Empathic accuracy (EA), the ability to correctly perceive another's emotional state, is crucial for emotional communication in parent-adolescent relationships. A total of 112 dyads (adolescent Mage = 14.13; 54.5% girls) participated in a 28-day daily diary study conducted between July 2022 and May 2023. We used the multilevel Actor-Partner Interdependence Model to assess how baseline and daily perceived closeness-reported by both parents and adolescents-predicted parent and adolescent EA in daily life. Results showed that greater perceived closeness predicted lower EA for both the perceiver and their partner, particularly for negative emotions. This is consistent with the motivated inaccuracy perspective: closeness may dampen attention to negative emotions to avoid relational discomfort. Conversely, on days when closeness was low, dyads exhibited greater EA, suggesting compensatory efforts to reconnect.

U.S.-born children of Latino immigrants often begin life with health advantages, yet the developmental conditions that -sustain or erode these advantages remain unclear. Drawing on socioecological and sociocultural perspectives, this study examined whether peer victimization and school belonging in middle childhood predicted changes in epigenetic aging from childhood to adolescence. These associations were compared between children of immigrant and U.S.-born Latina mothers. Future of Families and Child Wellbeing Study data were collected in 2007-2010 and 2014-2017 (N = 341; mean age 9.5 years; 50.7% female). Peer victimization and school belonging were self-reported at age 9, and epigenetic age was estimated at ages 9 and 15 using the Pediatric-Buccal-Epigenetic clock. Among children of immigrant mothers, greater victimization predicted faster aging (β = .57, p = .002), whereas stronger school belonging predicted slower aging (β = -.28, p = .034). Victimization predicted faster epigenetic aging only when school belonging was moderate or high, suggesting that social threat may carry greater biological consequences when children are emotionally invested in school. These patterns were not observed among children of U.S.-born Latina mothers. Experiences of inclusion and exclusion may become biologically embedded, shaping whether early health advantages are maintained or eroded over time.

This study followed infants at elevated and average likelihood for autism or ADHD (n = 163) from 6-36 months, classifying them into 36-month outcome groups: Autism (n = 28), ADHD Concerns (n = 20), or Comparison (n = 115). The sample was predominantly male, White, and non-Hispanic. Between 2013 and 2019, caregiver-child dyads played up to five times, with gaze, positive affect, and vocalizations coded from video. Developmental trajectories of dyadic synchrony (the degree of state matching and turn-taking relative to chance) were estimated via mixed-effects models. From 6 to 36 months, overall synchrony was lower in the Autism vs. Comparison group. Within behavior modalities, there were unique patterns of actor responsiveness, with mixed evidence for outcome group differences. Future research should explore links between synchrony, developmental milestones, services, and longer-term outcomes.

Using latent profile transition analysis, this study identified patterns and developmental changes in adolescents' coping across high school prior to COVID-19 and examined whether pre-pandemic coping differentiated depressive symptom trajectories across the pandemic years as youth transitioned into emerging adulthood. Participants were a diverse cohort (N = 940; 51% female; 34% White, 26% Latinx, 15% Multi-racial and multi-ethnic) assessed annually in Grades 9-12 on 5 coping indicators (internalizing, externalizing, social support seeking, problem solving, and avoidance). Distinct coping profiles reflected relatively approach-oriented coping (Balanced; Regulated Approach) and more avoidant or reactive coping (Reactive Approach; Self-Directed). A low-engagement, self-directed profile emerged in Grade 9 and, by Grade 10, differentiated into Balanced or Self-Directed patterns. Profile transitions were most evident early in high school and became stabilized thereafter. With this later stability, Grade 12 coping patterns differentiated depressive symptom trajectories across the COVID-19 pandemic (2021-2023). Specifically, Balanced and Regulated Approach (i.e., approach-oriented) profiles had fewer depressive symptoms, whereas Reactive Approach and Self-Directed (i.e., avoidant, reactive) profiles had more depressive symptoms. Findings highlight both continuity and early reorganization in coping across adolescence and show that coping -pathways foreshadowed depressive symptom trajectories during the pandemic as youth transitioned into emerging adulthood.

COVID-19 disrupted early reading development, especially for under-resourced students. Few studies have evaluated early reading skill recovery after the return to in-person instruction. This study tracked reading achievement among 236,701 kindergarten through second-grade students from the academic year 2019-2020 to 2023-2024 (48.7% female; 69.8% Latine). Children had lower reading performance and less growth during remote instruction (2020-2021) compared with the pre-COVID cohort. Reading scores improved once in-person learning resumed. Kindergarten students who experienced remote instruction during COVID-19 demonstrated reading achievement recovery by the second grade. We also assessed if increased school-level (N = 467) support services were related to reading skill growth. Results demonstrated that early reading skill recovery is possible after mass disruptions.

