Developmental Psychology最新文献

We sought to illuminate whether and how pandemic-related experiences shaped the genetic and environmental influences on mothering behavior to better understand the effects of stress on parenting. Participants included 710 mothers of twins (M_age = 47.00; SD_age = 5.59; White: 84.8%, Black: 7%, Hispanic: 1.1%, Asian American and Pacific Islander: 0.8%, Native American: 0.8%, biracial: 0.3%, other: 3%, and not reported: 2.1%) from the Michigan State University Twin Registry. Biometric analyses revealed that as pandemic-related stressors like job loss and illness increased, mother-child conflict became more environmental in origin. By contrast, we found assets (e.g., more quality time with family) served to increase maternal nurturance of both of her children by suppressing the importance of evocative child effects. Our results provide novel information on the ways stressors and assets alter the origins of parenting behaviors. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Verbal attention guidance is assumed to be an important cultural tool contributing to the development of culture-specific visual attention styles in childhood. We used a training approach to test whether verbal attention guidance in a 10 day app-based training that accentuates either analytic or holistic processing has the power to produce enduring effects on 6- to 7-year-old urban German children's (N = 42, 22 female, 20 male) attention in a picture description task, a single-choice recognition task and a change blindness task. Results indicate that verbal attention guidance is effective in influencing children's attention styles across indicators. These findings provide convergent evidence for the assumption that verbal attention guidance plays a central role in the long-term socialization of attention styles. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Reports an error in "Why is constructive interparental conflict beneficial for children's mental health? The role of effortful control and positive affect" by Patrick T. Davies, Vanessa T. Cao, Alexandria A. Baker and Melissa L. Sturge-Apple (Developmental Psychology, Advanced Online Publication, May 12, 2025, np). In the article "Why Is Constructive Interparental Conflict Beneficial for Children's Mental Health? The Role of Effortful Control and Positive Affect" by Patrick T. Davies, Vanessa T. Cao, Alexandria A. Baker, and Melissa L. Sturge-Apple (Developmental Psychology, advance online publication, May 12, 2025, https://doi.org/10.1037/dev0001990), the title was originally published as "Why Is Constructive Interparental Conflict Beneficial for Children's Mental Health? The Role of Effortful Conflict and Positive Affect." "Effortful Conflict" was corrected to "Effortful Control." All versions of this article have been corrected. (The following abstract of the original article appeared in record 2026-14817-001). This article examined children's positive affect and effortful control as mediators of associations between their exposure to constructive interparental conflict (IPC) and their social, emotional, and behavioral adjustment. Study 1 participants consisted of 243 mothers and their partners and preschool children (M_age = 4.60 years; 56% female; 54% Black or multiracial; 16% Latinx). Study 2 participants were 238 mothers, their partners, and their preschool children (M_age = 4.38 years; 52% female; 28% Black or multiracial; 16% Latinx). Both studies utilized multimethod, multi-informant assessment batteries within a longitudinal design. Findings from the two-wave design in Study 1 supported the hypothesis that children's effortful control at Wave 1 was a mediator of the associations between Wave 1 constructive IPC and their greater social competence and lower externalizing symptoms at Wave 2 after controlling for Wave 1 child functioning. The more rigorous three-wave design of Study 2 produced a comparable pattern of findings. Lagged, autoregressive tests of mediational paths indicated that Wave 1 constructive IPC was a significant predictor of children's effortful control at Wave 2. Effortful control, in turn, predicted children's greater social competence and lower externalizing symptoms at Wave 3. Although children's positive affect was not a mediator in either study due to its negligible associations with constructive IPC, positive affect predicted lower levels of internalizing symptoms across both studies. Results were consistent across studies with and without the inclusion of several covariates. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

This preregistered longitudinal study examined the long-term effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on academic self-efficacy and cognitive reappraisal in early adolescence. It followed and compared two cohorts over 4 years: one prepandemic (11-14 years, 2016-2019) and one during the pandemic (2019-2022). The study analyzed annual well-being surveys merged with school enrolment data from South Australian public schools (N = 28,307, 49% female). Employing latent growth modeling and a novel cohort comparison design, the study addressed a major limitation in pandemic studies: It separated pandemic effects from normative developmental changes. Results indicate that the pandemic cohort largely followed typical, yet declining, developmental trajectories, showing resilience at a population level. Unexpectedly, the examination of multiple covariates (i.e., gender, socioeconomic status, non-English background, anxiety, peer belonging, teacher support) showed that preexisting vulnerabilities did not predict adverse pandemic effects. This research underscores the value of longitudinal data infrastructures and the importance of understanding normative youth development and resilience research in discerning the effects of pandemics or other widespread crises. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Preteen children with problematic sexual behavior (PSB) are a poorly understood group, and etiological examinations typically focus on cross-sectional associations. Using the Longitudinal Studies in Child Abuse and Neglect (n = 1,354) data set, a hypothesized mediational model was tested that examined whether problems with self-regulation at age 6 predicted PSB at age 8 while accounting for the impact of child sexual abuse and/or child physical abuse occurring prior to age 6. Using structural equation modeling, the defined mediational model was largely supported, with both child sexual abuse and physical abuse prior to age 6 predicting problems with self-regulation at age 6, which in turn predicted PSB at age 8. This mediational relationship operated similarly across two different conceptualizations of PSB, one that was general and included a variety of behaviors and one that was restricted only to interpersonally intrusive types of behavior. Early physical abuse continued to predict age 8 PSB after controlling for self-regulation across both models; however, early child sexual abuse continued to predict only intrusive types of behavior. These results are discussed in the context of advancing etiological research and our understanding of PSB among preteen children. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Attention bias to threat is considered an adaptive cognitive phenomenon that is associated with developmental and psychopathological outcomes across the lifespan. However, investigations into the development of attention bias to threat in infancy have produced mixed results. Steady-state visual evoked potentials provide a robust measure of visual cortex processing and attention by capturing brain entrainment to the rhythmic flicker of visual stimuli. This investigation leveraged a novel steady-state visual evoked potential task to examine attention bias to threat via affective expressions and its changes with age within the first 2 years of life. Infants (N = 118, M_age = 9.21 months; range_age = 3-22 months; 57.61% female) viewed a series of affective face pairs (neutral with happy, fearful, or angry) in which one face flickered at 6 Hz and the other at 7.5 Hz, while their brain activity was measured with electroencephalography. Infants' frequency-tagged brain responses were larger to fearful faces, above all other expressions, consistent with the presence of an attention bias to threat in infancy. Affect-biased attention did not change with age. Furthermore, the presence of an attention bias toward fear was found prior to the literature-suggested age of 7 months. This study demonstrated the utility of using a robust and novel measure of attention, steady-state visual evoked potentials, to examine attention bias to threat and its development during infancy. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

