Developmental Psychology最新文献

Maternal responsiveness plays an important role in child development. Event-related potentials can be used to examine neural mechanisms underlying maternal responsivity. Here, associations between neural markers of maternal responsivity and five child development domains-cognitive, language, motor, adaptive behavior, and social-emotional development-were examined in 94 mothers (M_age = 29.19 years; 41% African American, 28% Caucasian, 19% Hispanic or Latina, 4% Asian or Asian American, 7% other or not reported) and their infants (M_age = 7.75 months; 60% female). Child development was assessed using the Bayley Scales of Infant Development, Third Edition. Event-related potentials were recorded while mothers viewed infant faces and were used to generate profiles of maternal neural responsiveness. A latent profile analysis was used to examine patterns of maternal event-related potential responses to infant faces. A model with three profiles had the best fit statistics. Maternal profile membership was significantly related to infant social-emotional development such that a profile characterized by an attenuated early response at the N170 amplitude and a faster late response at the P300 latency was associated with increased infant social-emotional development scores. There were no significant associations between maternal profile membership and infant cognitive, language, motor, or adaptive behavior development. Findings support the importance of characterizing neural aspects of maternal responsiveness that may underlie infant social-emotional development. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Racial discrimination experiences (RDEs) are pervasive and prevalent stressors for Black Americans, which occur on a daily basis and are linked with a variety of negative mental health outcomes. This study examines the impact of an individual's daily average (e.g., between-person) and daily fluctuations (e.g., within-person) of RDEs on daily depressive symptoms among 231 Black American adolescents and adults. Reporting higher levels and more fluctuations in daily RDEs was linked with increased depressive symptoms. The impact of daily fluctuations was stronger among Black American adults compared to adolescents. RDEs occur on a daily basis and are harmful for the mental health of Black American adolescents and adults. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

The niche-picking principle has been proposed to explain stabilization in personality development and personality continuity in adulthood. The niche-picking principle posits that the reciprocal exchange between people and their environments-person-environment transaction-serves to maintain trait continuity, thereby preserving rank-order stability of trait differences. To date, however, no longitudinal twin study has directly tested whether reciprocal effects between people and their environments contribute to trait continuity in middle and older adulthood. Using a sample of twins from the Swedish Adoption/Twin Study of Aging, we tested whether the niche-picking principle explained stability of longitudinal within-family differences in neuroticism, extraversion, and openness across two stages of adult development. Genetic simplex models that include a reciprocal effects (i.e., phenotype-environment covariance) parameter were fit to twins' longitudinal data. Results suggest that the niche-picking principle partly explains continuity of neuroticism and openness in middle adulthood whereas it partly explains continuity of neuroticism and extraversion in older adulthood. Stable genetic and unique environmental variance also explained continuity of each trait. Findings partially support lifespan developmental theories that posit that people adapt to and possibly optimize behaviors to sustain existing traits. We discuss the importance of the reciprocal exchange between people and their environments across the lifespan and how these exchanges might shift to support trait continuity. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Concern for mianzi, or the social perception of one's prestige and standing in the group, is an important socioemotional experience in Chinese adolescents. This 2-year longitudinal study examined relations between concern for mianzi and adjustment in junior high school students (N = 498; 266 boys), initially in seventh grade (M_age = 13 years), in rural China. Data were obtained from multiple sources including peer assessments, teacher ratings, and school records. The results showed that concern for mianzi positively predicted later sociability and academic achievement and negatively predicted later internalizing problems. Concern for mianzi also positively predicted later aggression and externalizing problems in boys. Aggression positively predicted concern for mianzi, and sociability positively predicted concern for mianzi in girls. The results indicate the developmental significance and the nature of concern for mianzi in rural Chinese context. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Reports an error in "Parenting stress, family conflict, and children's behavior problems: The protective role of self-regulation" by Rahmet Akpolat, Francisco Palermo and Sarah E. Killoren (Developmental Psychology, Advanced Online Publication, Sep 29, 2025, np; see record 2026-70055-001). In the original article, in Table 4, the third effect below "Moderated effects" is missing both an arrow and the label "Externalizing behavior," and the arrow from "Self-regulation" should point to the arrow between "Family conflict" and "Externalizing behavior." For the fourth effect below "Moderated effects," the arrow from "Self regulation" should point to the arrow between "Family conflict" and "Internalizing behavior." The corrected portion of the table is present in the erratum. (The following abstract of the original article appeared in record 2026-70055-001). Parenting stress is associated with behavior problems in childhood; however, the mechanisms through which it operates and the factors that weaken its negative effects are not well understood. This study examined the associations between maternal parenting stress during children's toddlerhood and their internalizing and externalizing behavior problems approximately 9 years later, in fifth grade. It also examined the extent to which family conflict mediated those associations and whether children's self-regulation abilities mitigated the negative effects of parenting stress and family conflict. The participants were 2,977 low-income mothers and children (51% boys, 37% European American, 35% African American, and 24% Hispanic) from the Early Head Start Research and Evaluation Project. Data were gathered across four time points: when children were 14 and 36 months of age, before kindergarten entry, when children were about 5 years old, and in fifth grade, when children were about 10 years old. Family conflict mediated the associations between maternal parenting stress and children's internalizing and externalizing behaviors. However, the mediated associations varied by children's self-regulation; the links weakened as children's self-regulation abilities increased. The findings highlight the family processes by which maternal parenting stress may be associated with children's internalizing and externalizing behavior outcomes and how self-regulation abilities may reduce the negative impact of parenting stress and family conflict on children's behavior outcomes. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Most studies on psychological control (PC) in families assume that parents are the perpetrators, thus focusing on the effects of parental PC on youth's developmental outcomes. Youth might also perpetrate psychologically controlling behaviors toward their parents, however. There is currently limited understanding of the potential longitudinal relationships between parent- and youth-perpetrated PC behaviors. This dyadic longitudinal study examined the between- and within-family associations between mother- and youth-perpetrated PC. Late adolescents and emerging adults in Hong Kong (N = 349; M_ageT1 = 18.20, SD = 1.10; 39.8% male; 99.1% Chinese ethnicity) and their mothers (M_ageT1 = 49.10, SD = 4.82) completed four assessments over a full academic year. A random intercept cross-lagged panel model showed a positive link between youth- and mother-perpetrated PC at the between-family level. At the within-family level, however, greater youth-perpetrated PC predicted decreases in later mother-perpetrated PC, suggesting that when mothers perceived their children to be more psychologically controlling than usual, youth subsequently reported their mothers as being less psychologically controlling than usual. The opposing valences of the between- versus within-family associations indicate a Simpson's paradox, offering a novel interpretation of manipulative and coercive behaviors in families. This research also represents a departure from a traditional focus on parental perpetration of PC, suggesting that youth might use PC to acquire more power in family interactions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Prolonged screen exposure in early childhood is linked to developmental challenges, particularly in executive functions (EF), which are critical for child adjustment. While infancy is recognized as a sensitive period of heightened brain plasticity and susceptibility to environmental influences, research on screen exposure during this time is limited, with most studies focusing on children over 2 years. Policymakers, recognizing the plasticity of the infant brain, have issued strict guidelines advocating for the complete avoidance of screen exposure for children under two; yet, approximately 75% of children in this age group exceed these recommendations. This underscores the need to better understand individual differences in screen-related risks to develop empirically informed, nuanced guidelines. Surprisingly, despite temperament being a key characteristic in infancy, shaping how infants respond to environmental inputs, its role in moderating the impact of screen exposure on regulatory development has not been studied. This study addresses these gaps by exploring temperamental negative emotionality (TNE) as a moderator between infant screen exposure and later EF difficulties. Eighty infants participated (57.5% males, all White, 73.3% monthly household income >3,400 U.S. dollars); TNE was assessed at 4 months, screen exposure at 10 months, and EF at 4 and 5.5 years. Results indicate that higher screen exposure in infancy predicts later EF difficulties but only for infants with average/high TNE. Our findings provide initial evidence suggesting the potential need to consider temperament-related individual differences when developing more nuanced, individualized guidelines for infant screen exposure. Such guidelines may enhance adherence and mitigate screen-related risks. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Adolescent depression is a significant mental health concern worldwide. Largely due to methodological problems and focus on Western samples in existing studies, issues concerning longitudinal directions remain to be clarified in the relations between social and personal factors and depression in the Chinese cultural background. This three-wave longitudinal study examined relations among family support, shyness, and depression based on the random intercept cross-lagged panel model, which disaggregates the between- and within-person variances. Six hundred forty-three Chinese adolescents (M_age = 12.39, SD_age = 0.53 at Time 1; 53.7% girls) participated in this study from Grade 7 to Grade 9. Family support and depression were measured using self-reports, and shyness was assessed using classroom-based peer nominations. The data were collected once a year for 3 years. The results revealed that, at the between-person level, depression was positively associated with shyness and negatively related to perceived family support. Moreover, at the within-person level, perceived family support and shyness were negatively predicted by each other, shyness positively predicted later depression, and perceived family support negatively predicted later depression through shyness. The study suggests that family support and shyness unidirectionally predicted adolescent depression. The study partially supported the model that the relations between family support and adolescents' depression may be formed through the dynamic cascading process involving individual vulnerability among Chinese adolescents. The implications for providing effective family support to Chinese early adolescents were discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

