British Journal of Developmental Psychology最新文献

Is there really a 'right age' for social media? As governments rush to regulate children's digital lives, age-based bans and 'age-appropriate' design regulations are gaining international momentum. However, these are often based on theoretically dated 'ages and stages' models and blunt age thresholds. This article examines three seemingly divergent yet surprisingly convergent approaches. First, emerging regulatory frameworks are embedding 'age-appropriate' design and bright-line age limits. Second, social science research on children's digital experience, offers valuable documentation of developmental variability across ages but provides limited policy-ready guidance and often lacks developmental theory. Third, a normative child rights framework grounded in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child's principle of 'evolving capacities' urges a balance between protection and participation rights in ways that take into account children's variable capacities and increasing autonomy. Given the often fraught and contested nature of the debates over digital policy, we call on developmental psychologists to scrutinize proposed age thresholds, map developmental evidence to diverse contexts, and bring contemporary theory and robust evidence to inform policy. Without this input, decisions that matter to children's digital lives will be left to political expediency and corporate interests, overlooking or even undermining children's rights and developmental needs.

Inattentional blindness (IB), which refers to a failure to detect unexpected stimuli in the visual field, is associated with increased risk from undetected threats. While IB has been attributed to several individual factors, the role of cognitive control capacities, such as executive functions, remains unclear. To investigate this relationship, 154 Chinese children aged 3–6 (52.6% male) completed two IB tasks (static and sustained) and three executive function tasks. Findings show that the executive function tasks were predictive of IB, and this prediction varied by IB type: working memory predicted static IB, while cognitive flexibility predicted sustained IB. This underscores the necessity of specifying IB type and the importance of alignment to the cognitive predictors when studying individual differences in IB. When this alignment is achieved, findings suggest that executive function abilities may be differentially implicated in different IB phenomena.

Positive responses to capitalization, the process of sharing positive experiences and emotions, are associated with better relationship wellbeing and consequently health and adjustment in the context of romantic relationships. However, responses to capitalization have rarely been studied in parent–child dyads, whereas most of the research has focused on how parents respond to children's negative emotions. The current study tested associations between maternal positive emotion socialization, specifically capitalization support and children's adaptive regulatory capacity indexed by baseline respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA). Ninety children (M_age = 41.87 months, SD = 4.29; 47.8% boys) participated in the study. Capitalization support indexed by maternal active-constructive responses during a conversation was observed and coded. Children's basal RSA levels when watching a calming video were assessed. Mothers also reported their reactions to children's negative emotions, child temperament and relationship closeness. Maternal capitalization support was associated with children's higher basal RSA levels, independent of maternal supportive reactions to children's negative emotions, child negative affect, and relationship closeness. The implication that supportive socialization for positive emotions benefits children's physiological regulation above and beyond that for negative emotions was discussed.

Emotional film clips are frequently used to induce emotions in age-mixed samples, but past research warrants doubt that this evokes comparable effects across age groups. We investigated age differences in target-emotion intensity and emotion specificity (the tendency to primarily respond with one target emotion rather than others), using data from a film-rating study with 5843 individual ratings. Ninety-nine persons from four age groups (adolescents; younger, middle-aged and older adults) rated their emotional responses to 66 happy, fearful, angry, sad, disgusting and neutral film clips. Crossed-random-effects models showed differential age effects across target emotions. When age differences emerged, older adults responded more intensely and adolescents responded less intensely than other age groups. Emotional specificity was lower in older adults versus younger age groups for disgusting and neutral films, but higher for happy films. We conclude that age-equivalent responding to emotional films may be rather the exception than the rule.

This study investigated the nature of the association between spatial ability and prosocial behaviour in middle childhood. We used a general-population longitudinal survey from the United Kingdom, which allowed us to control for a wide range of area, family and child covariates, including early verbal ability and parenting, in a large sample (N = 13,355, 51% male). The study's primary aim was to determine whether intrinsic-dynamic spatial skills predicted prosocial behaviour and vice versa across ages 5 and 7 years. The results from cross-lagged panel models with various levels of adjustment indicated that both paths were significant and equally strong. However, when also controlling for verbal ability and parenting practices, verbal ability (but not parenting) confounded the path from prosocial behaviour at age 5 to spatial ability at age 7. Therefore, only the path from spatial to social skills remained significant after adjustment for all confounders. Sex-stratified analyses did not reveal significant differences between the paths for males and females. The present study contributes to our understanding of social and cognitive development in children, highlighting the impact of spatial skills across the social domain. The findings have implications for educational curricula in the early years and primary school.

