Developmental Psychology最新文献

It has been established that whereas young children who use their fingers to solve arithmetic problems outperform those who do not, this trend reverses in older children around the age of 7. One possible interpretation is that finger counting is helpful for solving simple problems but becomes inadequate as problem complexity increases, leaving finger users reliant on strategies that are no longer efficient. Another possibility is that nonfinger users after the age of 7 are, in fact, ex-finger users who have already transitioned to efficient mental strategies. These contrasting interpretations carry significant theoretical and educational implications. In the first case, finger counting may be viewed as an ultimately limiting tool, potentially trapping children in immature strategies, and, in the second, as a powerful tool that has not only immediate benefit but also long-term positive effect on children's arithmetic development. To disentangle these interpretations, 192 children from middle to high socioeconomic status (mainly White, 96 girls) were followed from the age of 4.5 to 7.5 across seven testing points. While virtually all children were observed using their fingers at some point during the study, most nonfinger users by age of 6.5 were in fact ex-finger users. Importantly, they presented higher arithmetic performance than finger users and genuine nonfinger users of the same age. These original findings provide the first empirical evidence that finger counting acts as a developmental scaffold toward efficient mental arithmetic, rather than as a mere useful but limiting strategy eventually hindering development. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Helping others may serve as a resiliency-promoting factor for adolescents during challenging times, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. The present study examined short- and long-term within-person associations between providing emotional support and mood (i.e., vigor) among adolescents. We used data from an eight-wave longitudinal study with 6 months in-between timepoints (May 2020 and December 2023) among 2,430 adolescents aged 12-25. We performed random intercept cross-lagged panel models to examine daily and half-yearly lagged associations between emotional support and vigor and tested how sense of contribution and purpose, and age moderated these associations. Results revealed bidirectional lagged effects. Higher levels in emotional support to family were followed by subsequent higher vigor levels a day later, while higher vigor was followed by higher levels of emotional support to friends a day later. However, at the half-year level, higher vigor was associated with lower levels of emotional support to friends. Moderation analyses revealed that for adolescents who have a higher sense of contribution and purpose, providing emotional support to friends is more strongly associated with vigor increases, whereas providing emotional support to family is less strongly associated with such increases. Preliminary evidence also suggested that emotional support to friends was more strongly associated with vigor for older adolescents, whereas support to family showed stronger associations with vigor for younger adolescents. Our study highlights the potential of prosocial behavior to buffer against the negative effects of societal challenges for today's youth through feelings of purpose. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

A growing body of research suggests that children's use and understanding of cardinal number gestures (e.g., raising two fingers to indicate "two") reflect greater cardinal number knowledge than their number words alone (e.g., Butts, 2025; Gibson et al., 2019, 2022; Gunderson et al., 2015; Orrantia et al., 2024; Oswald et al., 2025). The present study adds to these findings by examining how often, and in what contexts, parents and their young children use iconic number gestures, with a particular focus on how these gestures are used in relation to number words. In a naturalistic, at-home longitudinal study, we found that 14- to 58-month-old children and their parents used iconic number gestures far less often than number words. Parents used more number words than the children, but children used more number gestures than the parents. Both children and parents used number gestures more often for nonpresent entities than for present entities, even though they both displayed the opposite pattern for number words (i.e., more number words for present than nonpresent entities). Finally, children were more likely to use number gestures if their parents used them (some parents never used number gestures during the observations), but neither parents' nor children's use of number gestures early on predicted children's cardinal number knowledge at 46 months of age. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Parental response to child negative emotions is an emblematic form of parental emotion socialization, having important implications for child emotional adjustment. Prior literature has predominantly been conducted with a variable-centered approach, which insufficiently captured the potentially intricate combination patterns of multiple emotion-related practices that parents naturally utilize. Building upon the cultural perspective of emotion socialization, the present study utilized a person-centered approach to identify patterns of parental responses to child negative emotions among Chinese parents and examined the associations between different response patterns and child emotional adjustment. One hundred fifty children (M_age = 8.54 years, SD = 1.67; 42.0% girls) and their primary caregivers (M_age = 39.22 years, SD = 4.07; 82.7% mothers) participated in the present study. Parents reported their responses to child negative emotions via questionnaires. Child emotional adjustment was assessed via multiple methods: questionnaires reported by multiple informants, behavioral coding, and physiological assessments. Latent profile analysis identified three patterns of parental responses to child negative emotions: "supportive" (high supportive and low unsupportive responses, 39.19%), "strict" (moderate supportive and moderate unsupportive responses, characterized by relatively high minimization and relatively low expressive encouragement, 27.70%), and "ambivalent" (high supportive and relatively high unsupportive responses, 33.11%). Children with "supportive" parents exhibited the best emotional adjustment, whereas children with "strict" parents exhibited the worst emotional adjustment. Children with "ambivalent" parents showed generally adaptive emotional adjustment but were also characterized by low self-esteem and high emotion negativity. Our findings were further discussed in relation to the modern Chinese culture. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Recent findings suggest that preschoolers are capable of adapting cognitive control (CC) through bottom-up associative learning. However, it is not clear how motivational contextual triggers may influence this ability. This study investigated adaptive CC in a "hot" experimental context administering a modified version of the Balloon Analogue Risk Task to 170 children (83 F; 4-7 years). Specifically, a proportion manipulation induced different risky attitudes based on item-specific features (i.e., the balloon color). Overall, children were capable of inferring environmental regularities embedded in the context to optimize their performance. Regarding their ability to exploit and update these regularities for flexible CC adaptation, results suggest that reversal learning is ambiguous at the block level-overshadowed by a general increase in risk-taking-but tentatively present at the sub-block level, with asymmetric effects. Indeed, children seem to successfully adapt CC when going from a low to a high advantageous context but not vice versa. Moreover, different adaptive CC profiles were predictive of daily behavioral difficulties revealed by parental questionnaires. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

