Developmental Psychology最新文献

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).

Well-being has been thoroughly studied worldwide mostly using questionnaires. Still, it is unclear what well-being means in specific contexts, as studies found that both well-being and underlying psychological needs may vary across cultures. In Aruba, concerns were raised regarding youth well-being. Therefore, this project used a mixed-method approach to explore the development of young people's well-being in Aruba. By taking a culture and human development approach, this project aims to conceptualize the concept and measurement of well-being in context. Students (n = 422) from three vocational schools in Aruba responded to a questionnaire based on the Self Determination Theory. Their age ranged from 16 to 25 years old, 52.7% were female, 43.9% male and 3.4% identified themselves as other. A total of 193 participants identified themselves as Aruban (43.7%), 130 as Aruban mixed with another culture (29.4%) and 118 as non-Aruban (26.7%). A total of 33 students from the larger sample participated in semistructured interviews. Results show moderate rates of satisfaction on the psychological needs questionnaire. Interviews with a subset of the research participants provide a more nuanced understanding of their psychological needs and reveal other needs as well. Cluster analysis shows three subgroups within the interview sample. One group was a less motivated group, the second group had a challenging home environment, and the third group showed high signs of ambition. The discussion focuses on the importance of using mixed methods and considering the cultural context when exploring concepts such as well-being in majority world countries. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Despite increasing awareness of sample, author, and editor representation and measurement equivalence in developmental psychology (DP), implicit and nuanced unevenness in the knowledge production consolidating the persisting Minority World dominance remains less explored. Inspired by Chen's (2010) "Asia as Method," this commentary introduces and investigates interreferencing among Majority World countries as a methodological approach that could potentially break through the Minority World dominance. A survey of 3,879 empirical articles from four top DP journals (Developmental Psychology, Child Development, Developmental Science, International Journal of Behavioral Development) up to 2022 showed that the total volume and proportion of studies including any Majority World sample(s) grew from the 2003-2013 period (11.41%) to the 2018-2022 period (14.72%). Nevertheless, studies including multiple Majority World samples (and potentially, using each other as points of reference) remain rare (1.31%), and existing interreferencing studies appear to be the fruits of exceptional teams rather than routinized scholarly practices. While challenging, interreferencing among Majority World countries is important as it can help demonstrate the contextual diversity within the Majority World; identify and test border-crossing processes and their developmental impacts; generate new scholarly insight; avoid essentialist or nationalist interpretation of research findings; and alleviate power imbalance in international research teams. Without excluding Minority World scholarship or undervaluing studies that include single Majority World samples, interreferencing can help Majority World scholars accumulate a greater presence, build allegiance, and develop a stronger sense of subjectivity that would lead to theoretical and methodological breakthroughs in the long run. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Adolescents' experiences of discrimination and their health consequences are understudied in non-Western cultures. Using data from 90 rural Chinese adolescents (M_age = 13.70; 49% female), this study examined cumulative and daily experiences of peer discrimination (based on socioeconomic status, gender, parental migration status, appearance, grades) and their associations with diurnal cortisol output. Data highlighted a high prevalence of peer discrimination, with 85% of the sample reporting any type of cumulative discrimination in the current semester and 56% of the sample reporting any type of daily discrimination over three consecutive days. At the within-person level, daily peer discrimination (regardless of type) was associated with exaggerated cortisol functioning (i.e., more pronounced rise and fall as indicated by steeper slopes and lower bedtime levels) on the same day; daily discrimination based on parental migration status was also associated with higher cortisol awakening responses on the next day. At the between-person level, cumulative discrimination based on socioeconomic status and gender (but not other factors) was associated with exaggerated cortisol functioning (higher waking levels, steeper slopes). The study also offered a methodological example for collecting daily and cortisol data in rural boarding schools in China. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

The quality of the home language environment and communicative interactions between caregivers and children are crucial components of child language development. We used the Language ENvironment Analysis (LENA) technology to assess children's language environments (adult word count, conversational turns, and child vocalizations) among a sample of children and their caregivers in rural Lesotho. We assessed whether a parenting intervention led to improvements in children's language environments. LENA data were collected from a randomly selected subsample of children enrolled in a cluster-randomized controlled trial. Language environment data were collected at the 12-month follow-up from 607 children (50.4% female; 28-81 months of age) and their caregivers using two different methodological approaches. For the 299 children (157 intervention; 142 control) in Sample 1 who wore the LENA device at home over 2 days, children's home language environments did not differ significantly by intervention and control conditions. For the 308 children (152 intervention; 156 control) in Sample 2 who wore the LENA device during a brief video-recorded caregiver-child interaction task, adult word count (0.4 SD; CI [0.026, -0.76]), conversational turns (0.31 SD; CI [0.03, 0.59]), and child vocalization count (0.36 SD; CI [0.03, 0.68]) were significantly higher during the interaction task in the intervention arm compared to the control arm. Interactions in the intervention arm were also characterized by significantly less silence. Our study demonstrates that despite the challenges it presents, measuring children's development in majority world settings remains an important priority, and that consideration of the local context should be prioritized within this research agenda. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

This article describes the adaptation of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory (CDI) for South Africa's 11 official spoken languages. The CDI is a parent-report tool that measures early language development from 8 to 30 months. We developed cross-linguistically comparable CDIs, representing two distinct language families, West Germanic and southern Bantu, using a common protocol. We describe our approach to item construction and harmonization across languages and to obtaining sociodemographic information in different cultural settings. Issues such as language contact and variation, sampling, data collection, and quality control are discussed as well as item selection and instrument reliability and validity. This study highlights key issues for CDI adaptations and other instrument development in understudied contexts and discusses the theoretical implications of adding this diverse set of cross-linguistically comparable languages for early child language research. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).