Social Development

The fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) are rife with inequalities and under-representation that have their roots in childhood. While researchers have focused on gender and race/ethnicity as two key dimensions of inequality, less attention has been paid to wealth. To this end, and drawing from the Social Reasoning Development approach, we examined children's and adolescents' perceptions of STEM ability and access to opportunities as a function of wealth, as well as their desire to rectify such inequalities...

Close peer relationships are critical to children's and adolescents' healthy development and well-being, yet youth sometimes struggle to make friends. The present work tested whether an online version of the Fast Friends procedure could engender closeness among 9- to 13-year-old youth. Participant dyads ( N = 131), matched in age and gender, were randomly assigned to answer personal questions that encourage self-disclosure and play a collaborative game (Fast Friends condition) or to engage in similar activities without self-disclosure or collaboration (control condition)...

Adolescence is a key developmental period for socio-emotional skills, and companion animal relationships may be one potential source of emotional support and resilience during this time. This study used longitudinal data from 940 pet-owning adolescents, collected over four time points, from youth in the Northeastern United States. We assessed whether pet relationship quality (indexed by relationship satisfaction, companionship, and emotional disclosure) predicted trajectories of loneliness, social anxiety, and depression...

Although there is interest in the role of peers in children's schooling experiences, few researchers have examined associations and related underlying processes between peers' emotionality, an aspect of temperament, and children's academic achievement. This study evaluated whether target children's ( N = 260) own self-regulation, assessed with two behavioral measures, served a moderating function for associations between peers' emotionality and children's own academic achievement in second grade. There was a positive association between peers' positive emotionality and reading scores for children with higher self-regulation...

Emotion talk (ET), an emotion socialization practice theorized to promote children's emotion understanding and emotion regulation, has been linked to better socioemotional adjustment in diverse samples. Immigrant children face developmentally unique challenges and opportunities related to their multi-lingual and multi-cultural experiences. The present study aimed to identify sociocultural correlates of parent ET in two groups of low-income immigrant families with preschool-age children: Mexican American (MA) and Chinese American (CA) families...

This two-year longitudinal study examined Mexican-origin adolescents' need to belong and cognitive reappraisal as predictors of multiple forms of prosocial behavior (i.e., general, emotional, and public prosocial behaviors). Prosocial behaviors, which are actions intended to benefit others, are hallmarks of social proficiency in adolescence and are influenced by intrapersonal abilities and motivations that typically develop during adolescence. Yet, few studies of Mexican-origin or other U.S. Latinx youths have examined whether such individual difference characteristics, specifically social motivation and emotion regulation skills, support prosocial behavior...

The social plasticity hypothesis proposes that social attunement, i.e., the adaptation to and harmonization with one's environment, plays a crucial role in the risk for developing alcohol use disorders (AUDs) during adolescence, whereas in adulthood it paradoxically may make individuals more sensitive to the social pull to reduce drinking. This study aimed to develop a valid measure of social attunement: the social attunement questionnaire (SAQ). A total of 26-items were developed and the questionnaire was completed by 576 Dutch mid to late adolescents and adults over three rounds of online data collection...

Extant research has produced conflicting findings regarding the link between social fearfulness and prosocial behavior, with some studies reporting negative relations and others reporting null effects. Furthermore, these studies have focused predominantly on toddlerhood, and few have examined prosociality between peers. The present study investigated whether the link between social anxiety and a prosocial behavior (i.e., providing encouragement) varied depending on interpersonal and situational factors (i.e...

Daily emotion dynamics provide valuable information about individuals' emotion processes as they go about their lives. Emotion dynamics such as emotion levels (mean), emotion variability (degree of fluctuation), and emotion network density (strength of temporal connections among emotions) are associated with risks for various psychopathology in youth and adults. Prior work has shown that caregivers and friends play crucial socializing roles in adolescent emotional well-being, but less is known about their roles in daily emotion dynamics...

In response to some resource inequalities, children give priority to moral concerns. Yet, in others, children show ingroup preferences in their evaluations and resource allocations. The present study built upon this knowledge by investigating children's and young adults' ( N  = 144; 5-6-year-olds, M age  = 5.83, SD age = .97; 9-11-year-olds, M age  = 10.74, SD age = .68; and young adults, M age  = 19.92, SD age  = 1.10) evaluations and allocation decisions in a science inequality context...