This study leverages a randomized clinical trial to test whether intervention-related changes in cognitive and socioemotional parenting behaviors during mother-child reminiscing support children's self-regulation (emotion regulation [ER] and executive function [EF]) in middle childhood among families with and without maltreatment exposure. At baseline (T1), 248 children (36-86 months; 50.4% male; 39.7% Black, 25.9% White, 34.5% Latinx/other) and their mothers were enrolled. Half of maltreated families were randomized to Reminiscing and Emotion Training (RET) to enhance maternal reminiscing. Dyads were assessed postintervention and longitudinally 5 years later. RET had a significant indirect effect on child ER at the 5-year follow-up through postintervention maternal elaboration (β = 0.10, SE = 0.04, p = .008). Findings highlight the importance of maternal reminiscing for child self-regulation.

The COVID-19 pandemic and the 2020 racial awakening posed challenges to adolescents' academic functioning. Culturally relevant school supports are one potential source of resilience in the dual pandemic. This study examined whether heterogeneous culturally relevant school support profiles buffered declining grade point average (GPA) trajectories from 2019 to 2021 among sixth- and ninth-grade students in the U.S. Southwest (N = 717; Mage = 13.7; 49.9% girls; 31.8% Hispanic/Latinx, 31.5% Multiethnic, 25.7% White, 11.1% Black/African American, Asian American, American Indian, or AMENA). Ninth-grade students experiencing high general, moderate cultural, & critical support or low general, devoid cultural, & critical support had significantly better GPA trajectories than those experiencing moderate general & cultural, devoid critical support. Among sixth-grade students, no differences emerged. Discussion of these complex patterns focuses on implications for academic resilience after the dual pandemic.

Through statistical learning (SL), children implicitly extract repeated patterns in their environment. The developmental trajectory of how previously learned statistical information impacts children's subsequent learning is poorly understood. Furthermore, how SL contributes to other developmental processes, like executive function, has received surprisingly little attention. In an accelerated longitudinal design, we assessed 187 5- to 12-year-olds' (42.8% = female, 84.6% = White) SL and executive function capacities over 16 months. Cue-based SL and retention of nonadjacent probabilistic sequences were age-invariant. However, while all age groups showed an increased sensitivity to deterministic sequences with each successive time point, 5- to 6-year-olds demonstrated a greater longitudinal increase in sensitivity than older children. This finding suggests enhanced abilities to apply previously learned deterministic sequences to novel scenarios. Regarding SL-executive function links, two latent change score models provided limited evidence for SL-executive function coupling across the time points. While further work is needed to explore SL-executive function links across other modalities and in younger populations, our results suggest that early visual SL capacities may not be a primary driver of executive function change during middle childhood.

This study investigated the development of young children's normative stances and moral self-concept (MSC) over 1 year and their relations with sharing behavior. Five hundred children in Germany (approximately 5 years at T1, mostly White, 51% girls) were assessed at 3 measurement points. Latent profile and transition analyses identified 7 distinct profiles of normative stances-MSC: (1) low-moderate, (2) moderate-exceptionally low, (3) high-moderate, (4) moderate-low, (5) moderate-high, (6) moderate-moderate, and (7) moderate-exceptionally high. Only the low-moderate profile was found across all 3 measurement points. MSC increased over time, while normative stances remained stable or declined. Children who transitioned from high-moderate (T1) to moderate-low (T2) to moderate-moderate (T3) shared more at T3 than those who remained at low-moderate levels. Gender and socioeconomic differences were found, highlighting the role of individual and family characteristics on moral development. Overall, no consistent pattern was found between profiles and sharing behavior, emphasizing the complex nature of moral development and prosocial behavior in early childhood.

This multi-method, multi-informant, quasi-experimental study examines trajectories of child psychopathology over an 8-year period pre-and post-COVID-19 pandemic. We examined parenting as a moderator of the COVID-19 impact. Participants were 310 low-to-middle-income families from the United States with a target child followed over 6 waves (Wave 1, Mage = 2.97, SD = 0.38; 55.3% girls; 55.2% White, 21.3% African American, 16.2% mixed race; Wave 6: Mage = 9.32, SD = 0.76). Findings indicated that children exhibit significant linear growth and COVID-related growth above and beyond the linear growth in internalizing problems. Pre-COVID parenting moderated this effect, such that low paternal structure and consistency and low parental secure-base provision strengthened the association between COVID impact and the growth of internalizing problems, yielding greater increases under high impact and lower increases under low impact.