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 (M_age = 10.5 years, SD_age = 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. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Literature suggests that the COVID-19 pandemic may have disrupted children's executive functioning (EF) development, but most studies rely on caregiver reports, cross-sectional data, or comparisons across cohorts. We build on the existing literature with repeated, direct assessments of EF from longitudinal pre-post COVID-19 data on a race-ethnically diverse cohort of elementary-aged children (N = 667) from low-income families. Random-intercept models estimate children's growth in two key EF skills between the fall of kindergarten (2018) and fifth grade (2023) as a function of school closures. We also test for moderation in children's growth trajectories by teachers' reports of children's compliance with remote learning expectations. Results indicate that children's EF growth stagnated during school closures, resulting in an estimated 11-12 months of lost growth compared to prepandemic trends. Postreopening, EF growth continued but at a 65%-74% slower rate than preclosures. Children who completed insufficient remote work demonstrated less stagnation in their inhibitory control/attention growth, which may have been driven by selection. Changes otherwise did not vary according to children's level of participation in remote learning during school closures. Findings underscore the need for interventions to support children's recovery of EF growth, as well as more research on the roles of school closures versus other pandemic-related stressors in the observed patterns. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted families' daily lives, compromising parents', and children's well-being. From a family systems perspective, children's socioemotional difficulties may infiltrate family dynamics via increased parental burnout-a syndrome characterized by exhaustion, low self-fulfillment, and emotional distancing due to demanding childrearing-that potentially compromises a parent's mental health over time. We examined how changes in children's difficulties predicted parents' mental health via parental burnout during the first 1.5 years of the pandemic. Three hundred seventeen U.S. parents (93% mothers, 70% White, median income-per-capita: $31,250) with children ages 2-18 years (M = 7.26 years, SD = 4.08 years) participated in a three-wave, longitudinal study examining family adjustment. Parents reported on their mental health, parental burnout, and their children's difficulties. A linear latent growth curve model found significant variability in children's initial total difficulties score and significant decreases in children's difficulties over 1.5 years. In an indirect effects model, both children's high initial total difficulties and their increasing difficulties over the pandemic prospectively predicted greater parental burnout, which subsequently related to parents' greater mental health problems. Despite concerns surrounding children's adjustment, our findings suggest that children's socioemotional difficulties decreased as the pandemic continued for this sample of well-resourced families. However, parents of children who began the pandemic with many difficulties, or who had increasing difficulties, were susceptible to parental burnout and compromised mental health. Providing resources for parents of children with challenging behaviors early and throughout a health crisis may mitigate downstream impacts on parents' well-being. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Efficient metacognition relies on a fine-tuned interplay between monitoring and control. However, these temporal dynamics between monitoring and control are still poorly understood, which limits our understanding of why some children succeed and other children struggle with metacognition. We assessed metacognitive monitoring, control, and off-task behavior in an unsolvable task in which participants built a wooden snake according to a plan. Participants were N = 123 typically developing 5- to 6-year-olds (M_age = 5.45 years, SD = 0.59, 52% female). We coded monitoring, control, and off-task behavior in 5-s intervals, resulting in a total of 6,150 observations. Based on children's monitoring, control, and off-task behaviors, we ran a latent class vector-autoregression analysis. We identified four latent clusters. The four clusters display distinct behavioral patterns over time, marked by varying levels of monitoring, control, and off-task behaviors. Subsequent analyses showed that younger children showed less stable metacognition than older children. Understanding differences in metacognitive dynamics is particularly important when trying to understand why children have metacognitive difficulties and may have important implications for tailoring interventions to the metacognitive needs of children. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

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. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).