research articles on developmental psychology

• Developmental Psychology
• Steady as she goes! Daily fluctuations in cognitive ability are associated with risk of Alzheimer’s disease from Neuropsychology March 22, 2024
• Risks and protective factors for young immigrant language brokers who experience discrimination from Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority March 1, 2024
• Bringing effective posttraumatic stress disorder treatment to those in need: Prolonged exposure for primary care from Psychological Services February 22, 2024
• Is seeing doing? How observing action outcomes may trigger behavior. from Motivational Science February 13, 2024
• The multicultural play therapy room: Intentional decisions on toys and materials from International Journal of Play Therapy February 6, 2024
• Social support and identity help explain how gendered racism harms Black women’s mental health from Cultural Diversity & Ethnic Minority Psychology May 10, 2022
• Special issue: Notes on a pandemic from Psychoanalytic Psychology June 7, 2021
• Moving away from using ethnicity as a proxy for cultural values from Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology December 16, 2020
• New ways of measuring “The Talk”: Considering racial socialization quality and quantity from Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology December 10, 2020
• Can sandplay therapy change the brain as it reduces anxiety? A case study using neuroimaging from International Journal of Play Therapy November 19, 2020
• The current state of pediatric integrated primary care: Emerging evidence in support of clinical best practices from Clinical Practice in Pediatric Psychology November 5, 2020
• Does better memory help to maintain physical health? from Psychology and Aging October 22, 2020
• Clinical approaches to address health disparities in pediatric psychology from Clinical Practice in Pediatric Psychology September 15, 2020
• Discrimination affects both physical health and relationships in Black families from A study in the Journal of Family Psychology August 17, 2020
• Can strongly identifying with both ethnic and national cultures protect immigrants from hostile social contexts? from Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology May 27, 2020
• Skills Versus Pills: Can Integrated Behavioral Health Services Benefit Depressed Patients in Primary Care? from Families, Systems, & Health February 28, 2020
• Perceived Underemployment Among African American Parents: What Are the Implications for Couples’ Relationships? from Cultural Diversity & Ethnic Minority Psychology February 6, 2020
• Was Everything Better in the Good Old Days? from Psychology and Aging December 13, 2019
• Does Cultural Revitalization Impact Academic Attainment and Healthy Living? from Cultural Diversity & Ethnic Minority Psychology November 27, 2019
• Racial / Ethnic Differences in Caregivers' Perceptions of the Need for and Utilization of Adolescent Psychological Counseling and Support Services from Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology August 27, 2019
• New Directions in the Study of Human Emotional Development from Developmental Psychology August 23, 2019
• Updating Maps for a Changing Territory: Redefining Youth Marginalization from American Psychologist October 12, 2018
• Age-Related Differences in Associative Memory: Empirical Evidence and Theoretical Perspectives from Psychology and Aging March 21, 2018
• Learning, Interrupted: Cell Phone Calls Sidetrack Toddlers' Word Learning from Developmental Psychology November 21, 2017
• Getting a Good Night's Sleep Has Special Implications for Youth With Chronic Conditions: A New Behavioral Treatment for Insomnia from Clinical Practice in Pediatric Psychology October 5, 2016
• Special Issue on the Role of Time and Time Perspective in Age-Related Processes from Psychology and Aging September 20, 2016
• Nurturing Conditions in Institutions Improve Children's Development After Being Placed Into Families from International Perspectives in Psychology September 15, 2016
• Do Juvenile Murderers Deserve Life Without Parole? from Psychology, Public Policy, and Law August 23, 2016
• Are Violent Video Games Associated With More Civic Behaviors Among Youth? from Psychology of Popular Media Culture August 9, 2016
• Beyond Early Adversity: A Multidimensional Approach Linking Early Experiences to Successful Aging from Psychology and Aging December 16, 2015
• Older (Compared With Younger) Adults More Frequently Engage in Future-Oriented Thoughts from Psychology and Aging November 12, 2015
• Old Age is Getting Younger: Today's 75-Year-Olds Are Cognitively Fitter and Happier Than the 75-Year-Olds of 20 Years Ago from Psychology and Aging October 1, 2015
• Heaven, Help Us from Journal of Family Psychology October 22, 2014
• Does Children's Biological Functioning Predict Parenting Behavior? from Developmental Psychology September 10, 2014
• We're in This Together from Journal of Family Psychology August 12, 2014
• Experiences at Every Stage of Life Influence Mental Function in Advanced Age from Neuropsychology July 8, 2014