We asked how caregivers use spatial language and deictic gestures, in addition to object labeling, with their infants during spatial play, and how such spatial multimodal input scaffolds infants' in-the-moment attention. Forty-nine North American middle-class racially and ethnically diverse caregivers (four fathers, 45 mothers; 51% White and not Hispanic) and their 9-month-old infants (15 girls, 34 boys; 43% White and not Hispanic) played with a puzzle while wearing head-mounted eye trackers. Results showed that caregivers' speech with spatial words or objects labels extended the duration of infants' looking at the puzzle, compared to looking accompanied by utterances without such words. Notably, the combination of spatial and labeling language was more effective than either type alone. Furthermore, infants' attention was longer when caregivers used deictic gestures (e.g., pointing) compared to when they did not use these gestures, highlighting the support of multimodal communication. Together these results add to our understanding of how the content of caregivers' speech, and not simply the presence of speech, along with deictic gestures may shape infants' attention in real time. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Praise is not only rewarding but also informative. It can provide children with information about their competence, especially when they are uncertain or unable to judge for themselves. Not all praise is equally meaningful, however: someone who praises only high-quality work is more informative than someone who praises indiscriminately. Across four experiments, we find that 4- to 5-year-old U.S. children-from both in-person preschool and online samples-can infer the informativeness of others' praise based on the statistical dependence between praise and the quality of work evaluated. Participants were more likely to endorse praise from a teacher whose previous praise covaried with the quality of work over a teacher who praised indiscriminately or a teacher who praised only lower quality work (Experiment 1). Although children did not show a preference between teachers when seeking out praise for themselves (Experiment 2), they sought out praise from different teachers on behalf of another learner depending on the learner's goal (Experiments 3-4). Collectively, these findings show that even young children understand that praise is more than just positive reinforcement. Rather, they can reason about a speaker's inferred informativeness and use this to guide whose praise to seek out and endorse. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Making abstract inferences from specific instances is a critical cognitive ability. Here, we examine children's capacity to use these inferences to reason beyond the evidence they observe. In three experiments, participants (N = 161, 46% female, 43% White) observed various colored balls randomly drawn from two opaque boxes and were asked to choose which box was more likely to contain a novel-colored ball. Younger preschoolers (M_age = 40.12 months, Experiment 1) chose the container that produced differently colored balls over one that produced balls of a single color, suggesting they made inferences about second-order characteristics (variability vs. uniformity), and used this to make novel predictions. When presented with more subtle contrasts (low- vs. high-variability, Experiments 2 and 3), older (M_age = 55.53 months), but not younger preschoolers, continued to make adult-like predictions, suggesting that these second-order inferences increase in sophistication during early childhood. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

As children grow older, they become increasingly critical of group-based partiality in providing help. However, the developmental trajectory of how children evaluate partiality in asking for help is largely unknown. Our study investigates evaluations and expectations of group-based partiality in providing versus asking for help in 5- to 10-year-old children (n = 164; 54.3% girls, 45.7% boys) from the New England region of the United States. In the study, participants learn about two groups of children at a playground and make predictions about their interactions. Because ingroup favoritism in asking for help does not immediately lead to negative outcomes for the outgroup, we predicted different responses regarding biased requests for help compared to biased helping. We find that children generally deem ingroup favoritism more acceptable in asking for help than in providing help. We also see age-related changes: Younger children evaluate ingroup favoritism in asking for help positively, while older children view it neutrally. In contrast, both age groups view ingroup favoritism in providing help negatively. Additionally, children from both age groups expect group-based partiality when responding to requests for help and when asking for it, showing some divergence between what children deem acceptable and what they deem likely to occur. Ingroup bias in asking for help is both accepted and expected and may contribute to the persistence of partiality in cooperation. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).