Frontiers in Developmental Psychology | New and Recent Articles

Studying the developmental origins of sociomoral cognition is challenging because preverbal infants have limited means to express their thoughts through verbal communication or overt action. Developmental research has therefore relied heavily on infants' looking behavior, often treating gaze as an indicator of expectation or attention. While these approaches have yielded substantial insights into…

Infants learn through relationships before they learn through instruction, and their capacity to explore, communicate, and form meaning emerges in environments that feel safe, responsive, and emotionally coherent. While developmental trajectories are shaped by multiple relational, social and structural factors, when families are supported to strengthen attachment and reduce stress, the conditions…

IntroductionDespite the common occurrence of online victimization (OV) and suicide risk factors among Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and other queer identifying (LGBTQ+) youth, their underlying experiences with OV are understudied. We aimed to evaluate the role of social communication challenges among LGBTQ+ youth experiencing OV. We focused on youth with history of suicidal ideation and/or…

Cultural and sociopolitical events shape the developmental contexts within which children form understandings of identity, justice, and belonging. Parents and primary caregivers are often intermediaries between the child and macrosystem events. Guided by relational developmental systems and positive youth development frameworks, this study examines predictors of caregiver-child conversations abou…

IntroductionThis study investigated the longitudinal effects of (problematic) social media use on physical activity levels among adolescents and the extent to which gender moderated this relationship.MethodsA total of 387 adolescents (Mage = 13.8 years; 54.5% female) participated in two annual measurements, using online self-report questionnaires.ResultsResults show a significant negative effect …

IntroductionThough a wealth of research has found that young infants have the capacity to evaluate helping and hindering agents, it is nevertheless unclear whether these evaluations reflect mere social evaluations or more mature understanding of moral concepts. The present experiments probed the nature of infants' evaluations by testing whether they associate the morally-relevant words “good” and…

Around the world, governments are banning youth from social media. Proponents of bans claim that banning or restricting social media access is necessary to curb the youth mental health crisis and support youth wellbeing. Our review of experimental evidence from social media restriction studies shows that, to date, youth participants who would be subject to these bans have been excluded from resea…

IntroductionInfants with an older sibling with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) (EL-AutSib) and infants with tuberous sclerosis complex (EL-TSC), a genetic neurodevelopmental syndrome highly associated with ASD, exhibit motor and other developmental differences in the first year of life. Despite the prevalence of gross motor impairments in these populations and the need for early clinical monitorin…

The early emergence of socio-moral preferences in infancy has generated intense debate within developmental psychology. A central question concerns whether infants' selective responses to prosocial and antisocial agents reflect an innate moral core or can be more parsimoniously explained by domain-general perceptual mechanisms. Although a growing body of evidence indicates that young infants eval…

IntroductionYoung social media users in the United States (US) have recently experienced real and proposed regulatory and access changes on common platforms. Through a convergent mixed-methods design, teens from a major US city provided their perspectives on social media, recent regulatory shifts, and what they believe digital health researchers should consider when designing, implementing, and e…

IntroductionScreen use among young children is high, although evidence of learning from screens is mixed. Engagement (including effort and persistence), measured by observable behaviors or holistic ratings, can predict learning in live contexts. Do measures of engagement predict children's word learning in an on-screen context?MethodsChildren (M age = 38 months, n = 36) were presented four novel …

To examine the impact of an empathy training on the development of empathy and social-emotional wellbeing of Chinese emerging adults, the current study applied a mixed-methods design using short-term longitudinal data. Two hundred and forty five STEM male college students (M = 18.22, SD = 0.82) were randomly assigned to a control group and treatment group. The treatment group completed a 21-day e…

IntroductionExtensive research on positive youth development (PYD) has emphasized strengths-based assets that support youths' capacity to thrive, often operationalized through the 5Cs—competence, confidence, character, caring, and connection. Grounded in its commitment to promoting thriving among all youth, including those experiencing complex adversity, PYD underscores the importance of centerin…

Executive functions (EF) are higher-order cognitive functions, including inhibitory control, working memory, and cognitive flexibility. In 2019, Fiske and Holmboe published a review on the neural substrates of early EF development which mapped what was then known in this field. Much research has been conducted since then, partially spurred by the wider availability of infant-friendly neuroimaging…

The majority view seems to be that children have an “innate moral core,” with a wide range of tasks used to defend this argument. We examine exemplars of each task for whether they really require moral understanding, including tasks tapping children's empathy, their theory of mind, the moral-conventional distinction, helpers vs. hinderers, fairness, aggression and hierarchies. We focus on both re…

Young people are growing up amid interacting crises, including climate disruption, war, economic insecurity, democratic strain, and rapid technological change. This condition, often described as polycrisis, may weaken future orientation, agency, and confidence in the link between effort and outcome. This Hypothesis and Theory paper argues that rising youth distress should be understood as a devel…

We investigated whether 18-month-old children were capable of updating third-person representations about object location based on verbal information. Whether verbal information was applicable to the update was determined by the pragmatic context. For this, we used a location change paradigm that required mapping a novel label to one of two unfamiliar objects, only possible if young children trac…

BackgroundDeficits in preschoolers' social competence—encompassing emotional understanding, peer cooperation, and conflict resolution—pose significant risks for later school adjustment and interpersonal relationships. Parental intelligence is a core cognitive parenting capacity, but the mechanisms linking it to child social outcomes remain underexplored. Most prior research has focused on materna…