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Volume 5, 2023

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Navigating an Unforeseen Pathway

This article describes a career path from a non-traditional STEM field to an impactful career in developmental science. It acknowledges the unique experiences of an African American woman growing up in a northeastern urban center at the end of World War II, during which the experiences of Blacks were still heavily impacted by policies and practices representing highly significant racial inequities requiring individual, family, and collective coping. My human development theory, phenomenological variant of ecological systems theory (PVEST), provides a framing device for describing both high vulnerability situations and resilience expressions linked to particular contextual experiences including significant challenges and, as well, unexpected sources of support. Experiences had within my family of origin, civil rights activities, and diverse learning environments afforded supports, inferred mortal attacks, and unexpected opportunities. Ongoing are challenges and stress inferred to be associated with my committed positionality that acknowledges all children's humanity and particularly the persistent situations of youth and communities of color.

Prenatal Substance Exposure

This is an evaluative review of the field of prenatal substance exposure, with a focus on neurobiological and behavioral outcomes from infancy to young adulthood. We provide an overall evaluation of the state of the field and comment on current conceptual and methodological issues in need of attention. Although there are many studies of prenatal substance exposure, developmental frameworks that incorporate and reflect the lived experiences of children and families have seldom been employed in this field. In addition, although there are some common effects (e.g., on fetal growth) between major substances, there are also unique effects. Thus, we discuss the role of specific substances but note that polysubstance exposure is common, and models and methods used to date may not be sufficient to advance understanding of coexposure or polyexposure effects. We discuss these conceptual and methodological weaknesses and provide suggestions for future directions.

Neurodevelopment of Attention, Learning, and Memory Systems in Infancy

Understanding how we come to make sense of our environments requires understanding both how we take in new information and how we flexibly process and store that information in memory for subsequent retrieval. In other words, infant cognitive development research is best served by studies that probe infant attention as well as infant learning and memory development. In this article, we first review what is known about infant attention and what is known about a selection of learning systems available in infancy. Then, we review what is known about the interactions between attention and these systems, focusing on infancy when possible but highlighting relevant child and adult literatures when infant research is yet scarce. Finally, we close by proposing a path forward, which we believe will result in a clearer understanding of the interactions between attention and memory that govern infant learning.

The Representation of Third-Party Helping Interactions in Infancy

Despite numerous findings on the sophisticated inferences that human infants draw from observing third-party helping interactions, currently there is no theoretical account of how infants come to understand such events in the first place. After reviewing the available evidence in infants, we describe an account of how human adults understand helping actions. According to this mature concept, helping is a second-order, goal-directed action aiming to increase the utility of another agent (the Helpee) via reducing the cost, or increasing the reward, of the Helpee's own goal-directed action. We then identify the cognitive prerequisites for conceiving helping in this way and ask whether these are available to infants in the interpretation of helping interactions. In contrast to the mature concept, we offer two simpler alternatives that may underlie the early understanding of helping actions: ( a ) helping as enabling, which requires second-order goal attribution but no utility calculus, and ( b ) helping as joint action, which requires efficiency (i.e., utility) evaluation without demanding second-order goal attribution. We evaluate the evidence supporting these accounts, derive unique predictions from them, and describe what developmental pathway toward the mature concept they envisage. We conclude the article by outlining further open questions that the developmental literature on the interpretation of helping interactions has not yet addressed.

