Lindsey C Partington, Meital Mashash, Paul D Hastings
{"title":"Children's problems predicted parents' mental health via parental burnout during the COVID-19 pandemic in a sample of predominantly White, partnered mothers.","authors":"Lindsey C Partington, Meital Mashash, Paul D Hastings","doi":"10.1037/dev0002076","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1037/dev0002076","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>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 (<i>M</i> = 7.26 years, <i>SD</i> = 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) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).</p>","PeriodicalId":48464,"journal":{"name":"Developmental Psychology","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.1,"publicationDate":"2025-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145214252","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Children's cortical speech tracking in child-adult and child-robot interactions.","authors":"Fatih Sivridag, Nivedita Mani","doi":"10.1037/dev0002086","DOIUrl":"10.1037/dev0002086","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Synthesized speech technology holds potential for enabling natural conversations between humans and machines, particularly in social robotics. However, the combination of synthesized speech with social robots still lacks some qualities of natural speech, which is crucial for human-robot interactions, especially for children. In this study, we recorded the neural activity of 5-year-old, typically developing children from middle to high socioeconomic households using an electroencephalogram while they listened to stories narrated by either an adult or a social robot, specifically Furhat. We measured cortical speech tracking to compare how well children's brains tracked synthesized speech from a robot compared with natural speech from an adult. Our results suggest that children do indeed show cortical speech tracking in both scenarios. The results also suggest that cortical speech tracking requires larger time delays between the speech and the response to reach its peak in child-robot interaction compared with child-adult interaction. Possible sources of these differences along with their implications are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).</p>","PeriodicalId":48464,"journal":{"name":"Developmental Psychology","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.1,"publicationDate":"2025-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145214182","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Roads to regulation: Indirect paths from effortful control and respiratory sinus arrhythmia to emotion regulation across childhood.","authors":"Jennifer J Phillips, Jyoti Savla, Martha Ann Bell","doi":"10.1037/dev0002085","DOIUrl":"10.1037/dev0002085","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Emotion regulation begins to develop early in childhood and has important implications for optimal development. Individual regulatory factors, such as effortful control and baseline respiratory sinus arrhythmia (bRSA), have been demonstrated as markers that influence the development of emotion regulation across childhood. The aim of this present study was to examine the stability and the direct and indirect associations of these regulatory factors from early to middle childhood in predicting emotion regulation in late childhood. Children (<i>n</i> = 230) visited the lab when they were 3, 6, and 9 years old. At ages 3 and 6, mothers reported on child effortful control, and bRSA was assessed, and at age 9, mothers reported on child emotion regulation. Using cross lagged path modeling, we demonstrated that both effortful control and bRSA exhibited stability from early to middle childhood. Our results highlighted two distinct longitudinal pathways to emotion regulation: indirect effects of effortful control and bRSA at age 3 on emotion regulation at age 9, mediated through their respective measures at age 6. Cross-lagged mediation paths and alternate models, however, did not support the roles of effortful control and bRSA at age 6 as mediators in the relationship between each other's early measures and later emotion regulation. In other words, neither effortful control nor bRSA at age 6 indirectly predicted emotion regulation at age 9 through each other. These results are discussed in light of their clinical and prevention applications, as well as the developmental trajectories of these regulatory factors across childhood. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).</p>","PeriodicalId":48464,"journal":{"name":"Developmental Psychology","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.1,"publicationDate":"2025-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12494152/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145214248","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Kristie L Poole, Sarah D English, Linda Sosa-Hernandez, Mya Dockrill, Heather A Henderson
{"title":"Children's sharing behavior with an unfamiliar peer across repeated social interactions.","authors":"Kristie L Poole, Sarah D English, Linda Sosa-Hernandez, Mya Dockrill, Heather A Henderson","doi":"10.1037/dev0001938","DOIUrl":"10.1037/dev0001938","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>We examined children's patterns of sharing behavior with a peer across repeated social interactions. Children aged 9-12 years old (<i>N</i> = 186; <i>M</i> = 10.72 years, <i>SD</i> = 1.09; 108 females; 75.7% White) were matched with a same-age, same-sex, unfamiliar peer, and the dyad completed structured and unstructured tasks during three online sessions across 1 month. At the end of each session, children independently and anonymously participated in a task to assess sharing behavior with their interaction partner. We found evidence for three patterns of sharing behavior across the sessions: fair sharers (45.2%), minimal sharers (44.6%), and increasing sharers (10.2%). We examined how children's own traits and social perceptions of their peer's traits predicted sharing behavior. Children who were rated by their parents as lower in temperamental affiliation and children who perceived their social partner as higher in negative traits were likely to share minimally with their peer across sessions. Further, children who were rated by their parents as higher in temperamental shyness and children who perceived their social partner as higher in shy/nervous traits were likely to increase the number of tickets they shared with their peer across sessions. These findings illustrate that children's sharing behavior with an initially unfamiliar peer is related to their own traits and their perception of the recipient and may change over the course of repeated social interactions. These patterns may be driven by differences in social-affiliative goals based on temperament and unfolding social dynamics. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).</p>","PeriodicalId":48464,"journal":{"name":"Developmental Psychology","volume":" ","pages":"1849-1859"},"PeriodicalIF":3.1,"publicationDate":"2025-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143081728","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Jennifer Watling Neal, Zachary P Neal, Brian Brutzman, C Emily Durbin