There exists cultural variation in how people react to prosocial obligations, but we still know little about when these differences emerge in development and how they can be explained. We investigated this in a study with 6- to 11-year-old children (N = 686) in five cultural contexts. Children listened to scenarios about spontaneous and requested (within-subjects) helping and sharing. They rated requested scenarios as less desirable and less satisfying, but there was significant cross-cultural variation in the magnitude of this effect, which was mostly stable with age. We also measured children's sense of individual agency and internalization of prosocial norms as potential explanations. While internalization moderated the effect of requests in helping scenarios at the individual level, neither agency nor norm internalization explained cross-cultural variation in children's judgments of requests. Overall, our findings underline the importance of self-determination for motivation and offer insights into cross-cultural similarities and differences in prosocial motivation. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Children recognize semantic relations between words early in development, yet it is unclear how this ability is affected by children's vocabulary size. We explore this question using an eye-tracking paradigm that manipulated the degree and kind of semantic overlap between labeled target objects and unnamed distractor objects to measure real-time recognition of known word meanings in 18-month-olds with varied vocabulary sizes (N = 136). Additionally, we assess how semantic network structure in children's vocabularies affects disambiguation among semantically related and unrelated words by measuring words' density of semantic interconnections within the semantic networks. Semantic overlap condition differently affected lexical recognition as a function of the kind of semantic overlap, children's vocabulary size, and words' semantic network structure. Across children, word recognition was least robust in the condition involving taxonomic (i.e., categorical) semantic overlap between words. For children with larger vocabularies, denser local neighborhood semantic network structure decreased word recognition under taxonomic overlap. However, for children with smaller vocabularies, denser network structure did not affect word recognition in conditions under taxonomic overlap. These results reinforce the idea that lexical recognition is a dynamic process dependent on the specific configuration of children's semantic knowledge. Further, the results have implications for the trajectories of vocabulary development in late talkers-children with small vocabulary sizes for their age. Beyond delayed word learning, these children are primed to process and learn different kinds of words, which may have cascading effects on later language learning. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).