developmental-psychology

A parent can help kids feel they matter by paying close attention to their feelings in the first three years of life and providing consistent help with soothing and regulation.

Adolescents who display ADHD-like difficulties but remain undiagnosed occupy a diagnostic borderland in which medical, social, and institutional expectations collide. In the Swedish context, where rates of diagnosed ADHD have risen sharply, this constitutes an understudied and increasingly marginalized group. Drawing on Mead’s concepts of the I and the Me, the study explores how ten Swedish adole…

IntroductionSensory processing abnormalities represent a high-impact clinical feature in individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Sensory alterations can be classified by modality and behavioral responses to stimuli. The literature presents conflicting results regarding the association between the sensory profile and other clinical elements. Therefore, this study aimed to characterize the…

Pretend play is often seen as just for fun, but new research links early imaginative skills to better long-term mental health. The findings suggest that encouraging creative play in toddlers reduces behavioral difficulties years later.

BackgroundClose friend support is a key emotional and coping resource during adolescence, yet less is known about the psychological variables that may statistically account for its association with students' perceived school climate.MethodsWe conducted a cross-sectional survey among 1,380 Chinese high school students aged 15–18 years from five senior high schools in Shihezi, Xinjiang, China. Perc…

Psychological readiness plays a critical role in how secondary school students prepare for high-stakes national examinations. This study examined the relationships among study habits, examination anxiety, academic motivation, and perceived readiness among secondary school students in Somaliland. A cross-sectional predictive correlational design was employed with a sample of 539 Form 4 students. D…

BackgroundAdolescent mental disorders affect 14% of youth globally, yet treatment rates remain low (38%), particularly in low-resource settings. While stigma is a recognized barrier to care, limited evidence exists on how multi-level stigma (public, peer, family) transforms into self-stigmatization during adolescence—a critical developmental period characterized by heightened peer sensitivity.Met…

In the context of the digital era, screen media has become deeply embedded in family life, reshaping traditional parent-child interactions and altering the developmental ecology of early childhood. To examine how these dynamics unfold over time, we conducted a longitudinal study involving 532 Chinese children aged 3 to 6 years, assessed across three waves spaced 4 months apart. Analyses revealed …

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…

Making children laugh can build deep emotional connections and soothe their nervous systems, making them more resilient and open to new ideas, a leading child development expert tells us.

A longitudinal study of aging adults reveals that severe childhood adversity substantially raises the risk of developing simultaneous physical and mental illnesses in later life. Early-onset depression often acts as a bridge to these overlapping health struggles.

Adolescence has always been hard. But today's teenagers are carrying something heavier than previous generations faced at the same age. They're navigating academic pressure that starts earlier and hits harder. They're growing up inside social media ecosystems designed to trigger comparison, anxiety, and self-doubt. They're processing a world that feels increasingly uncertain — economically, envir…

My study is investigating the link between babies hearing multiple accents in their environment and recognising words in accents they haven't heard before. We are looking specifically for children who primarily hear English and are not bilingual. The Plymouth Babylab is specialised in the study of early language development and over the past two decades, we have developed a range of tools to allo…

Nature Human Behaviour, Published online: 21 May 2026; doi:10.1038/s41562-026-02483-8 We investigated memory for real-world navigational episodes across delays of up to three decades. Our data reveal that real-world spatial memory is continuously reshaped over the years through a shifting combination of episode-dependent spatial representations and episode-independent schematic knowledge that fol…

Nature Human Behaviour, Published online: 20 May 2026; doi:10.1038/s41562-026-02437-0 Twenty-five years after the prenatal sex steroid theory of autism was first proposed, the authors of the original theory discuss the current state of evidence and new lines of research.

Do parents abused as children become child abusers? Many interacting factors increase risk for intergenerational maltreatment.

Trust is everywhere and shapes our daily interactions, yet there are surprisingly few developmental studies. In our 11‑year study of Swiss youth, we examined how generalized trust develops from adolescence to adulthood and how family relationships and peer victimization influence it.

ObjectiveThis study aimed to explore how parents of children with hearing loss understand, emotionally process, and engage with auditory rehabilitation, with particular attention to differences between parents of children with age-appropriate versus delayed language development.MethodsA qualitative design was employed using focus group interviews with parents of children with hearing loss. Partic…

Cognitive development has long been understood through the lens of constructivism, a perspective in developmental psychology advanced by figures like Jean Piaget and Jerome Bruner. Constructivism holds that learners actively build their own mental models of the world by interacting with their environment, revising their understanding through processes of assimilation and accommodation. This view …

New Curtin University-led research has found siblings of people with neurodevelopmental conditions in regional and remote Australia are struggling with poorer wellbeing and are more likely to feel overlooked.