Emotion inference is not purely reactive but is supported by conceptual priors that contribute to active sampling of meaningful cues as social events unfold, yet how children learn to anticipate when and where such cues will emerge remains unclear. This study examined whether conceptual emotion knowledge serves as a prior supporting developmental increase in anticipatory attention, and whether such attention facilitates more adult-like emotion inferences. Children aged 5-11 years (N = 180, Mage = 8.02 years, 84 female; data collected 2024-2025) from China viewed videos while eye movements were simultaneously recorded and continuously rated the target character's emotion on a valence-arousal grid. Anticipatory attention was indexed by the extent to which children's saccades were directed toward regions about to contain meaningful information. Conceptual emotion knowledge was assessed with a composite that combined emotion granularity, diversity, and performance on a standardized emotion understanding test. Multilevel, moderated mediation models revealed that conceptual emotion knowledge mediated age-related increases in anticipatory saccades toward meaningful regions, which in turn predicted more adult-like emotion judgments. Together, these findings suggest that conceptual knowledge acts as a developmental mechanism bridging children's prior experience and growing attentional strategies, enabling more mature emotion understanding in social environments.

The development of audiovisual speech perception in tone-language-speaking children remains debated, and this study addressed this issue by examining Cantonese-speaking children, extending prior work on Mandarin speakers to a tone language with greater phonological complexity. Using the McGurk paradigm, 82 typically developing Cantonese-speaking children (42 girls, 40 boys; aged 4-11 years) and 21 adults (11 females, 10 males) from Hong Kong completed audiovisual speech perception tasks in quiet, moderate background noise (10 dB speech-to-noise ratio, SNR), and severe background noise (-10 dB SNR). Results showed developmental shifts in sensory dominance among Cantonese-speaking children around age 10: from relying mainly on auditory cues to integrating auditory and visual cues in quiet and 10 dB conditions, and from audiovisual-integrated to visual-dominant processing in the -10 dB condition. This developmental pattern aligns with the predictions of the Statistically Optimal Hypothesis. These findings also indicate that Cantonese-speaking children undergo this shift later than Mandarin-speaking peers, highlighting the adaptive nature of this developmental process.

This cluster randomized controlled trial evaluated a brief parenting program for recently settled immigrants in Sweden, focusing on improving parent-child relationships, parental efficacy in supporting schooling, resilience, optimism, societal belonging, and mental health. The four sessions, delivered in Arabic, Dari, and Somali, involved 92 parents in the intervention (13 clusters) and 40 in the control group (7 clusters, Mage = 42, 80% mothers). Participants were recruited between May 2023 and February 2025. Compared to the control group, intervention participants showed significant improvements in resilience (β = .17, p = .026) and efficacy in supporting their child's schooling (β = .42, p = .005). Those with greater initial challenges benefited more from the program. These findings underscore the program's potential to promote resilience and efficacy among recently settled immigrant families.

The study examined the transmission of Confucian-influenced gender role beliefs from Chinese American fathers to their adolescent sons, through fathers' parenting hostility and the cultural construct of shaming. Participants included fathers, mothers, and adolescents from Wave 2 (adolescent Mage = 17.04 years; 58% female and 42% male; collected in 2006) and Wave 3 (collected in 2010) of a study of 444 Chinese American families from the West Coast of the United States. Fathers' gender role beliefs indirectly predicted increases in male adolescents' beliefs from adolescence to emerging adulthood, through fathers' reports of hostility (b = .042, 95% CI = [0.001, 0.097]) and adolescents' reports of shaming (b = .038, 95% CI = [0.002, 0.090]). Gender socialization occurs through general parenting practices, and cultural measures are integral for understanding Chinese American male adolescents' gender development.

Learning to predict when events occur often requires inferring links between experiences. While children use knowledge of routines to retrospectively estimate event times, little is known about how structured temporal knowledge forms initially and develops. Here, a representative community sample (aged 7-25 years; n = 104; 53% female; 57% White; Austin, TX, USA) completed a memory task in which they could infer event times from temporal cues that varied across learning repetitions by linking and updating information across experiences. We found that while adults precisely located events in time through inference, younger participants' temporal estimates were biased toward average times, particularly when temporal cues were more variable. These findings suggest that developmental improvements in linking and updating information across multiple experiences underlie age-related gains in how children represent time.