Stress coping theories suggest that the effectiveness of coping depends on the level of stress experienced. Existing research shows that efforts to cope with high levels of peer victimization may not prevent subsequent peer victimization. Additionally, associations between coping and peer victimization often differ between boys and girls. The present study included 242 participants (51% girls; 34% Black, 65% White; Mage = 15.75 years). Adolescents reported on coping with peer stress at age 16 and on overt and relational peer victimization at ages 16 and 17...

Relationships with pet dogs are thought to provide substantial benefits for children, but the study of these relationships has been hindered by a lack of validated measures. Approaches to assessing the quality of children's pet dog relationships have tended to focus on positive relationship qualities and to rely on self-report questionnaires. The aim of this study was to develop and test multiple measures that could be used to assess both positive and negative features of children's relationships with pet dogs...

Many prosocial behaviors involve social risks such as speaking out against a popular opinion, bias, group norm, or authority. However, little is known about whether adolescents' prosocial tendencies develop over time with their perceptions of social risks. This accelerated longitudinal study used within-subject growth-curve analyses to test the link between prosocial tendencies and social risk perceptions, in a sample of adolescents who completed self-reports annually for three years (N = 893; M age = 12.30 years, 10 - 14 years at Wave 1, and 10 - 17 years across the full study period; 50% Girls, 33% White non-Latinx, 27% Latinx, 20% African American, 20% Mixed/Other Race)...

Aspects of parenting including overprotection explain individual differences in child adjustment. This review and meta-analysis summarizes studies on parental overprotection and internalizing and externalizing problems. To ensure that findings could be compared as systematically as possible, the focus was on studies that used the overprotection scale of the Egna Minnen Beträffande Uppfostran ("Memories of my Parents' Upbringing") (EMBU) questionnaire, a popular instrument to measure parental overprotection...

To better understand the development of externalizing behavior, the current study examines how multiple levels of influence (child temperament, negative parenting, and dyadic interactions) work together to increase externalizing behaviors over time. Negative parenting (NP) and observed dynamic dyadic behavioral variability (DBV) in parent-child interactions (e.g., in discipline and compliance) are characteristic of coercive family processes. The present study first examined latent profiles of temperament in 3-year-olds ( N = 150)...

Face masks are an effective and important tool to prevent the spread of COVID-19, including among children. However, occluding parts of the face can impact emotion recognition, which is fundamental to effective social interactions. Social distancing, stress, and changes to routines because of the pandemic have also altered the social landscape of children, with implications for social development. To better understand how social input and context impact emotion recognition, the current study investigated emotion recognition in children (7-12 years old, N = 131) using images of both masked and unmasked emotional faces...

Studies of gender development typically use binary, discrete measures of identity. However, growing literature indicates that some children might not identify with a binary gender. We tested a continuous measure of felt gender identity with gender-nonconforming children, socially-transitioned transgender children, cisgender siblings, and unrelated cisgender children. In two studies, we found that transgender and cisgender children did not differ in their degree of identifying as their current gender, that they showed more binary identities compared to gender-nonconforming children, and that the continuum was a valid predictor of other measures of gender development...

Although many emerging adults struggle to gain status and develop social relationships, particularly during the college transition, it remains unclear whether certain personality traits facilitate this transition. Using a longitudinal design, we investigated whether status-related traits-namely, entitlement, intrasexual competitiveness, and dominance-related to the development of status in 91 first-year college students ( M age =18.15, SD =0.44) transitioning to a novel college environment. We also examined whether personality traits moderated the degree to which status related to loneliness...

The aim of this study was to test a longitudinal, transactional model that describes how social withdrawal and friendship development are interrelated in late adolescence, and to investigate if post-secondary transitions are catalysts of change for highly withdrawn adolescents' friendships. Unilateral friendship data of 1,019 adolescents (61.3% female, 91% Dutch-origin) from the Tracking Adolescents' Individual Lives Survey (TRAILS) cohort were collected five times from ages 17 to 18 years. Social withdrawal was assessed at 16 and 19 years...

Exuberance, a profile of temperament characterized in toddlerhood by high approach motivation, positive affect, and sociability, is associated with both adaptive and maladaptive socioemotional outcomes. The aims of the current study were to introduce a novel approach/avoidance-eliciting social task, as well as longitudinally extend our understanding of toddlerhood exuberance to outcomes in middle childhood. Specifically, affect and social behavior at age seven during a high-intensity game were compared to that observed during a low-intensity freeplay task...