Toddlers displaying extremely inhibited behavior may be at risk for becoming socially withdrawn. However, behavioral inhibition may be a multifaceted characteristic, and its concurrent relation to toddler wariness with peers has not been examined. In this study, 108 toddlers (54 females) and their mothers were observed in novel situations involving unfamiliar settings, adults, and peers. Vagal ...

BACKGROUND Public health experts raise concerns about adolescents' and black youth's greater exposure to TV advertising for unhealthy foods and beverages compared with children and white youth. OBJECTIVES Examine how television-viewing patterns and rates of advertising during targeted programming contribute to this greater exposure. METHODS Nielsen panel data provided viewing times and amou...

Novel words (like tog) that sound like well-known words (dog) are hard for toddlers to learn, even though children can hear the difference between them (Swingley & Aslin, 2002, 2007). One possibility is that phonological competition alone is the problem. Another is that a broader set of probabilistic considerations is responsible: toddlers may resist considering tog as a novel object label beca...

Researchers have suggested that as children's language skill develops in early childhood, it comes to help children regulate their emotions (Cole, Armstrong, & Pemberton, 2010; Kopp, 1989), but the pathways by which this occurs have not been studied empirically. In a longitudinal study of 120 children from 18 to 48 months of age, associations among child language skill, observed anger expressio...

Toddlers learn object names in sensory rich contexts. Many argue that this multisensory experience facilitates learning. Here, we examine how toddlers' multisensory experience is linked to another aspect of their experience associated with better learning: the temporally extended nature of verbal discourse. We observed parent-toddler dyads as they played with, and as parents talked about, a set...

According to family systems theory, children's emotional development is likely to be influenced by family interactions at multiple levels, including marital, mother-child, and father-child interactions, as well as by interrelations between these levels. The purpose of the present study was to examine parents' marital conflict and mothers' and fathers' distressed responses to their infant's nega...

Despite the importance of theory of mind (ToM) for typical development, there remain 2 key issues affecting our ability to draw robust conclusions. One is the continued focus on false belief as the sole measure of ToM. The second is the lack of empirically validated measures of ToM as a broad construct. Our key aim was to examine the validity and reliability of the 5-item ToM scale (Peterson, W...

Despite its apparent distance from the core topics of economics, economists have been attracted to, and deeply engaged in, research about teen fertility for more than a quarter century. Research has focused on two broad, interrelated issues: the socio-economic consequences of a teen birth and the socio-economic causes of a teen birth. In researching these issues, economists have drawn on and ex...

Younger drivers (18-21 years) are over-involved in crashes. Research suggests that one of the reasons for this over-involvement is their failure to scan areas of the roadway for information about potential risks in situations that are hazardous, but not obviously so. The primary objective of the present study is to develop and evaluate a training program that addresses this failure. It was hypo...

OBJECTIVES Offspring of older men have impaired cognitive ability as children, but it is unclear if this impairment persists into adulthood. The main objective of this study was to explore the association between paternal age at offspring birth and general cognitive ability as young adults. DESIGN Population-based cross-sectional study with prospectively collected data on obstetric factors an...