childhood to younger adulthood, children get better in domain-specific numerical skills such as place-value processing. From younger to older adulthood, domain-general cognitive skills such as working memory decline. These skills are needed for complex arithmetic such as addition with carrying and subtraction with borrowing. This study investigates how the domain-specific (number magnitude, place-value processing) and domain-general (working memory, processing speed, inhibition) processes of arithmetic change across the lifespan. Thereby, arithmetic effects (carry and borrow effects), numerical effects (distance and compatibility effects), and cognitive skills were assessed in children, younger and older adolescents, and younger, middle-aged and older adults. The results showed that numerical and arithmetic skills improve from childhood to young adulthood and remain relatively stable throughout adulthood, even though domain-general processes, particularly working memory and processing speed, decline with age. While number magnitude and place-value processing both develop until adulthood, number magnitude processing shows deficits during aging, whereas place-value processing remains intact even in old age. The carry effect shifts from a categorical all-or-none decision (whether or not a carry operation is needed) to a more continuous magnitude process in adulthood, reflecting increasing reliance on domain-specific skills. In contrast, the borrow effect remains largely categorical across all age groups, depending on general cognitive processes. These results provide critical insights into how arithmetic skills change over the lifespan, relying on both domain-specific and domain-general processes. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

As local spatial cues, angle and length information are known to be effective cues for relocation in adults, yet young children often struggle with using such information. We propose that the previously found late utilization of local geometric cues might be partly attributed to the testing environments, where connected enclosures provided immediate access to its global shape. Here, we investigated at what age children acquire the ability to relocate using local angle and length information in fragmented arrays, without available global shape, and whether children represent such information for relocation in enclosures. We found that both 3-year-olds (Experiment 1: n = 29, 15 girls; Experiment 2: n = 28, 13 girls) and 4-year-olds (Experiment 1: n = 28, 14 girls; Experiment 2: n = 29, 15 girls) successfully relocated using angle or length information in fragmented arrays, where these local cues were the only available cues. However, only 4-year-olds, but not 3-year-olds represented angle or length information for relocation in an enclosure offering both global shape and local geometric information. Importantly, 3-year-olds' failure in enclosures could not be attributed to their inability to perceive and represent such information itself. Instead, it may be that young children fail to spontaneously represent local geometric information in enclosures, and that young children face greater cognitive demands on mental segmentation when processing angle and length information in enclosures where global shape is prominent. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Parental ethnotheories delineate culturally shared beliefs about the nature of children and normative parenting in a particular cultural niche. Using a sequential mixed-methods design, we assessed parental ethnotheories in a non-White, educated, industrialized, rich, and developed cultural context of Türkiye and developed a parental beliefs scale (PBS) with a culturally informed emic approach in two studies. Study 1 relied on semistructured interviews with 125 Turkish parents (79 mothers, 46 fathers) to better understand parents' beliefs on the child's nature and proper parenting with particular attention to the key demographic characteristics reflecting intracultural diversity. This qualitative inquiry informed the generation of items for a PBS about the nature of children and parenting. In Study 2, we investigated the factor structure, measurement invariance, and the predictive power of the PBS on parenting behaviors with a nationally representative sample of 1,397 parents (796 mothers, 601 fathers) of children aged 3-17 years. Factor analysis revealed three factors representing constraining beliefs, autonomy-enabling beliefs, and beliefs in the malleability of the child. Structural and measurement invariance analyses partially supported the equivalence of the three-factor structure across parent and child gender and child age groups. Regression analyses indicated that constraining beliefs strongly and positively predicted psychological control and punitive behaviors. Autonomy-enabling beliefs predicted positive parenting, while malleability beliefs primarily predicted sociocultural control. Parent education and socioeconomic status moderated the effects of parental beliefs on parenting behaviors. The results were discussed based on parents' gender and socioeconomic status within a developing country, exemplifying a culturally informed assessment approach for the majority world. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Extensive research on the Family Stress Model demonstrated the negative indirect impacts of parental cultural stress on adolescents' mental health via disrupted parenting. However, limited attention has been paid to testing how adolescents' cultural stress could affect parents' mental health through adolescent-reported parenting. According to Family Systems Theory, the family serves as an interdependent system, suggesting that adolescents' cultural stress can spill over and negatively influence parenting and their parents' mental health. Furthermore, prior studies have largely neglected the bidirectional link between parenting and mental health within the Family Stress Model. Thus, this study examined the associations among cultural stress, parenting (i.e., maternal warmth and hostility), and their mental health (i.e., anxiety and depressive symptoms) in mother-adolescent dyads across two waves. Participants included 595 mothers (M_age = 38) and adolescents (54% female, M_age = 12) as dyads. The actor-effect results revealed that Mexican-origin mothers' and adolescents' cultural stress at Wave 1 (W1) were related to their own mental health at Wave 2 (W2) via their self-reported parenting at W1. Moreover, mothers' and adolescents' cultural stress at W1 were associated with their self-reported parenting at W2 through their self-reported mental health at W1. Partner-effect results indicated that mothers with higher levels of cultural stress at W1 were likely to report anxiety at W1, which may in turn influence adolescents' perceptions of more maternal hostility at W2. This study provides implications for family-based intervention programs that aim to both foster parenting and promote mental health outcomes in Mexican-origin mothers and their adolescents. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Although it is developmentally appropriate for preschoolers to be highly active, this physical activity level can be difficult for parents to manage at mealtime when children are asked to sit and focus on eating. We examined how children's physical activity levels across the week related to parents' feeding coparenting efforts and how parent feeding pressure and prompts to change the child's activity mediated these associations. From a sample of 100 families with a preschool-age child (3-5 years, 49% female, 59% White, 12% Black, 10% Hispanic, 26% low-income), home dinners with mothers and fathers present were recorded in 65 families for seven consecutive days (455 total meals observed). Coders rated meals for children's activity level and parents' prompts for activity change, pressuring feeding behaviors, and feeding coparenting support, undermining, and balance. Multilevel structural equation models tested direct and indirect associations at within-person and between-person levels. On days children were more active than usual, parents engaged in more supportive feeding coparenting and used more prompts for children's activity change. Fathers' increased prompts for activity change explained associations between child activity level and supportive feeding coparenting. Although fathers' feeding pressure related to more supportive and balanced feeding coparenting, it was not predicted by child activity level and, thus, did not mediate associations between child activity and feeding coparenting. At the between-person level, children who were more physically active had parents who engaged in more undermining feeding coparenting. Results are discussed in terms of the consistency of children's physical activity and fathers' feeding engagement. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

This study examined how a firstborn child's empathy interacts with maternal emotional availability (EA) to predict later positive sibling relationships. The study included 108 families expecting a second child who also had a 10- to 45-month-old firstborn child (M = 24.6 months, SD = 7.42; 58 girls). Before the second-born child arrived, the firstborn child's empathic abilities were measured, and a mother-child play interaction was videotaped and coded for maternal EA. At 16-18 months postpartum, mothers completed questionnaires assessing the quality of the sibling relationship. Maternal EA moderated the link between the firstborn's cognitive and emotional empathy and the quality of the sibling relationship. Higher levels of emotional and cognitive empathy predicted better sibling relationships for children whose mothers were more emotionally available. Implications for early interventions are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Computational models of development have the potential to address a key challenge in emotional development research: investigating not only what changes across development but also how these changes come about. Drawing on connectionist and Bayesian methods, this review considers how computational modeling could augment the processes of theorizing and behavioral research to investigate causal processes underlying emotional development. As an illustrative example, we consider how different modeling approaches could help researchers evaluate different ideas about how children come to reason about others' emotions in increasingly sophisticated ways across development. This example is just a starting point; we propose that computational modeling could be an invaluable tool for exploring a variety of yet unresolved "how" questions in emotional development. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).