A Developmental Social Neuroscience Perspective on Infant Autism Interventions

Research on early biomarkers and behavioral precursors of autism has led to interventions initiated during the infant period that could potentially change the course of infant brain and behavioral development in autism. This article integrates neuroscience and clinical perspectives to explore how knowledge of infant brain and behavioral development can inform the design of infant autism interventions. Focusing on infants ≤12 months, we review studies on behavioral precursors of autism and their neural correlates and clinical trials evaluating the efficacy of infant autism interventions. We then consider how contemporary developmental social neuroscience theories of autism can shed light on the therapeutic strategies used in infant autism interventions and offer a new perspective that emphasizes improving child outcome and well-being by enhancing infant–environment fit. Finally, we offer recommendations for future research that incorporates brain-based measures to inform individualized approaches to intervention and discuss ethical issues raised by infant autism interventions. Readers are referred to Supplemental Table 1 for a glossary of terms used in this article.

Intervening Early: Socioemotional Interventions Targeting the Parent–Infant Relationship

Responsive, nurturing parenting helps infants and young children develop secure, organized attachments as well as adequate self-regulatory capabilities. However, when parents experience challenges, they often have difficulty providing responsive, nurturing care. In this article, we provide an overview of interventions that have been developed to enhance parental responsiveness, and we discuss in detail three interventions that have particularly strong evidence of effectiveness. For each intervention, we describe the intervention's purported mechanism and the evidence supporting its engagement as well as proximal and distal intervention outcomes. The three interventions described vary in duration from 6 to 32 sessions on average and are variously implemented in the home or office. Nonetheless, all three interventions have strong evidence of effectiveness in engaging the intervention mechanism of parental responsiveness and show impressive effects on children's attachment and self-regulatory capabilities. We also discuss challenges in disseminating interventions in the community.

Growing Up, Learning Race: An Integration of Research on Cognitive Mechanisms and Socialization in Context

In the United States, race is a critical factor in determining how children experience and navigate their social worlds. Developmental scientists have examined the complexities and nuances of how children develop an understanding of what race means for them and others as well as their attitudes toward people of other racial groups. We provide an overview of the literature on two approaches to understanding children's racial learning—sociocognitive approaches, which focus on various aspects of children's understanding of, beliefs about, and attitudes toward race and racial groups, and socialization perspectives, which examine the messages that socialization agents transmit to children about race. Throughout, we highlight the ways in which the persistence of structural and interpersonal racism in the United States forms the background context for children's racial learning.

Social Identities and Intersectionality: A Conversation About the What and the How of Development

Research on the development of social identities in early and middle childhood has largely focused on gender; increasingly, however, theory and research have addressed the development of ethnic/racial, social class, sexual, and immigrant identities. Moreover, it is assumed that individuals’ thinking about and articulating of the intersectionality between their social identities emerge in adolescence and young adulthood, but a growing body of work has shown that minoritized children conceptualize their intersectional identities by middle childhood. This article reviews that work and addresses how interdisciplinary scholarship and quantitative and qualitative methodologies can deepen our understanding of the development of social identities and intersectionality. We take a contextual approach to investigate how relational and cultural contexts contour the socialization of social and intersectional identities. Most of our review focuses on theory and research in the United States; however, because we aim to consider immigrant identity, we also include theory and research on how immigrant families and communities help minoritized children and youth navigate their identities in schools and communities and cope with discrimination.

Children's Acquisition and Application of Norms

All human societies are permeated by collectively shared entities that govern daily social interactions and promote coordination and cooperation: norms. While the study of norm development is not new to developmental psychology, it has only recently been the target of an interdisciplinary wave of research using new methodologies and (often) complementary theoretical accounts to describe and explain the origins and potentially species-unique aspects of human norm psychology. Here we review recent developmental research showing that young children swiftly acquire and infer norms in a variety of social contexts. Moreover, children actively enforce these norms, even as unaffected bystanders, when third parties do things the wrong way. This research suggests that the foundations of human norm psychology can be found in early childhood. Deeper insights into the ontogenetic roots of norm psychology may contribute to understanding the evolutionary emergence of human cooperation and its maintenance in the contemporary world.