{"title":"Understanding the developmental transition between parallel and social play during preschool: A multiplex social network analysis.","authors":"Jennifer Watling Neal, Zachary P Neal, Brian Brutzman, C Emily Durbin","doi":"10.1037/dev0001837","DOIUrl":"10.1037/dev0001837","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Preschoolers are expected to transition from parallel play, where they engage in similar activities next to peers, to social play, where they engage in direct interactions with peers. We use longitudinal, multiplex social network analysis to examine the transition between observed parallel and social play over a school year in a 3-year-old classroom (<i>N</i> = 25, 45% girls, 48% White) and a 4-year-old classroom (<i>N</i> = 28, 42.86% girls, 60.71% White). In both classrooms, the existence of a parallel play relationship between two children predicted the formation of a social play relationship between the same two children over time but not vice versa. Findings provide support for a unidirectional, sequential transition from parallel to social play with the same peers. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).</p>","PeriodicalId":48464,"journal":{"name":"Developmental Psychology","volume":" ","pages":"1860-1867"},"PeriodicalIF":3.1,"publicationDate":"2025-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142298907","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Alexandra D Ehrhardt, Adam J Hoffman, Hannah L Schacter
{"title":"Friendships in flux: A daily examination of friend continuity and associations with adolescent mood.","authors":"Alexandra D Ehrhardt, Adam J Hoffman, Hannah L Schacter","doi":"10.1037/dev0002014","DOIUrl":"10.1037/dev0002014","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Although maintaining stable friendships is an important developmental task for adolescents, there is limited understanding of whether adolescents' friendships vary from day to day and predict changes in emotional well-being. Therefore, the current daily diary study aimed to characterize the day-to-day consistency of adolescents' close friendships and investigate whether feeling close to the same friends from 1 day to the next (daily friend continuity) predicted daily mood. Fourteen consecutive days of friendship nominations and mood assessments were collected from 195 11<sup>th</sup>-grade students (<i>M</i><sub>age</sub> = 16.48; <i>SD</i><sub>age</sub> = 0.53; 66% female). Variability statistics (intraclass correlations, root mean square of successive differences) indicated considerable fluctuations in the consistency of friendship closeness as perceived by adolescents across 2 weeks. Results from multilevel models demonstrated that greater friend continuity was associated with greater positive mood, but not negative mood, at both the within- and between-person level. The findings reveal inconsistency in whom adolescents feel closest over 2 weeks and suggest that maintaining closeness with the same friends from 1 day to the next bolsters adolescents' short-term emotional well-being. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).</p>","PeriodicalId":48464,"journal":{"name":"Developmental Psychology","volume":" ","pages":"1868-1874"},"PeriodicalIF":3.1,"publicationDate":"2025-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144610012","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Şeyma Nur Ertekin, Abe D Hofman, Han van der Maas, Dora Matzke, Carolin Streitberger, Julia M Haaf
{"title":"Extending empirical benchmarks of working memory to children: Insights from an adaptive learning environment.","authors":"Şeyma Nur Ertekin, Abe D Hofman, Han van der Maas, Dora Matzke, Carolin Streitberger, Julia M Haaf","doi":"10.1037/dev0001992","DOIUrl":"10.1037/dev0001992","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>In this study, we explored whether the key benchmarks of working memory processing identified in adults by Oberauer et al. (2018a) also apply to children, using data from a large adaptive learning environment. Over 9,000 children from Dutch primary schools (age between 6 and 12) played two serial recall tasks (verbal domain and visuospatial domain), providing a means for studying working memory processing in students' regular educational environment. Using Bayesian multilevel modeling, we found that the difficulty of the over 2,000 lists was affected by characteristics related to response facilitation, spatial grouping, and set size. Set size and spatial grouping also affected the accuracy of students' responses. Furthermore, we investigated primacy and recency effects and found that, as expected, the effect of serial position of items varies across set size. This result is also in line with previous findings on developmental changes in working memory processing, where primacy and recency effects change as children grow older. Finally, key benchmark findings on error categorization were replicated, revealing that children were more prone to omission and intrusion errors than transposition errors. However, as children matured, the proportion of transposition errors increased. Additionally, we found limited evidence for an infill effect in transpositions in the verbal working memory tasks and substantial evidence for locality constraints on transpositions in both tasks. Our findings provide an understanding of the development of working memory processing in children and highlight the robustness of classical working memory findings in online educational data. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).