We examined age-related attitudes in 56 German children (M_age = 6.5, 4–8 years; 55% female) using newly developed behavioural (seating and team formation task), explicit (picture rating) and implicit [single-target implicit association test (ST-IAT)] measures. Stimuli comprised pictures of younger and older adults. Children placed younger adults closer to themselves and placed more older adults in an opposing team, rated pictures of younger adults more positively than those of older adults, and evinced more favourable implicit evaluations of younger than older targets. This shows that already young children evaluate younger and older adults differently, underscoring the need for further research on the development of age-related attitudes in childhood.

The goal of the present study was to investigate the trajectories of problematic smartphone use among adolescents and its predictors, including self-regulation, fear of missing out (FoMO), depression, and anxiety among Canadian adolescents. A total of 2549 participants (1025 girls; M_age = 14.10 years, SD = 0.96 years) from grades 8 to 12 in Southern British Columbia, Canada, took part in the study. Self-reported problematic smartphone use was collected annually over 4 years. At Time 1, adolescents provided self-reports on self-regulation, depression, anxiety, and FoMO. Growth mixture modelling was used to examine the trajectories of problematic smartphone use. The results revealed three distinct trajectories: low-increasing-decreasing (35.5%), moderate-increasing (60.9%), and high-stable (3.6%). Multinomial logistic regression revealed that higher FoMO and depression were significant predictors of membership in the high-stable problematic smartphone use group, while better self-regulation predicted lower problematic smartphone use. These findings highlight the dynamic nature of problematic smartphone use and the importance of self-regulation and mental health in understanding problematic smartphone use trajectories among Canadian adolescents.

Inequalities in children's cognitive and socioemotional skills emerge early and persist throughout childhood. This study examines how multiple dimensions of children's developmental contexts, including demographic, socioeconomic and family circumstances, predict age 3 outcomes using data from the UK Household Longitudinal Study (2012–2022). In a cross-sectional sample of 5700 three-year-olds and their families, results showed that child health, the home learning environment, turning 3 during Covid-19, child ethnicity, parent education and financial strain in the home significantly predicted early outcomes in communication, daily living, socialization and motor skills. Although income-related eligibility for early years pupil premium did not predict early outcomes, this may reflect the inadequacies of this indicator for capturing all families facing financial difficulties. There was also an increasing gap in early outcomes as children experienced more indicators related to disadvantage, relative to children with no indicators. Overall, this study highlights the importance of a multidimensional approach for understanding and reducing early educational inequalities.

Spatial skills are essential cognitive abilities that develop during middle childhood and play a crucial role in solving STEM problems. In this relation, however, important aspects of problem-solving performance remain underexplored. Consequently, this study investigated whether spatial skills contribute to solution quality and parsimony in problem-solving. The sample comprised 478 six- to eight-year-olds (219 female) who completed mental rotation, visuospatial memory and gear-based problem-solving tasks. In both problem-solving tasks, spatial skills were associated with solution quality (β = .27** or .39**, respectively) and partially with the number of operations (β = −.06 or −.16*), indicating higher parsimony. Age was significantly linked to spatial skills and partially to parsimony but not to solution quality. These findings highlight the importance of spatial skills for different aspects of children's STEM-related problem-solving.

This study investigated youths' reasoning about personal autonomy and maternal authority in hypothetical emerging adult child–mother conflicts in Türkiye. High school and university students (N = 138, M_age = 19.72 years) from secular and religious schools completed a self-report questionnaire including eight conflict scenarios where the mother opposes her child's decision to marry a non-Muslim or get a tattoo. Maternal opposition in hypothetical scenarios was presented in the forms of maternal advice and maternal use of haram opposition. Haram opposition implies the declaration of maternal accrued rights (a concept deeply rooted in Turkish culture) as haram. The results showed that participants were more likely to subordinate child autonomy to maternal authority when the mother in hypothetical scenarios was depicted as using haram opposition. Authoritative parenting appeared to strengthen this effect. This study has shown that haram opposition is a psychological control mechanism to subordinate child autonomy to maternal authority.