A Rational Account of Cognitive Control Development in Childhood

Cognitive control is defined as a set of processes required for the organization of goal-directed thoughts and actions. It is linked to success throughout life including health, wealth, and social capital. How to support the development of cognitive control is therefore an intensively discussed topic. Progress in understanding how this critical life skill can be optimally scaffolded in long-lasting ways has been disappointing. I argue that this effort has been hampered by the predominant perspective that cognitive control is a competence or ability, the development of which is driven by predetermined maturational sequences. I propose that this traditional view needs to be overhauled in light of a growing body of evidence suggesting that cognitive control allocation is a both highly dynamic and rational process subject to cost–benefit analyses from early in development. I discuss the ramifications of shifting our perspective on cognitive control mechanisms in relation to how we design interventions. I close by spelling out new avenues for scientific inquiry.

Two-Hit Model of Behavioral Inhibition and Anxiety

Four decades of research have examined the antecedents and consequences of behavioral inhibition (BI), a temperament profile associated with heightened reactivity to sensory stimuli in infancy, reticence toward social cues in childhood, and the later emergence of social anxiety in adolescence. This review proposes that a two-hit model can supplement prior work to better understand these developmental pathways. Specifically, time limited experiences (“hits”) centered in infancy and adolescence stress idiosyncratic BI-linked processes that uniquely trigger the developmental pathway from temperament to disorder. To illustrate, we focus on caregiver distress in infancy (including fetal development), social reorientation in adolescence, and their impact on malleable attentional and cognitive systems. These are developmental challenges and processes that go to the heart of the BI phenotype. Finally, we note open questions in this conceptual model, potential caveats, and needed future research.

Developmental Neuroimaging of Cognitive Flexibility: Update and Future Directions

Cognitive flexibility, or the ability to mentally switch between tasks according to changing environmental demands, supports optimal life outcomes, making it an important executive function to study across development. Here we review the literature examining the development of cognitive flexibility, with an emphasis on studies using task-based functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The neuroimaging literature suggests that key brain regions important for cognitive flexibility include the inferior frontal junction and regions within the midcingulo-insular network, including the insular and dorsal anterior cingulate cortices. We further discuss challenges surrounding studying cognitive flexibility during neurodevelopment, including inconsistent terminology, the diversity of fMRI task paradigms, difficulties with isolating cognitive flexibility from other executive functions, and accounting for developmental changes in cognitive strategy. Future directions include assessing how developmental changes in brain network dynamics enable cognitive flexibility and examining potential modulators of cognitive flexibility including physical activity and bilingualism.

A Neuroecosocial Perspective on Adolescent Development

Adolescence is a period of life that encompasses biological maturation and profound change in social roles. It is also a period associated with the onset of mental health problems. The field of developmental cognitive neuroscience has advanced our understanding of the development of the brain within its immediate social and cultural context. In a time of rising rates of mental health problems among adolescents across the globe, it is important to understand how the wider societal, structural, and cultural contexts of young people are impacting their biological and social-cognitive maturation. In this article, we review the landscape of youth mental health and brain development during adolescence and consider the potential role of brain research in understanding the effects of current social determinants of adolescent mental health, including socioeconomic inequality, city living, and eco-anxiety about the climate crisis.

Poverty, Brain Development, and Mental Health: Progress, Challenges, and Paths Forward

Poverty is associated with changes in brain development and elevates the risk for psychopathology in childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. Although the field is rapidly expanding, there are methodological challenges that raise questions about the validity of current findings. These challenges include the interrelated issues of reliability, effect size, interindividual heterogeneity, and replicability. To address these issues, we propose a multipronged approach that spans short-, medium-, and long-term solutions, including changes to data pipelines along with more comprehensive data acquisition of environment, brain, and mental health. Additional suggestions are to use open science approaches, more robust statistical analyses, and replication testing. Furthermore, we propose increased integration between advanced analytical approaches using large samples and neuroscience models in intervention research to enhance the interpretability of findings. Collectively, these approaches will expand the application of neuroimaging findings and provide a foundation for eventual policy changes designed to improve conditions for children in poverty.

The Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (SECCYD): Studying Development from Infancy to Adulthood

The National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (SECCYD) is a comprehensive study of human development that has followed participants from birth ( N = 1,364) to age 26 ( N = 814). Observations, diagnostic procedures, standardized tests, and questionnaires were used to measure five developmental contexts (early care and education, home, school, out of school, and neighborhoods) and three developmental domains (social–emotional, cognitive–academic, and physical–biological). Measures were repeated over time so that stability, change, and growth trajectories of both contexts and developmental domains could be studied. The goals of this review are threefold: ( a ) to acquaint readers with the depth and breadth of measures available in this public data set, ( b ) to provide an overview of longitudinal findings that extend the SECCYD to the end of high school and age 26, and ( c ) to highlight promising areas for future research.

Bridging the Divide: Tackling Tensions Between Life-Course Epidemiology and Causal Inference

Life-course epidemiologists have developed sophisticated models for how exposures throughout life—from gestation to old age—shape health, sometimes years after the exposure occurred. The field, however, has been slow to adopt robust causal inference methods, including quasi-experimental designs. This reflects, at least in part, a tension between ( a ) study designs that maximize our ability to make causal claims and ( b ) exposure operationalizations that correspond with life-course theories. In this narrative review, we attempt to mitigate that tension. We first discuss the unique challenges for causal inference in life-course epidemiology. We then outline how quasi-experimental methods have already contributed to testing life-course theories, as well as the limitations of the quasi-experimental methods therein. We close with solutions that bridge the gap between modern developments in causal inference and life-course epidemiology, including redefined estimands to maximize public health impact; marginal structural and structural nested models; longitudinal instrumental variables approaches; leveraging new data linkages, such as with detailed residential histories; and triangulation across methods, including adopting a pluralistic approach to causal inference.

The Functioning of Offspring of Depressed Parents: Current Status, Unresolved Issues, and Future Directions

Although the intergenerational transmission of risk for depression is well documented, the mechanisms and moderators involved in this transmission of risk from depressed parents to their offspring are not clear. In this review, we discuss the progress that has been made over the past two decades in studying offspring of depressed parents and describe the maladaptive characteristics of these offspring in a diverse range of domains, including clinical, cognitive, and biological functioning. Despite recent advances in this area, there are unresolved questions that warrant further investigation involving the nature of risk transmission from parent to offspring, the specificity of findings to depression, and the role of factors that often accompany depression. We discuss these issues and offer directions for future research that we believe will move the field forward in gaining a better understanding of the relation between parental depression and altered psychobiological functioning in their offspring.

Emotion Regulation in Couples Across Adulthood

Intimate relationships are hotbeds of emotion. This article presents key findings and current directions in research on couples’ emotion regulation across adulthood as a critical context in which older adults not only maintain functioning but may also outshine younger adults. First, I introduce key concepts, defining qualities (i.e., dynamic, coregulatory, bidirectional, bivalent), and measures (i.e., self-report versus performance-based) of couples’ emotion regulation. Second, I highlight a socioemotional turn in our understanding of adult development with the advent of socioemotional selectivity theory. Third, I offer a life-span developmental perspective on emotion regulation in couples (i.e., across infancy, adolescence and young adulthood, midlife, and late life). Finally, I present the idea that emotion regulation may shift from “me to us” across adulthood and discuss how emotion regulation in couples may become more important, better, and increasingly consequential (e.g., for relationship outcomes, well-being, and health) with age. Ideas for future research are then discussed.

Volume 5 (2023)

Volume 4 (2022), volume 3 (2021), volume 2 (2020), volume 1 (2019), volume 0 (1932).