</p>","PeriodicalId":48464,"journal":{"name":"Developmental Psychology","volume":" ","pages":"1963-1990"},"PeriodicalIF":3.1,"publicationDate":"2025-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144310622","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The home language environment predicts individual differences in language comprehension at 9 months of age.","authors":"Jayde Homer, Abbie Thompson, Jill Lany","doi":"10.1037/dev0001943","DOIUrl":"10.1037/dev0001943","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>By 18-24 months of age, infants whose caregivers talk to them more tend to recognize and comprehend common words relatively quickly and accurately. In turn, real-time language comprehension skill at this age is linked to language development later in childhood. Critically, infants begin to comprehend common words as early as 6-9 months of age, but it is unclear whether the origins of lexical comprehension skill are likewise influenced by hearing child-directed speech. Instead, ambient speech, including caregiver speech that is overheard by infants rather than directed to them, may play strong supportive role in very early language development. Thus, we tested how aspects of the home language environment (HLE) are related to performance on a lexical recognition task in 9-month-old American-English learning infants (<i>N</i> = 38). In our sample, 94.9% of infant participants were Caucasian, 8% Hispanic, 7.7% American Indian/Alaskan Native, and 5.1% Black. Families used the Language Environment Analysis (LENA) system to make audio recordings of the HLE across 2 days. We used LENA-generated measures, as well as measures of child-directed and overheard speech calculated from 2 hr of transcribed recordings, to determine which aspects of the HLE are related to lexical recognition. We found that LENA measures of the total amount of speech infants heard, and of their participation in conversational exchanges, predicted lexical recognition. However, hand-transcribed measures of child-directed speech were not related to lexical recognition. These results suggest that adult speech and speech heard within vocal interactions are important to early-emerging language comprehension abilities. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).</p>","PeriodicalId":48464,"journal":{"name":"Developmental Psychology","volume":" ","pages":"1888-1903"},"PeriodicalIF":3.1,"publicationDate":"2025-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143671472","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Generous and fair: Children's preferences for cooperative partners in India and Canada.","authors":"John Corbit","doi":"10.1037/dev0001998","DOIUrl":"10.1037/dev0001998","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Treating cooperative partners fairly is hypothesized to be an adaptive strategy to maintain cooperative relationships. Indeed, emerging evidence suggests that adults prefer to cooperate with partners who are likely to treat them fairly, but to date little is known about how children's developing concern for fairness influences cooperative partner choice or how these preferences may vary across societies. This study investigated whether children prefer cooperative partners who are fair (discard a resource to avoid advantageous or disadvantageous distributions) or who efficiently distribute resources but create inequality (give a resource to create either advantageous or disadvantageous distributions). We recruited <i>N</i> = 252 children (4-9 years of age, <i>N</i> = 131 Female) from India and Canada. Children learned about the resource allocation behavior of two potential partners for a cooperative game. Each partner received one candy for themselves, one for a peer, and had an extra candy to either distribute (creating inequality) or discard (creating equality). On advantageous trials, partners could keep or discard the extra candy; on disadvantageous trials, they could give it to a peer or discard it. In both countries, children showed a greater tendency to choose partners who achieve equality by giving up a personal advantage, over those who achieve equality by preventing a partner from gaining an advantage, a tendency that increased with age. These findings reveal that children across diverse societies prefer cooperative partners who behave fairly by giving up a personal advantage and those who behave generously by allowing their partners to gain an advantage. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).</p>","PeriodicalId":48464,"journal":{"name":"Developmental Psychology","volume":" ","pages":"1875-1887"},"PeriodicalIF":3.1,"publicationDate":"2025-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144638457","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Aastha Puri, Annette M E Henderson, Shivani Kershaw, Ted Ruffman
{"title":"The role of parent talk in connected and unconnected conversations on children's theory-of-mind development.","authors":"Aastha Puri, Annette M E Henderson, Shivani Kershaw, Ted Ruffman","doi":"10.1037/dev0001964","DOIUrl":"10.1037/dev0001964","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Previous studies have consistently found a positive relationship between parental mental state talk (MST) about desires, emotions, and cognitions as crucial for children's subsequent theory-of-mind development. The present study examined whether connected conversations between the parent and child yielded more parental MST. We employed a within-subjects longitudinal design, testing 48 parents and their children (18- to 26-month-olds) in a series of social games, exploring how parents' quality of talk (defined as initiated, connected, or failed) influenced the content of their talk (MST vs. non-MST). Our findings revealed that parents' use of mental state terms in failed talk (talk that was not connected) at the initial time point was related to children's longitudinal mental state vocabulary acquisition, whereas parents' use of mental state terms in connected talk (when children's subsequent utterance was semantically connected to the parent's) was not. This positive influence of failed parental MST on children's mental state vocabulary was significant even after controlling for potential confounds including children's age, baseline internal state vocabulary, general vocabulary, and connected parent MST. Thus, our results provide compelling evidence that children can learn from conversations that appear disconnected and still learn about mental states when they appear \"inattentive,\" informing strategies aimed at enriching their learning and nurturing their social development. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).</p>","PeriodicalId":48464,"journal":{"name":"Developmental Psychology","volume":" ","pages":"1916-1926"},"PeriodicalIF":3.1,"publicationDate":"2025-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144042148","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}