The current study tests a novel latent construct reflecting psychological absence and examines its relations with maternal depression, mother-toddler interactions, and toddlers' social-emotional outcomes in a low-income sample (N = 2,632). Structural equation modeling confirmed a psychological absence construct and revealed that psychological absence, measured at the child's 36-month birthday-r...

English-learning toddlers of 21 and 22 months were taught a novel spatial word for four actions resulting in a tight-fit spatial relation, a relation that is lexically marked in Korean but not English (Choi & Bowerman, 1991). Toddlers in a control condition viewed the same tight-fit action events without the novel word. Toddlers' comprehension of the novel word was tested in a preferential-look...

This study sought to identify ways in which adolescent attachment security, as assessed via the Adult Attachment Interview, is manifest in qualities of the secure base provided by the mother-adolescent relationship. Assessments included data coded from mother-adolescent interactions, test-based data, and adolescent self-reports obtained from an ethnically and socioeconomically diverse sample of...

Empirical studies of religion's role in society, especially those focused on individuals and analyzing survey data, conceptualize and measure religiosity on a single measure or a summary index of multiple measures. Other concepts, such as "lived religion," "believing without belonging," or "fuzzy fidelity," emphasize what scholars have noted for decades: humans are rarely consistently low, medi...

Both the input directed to the child, and the child's ability to process that input, are likely to impact the child's language acquisition. We explore how these factors inter-relate by tracking the relationships among: (a) lexical properties of maternal child-directed speech to prelinguistic (7-month-old) infants (N = 121); (b) these infants' abilities to segment lexical targets from conversati...

This commentary provides a critical discussion of current research investigating the correlates and determinants of physical activity in young people, with specific focus on conceptual, theoretical and methodological issues. We draw on current child and adolescent literature and our own collective expertise to illustrate our discussion. We conclude with recommendations that will strengthen futu...

OBJECTIVE The aim of this study was to evaluate changes of anger scores in female karate athletes during 18 months, and to compare anger scores in adolescents who continue or stop training karate. METHOD The sample consisted of 18 female elite karate athletes, practicing modern style of karate. To measure anger and its subscales, participants were asked to complete "Adolescent Anger Rating Sc...

OBJECTIVE The purpose of this study was to determine whether switch control site (hand vs. head) affects the age at which children can successfully activate a computer to play a cause-and-effect game. METHOD The sample consisted of 72 participants randomly divided into two groups (head switch and hand switch), with stratification for gender and age (9-11 months, 12-14 months, 15-17 months). A...

Adult word recognition is influenced by prior exposure to phonologically or semantically related words (cup primes cat or plate) compared to unrelated words (door), suggesting that words are organised in the adult lexicon based on their phonological and semantic properties and that word recognition implicates not just the heard word, but also related words. We investigate the phonological organ...

This study investigated infant social looking in a social referencing procedure with mothers and strangers. Sixty-one infants and their mothers participated when the infants were 18 and 24 months old. The frequency and latency of looking toward each adult when the baby encountered remotecontrolled ambiguous toys were measured. Mothers and strangers (female experimenters) expressed positive or n...