Frontiers in Developmental Psychology | New and Recent Articles

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…

Over the past decade, artificial intelligence (AI) has undergone a tremendous shift from a highly technical instrument to a household learning, problem-solving, and decision-making cognitive aid. In the context of development, children, adolescents, and adults become increasingly exposed to AI systems that guide or provide feedback and information in real-time. Nevertheless, developmental psychol…

The COVID-19 pandemic represented a dire time of global crisis with pandemic-related social restrictions drastically impacting the daily lives of youth. Prior research found that during collective times of crisis, adolescents and young adults engage in prosocial behavior to overcome the suffering together. However, as the COVID-19 pandemic lasted for over 3 years, it remains unclear how youth ada…

The rapid evolution of emerging technologies has intensified calls for a renewed set of future-ready competencies that extend beyond academic knowledge to include technical capabilities, efficacy, and sociomoral strengths. These integrated competencies empower youth to navigate complex social environments, pursue meaningful career pathways, and develop as confident, ethical and responsible citize…

IntroductionThe higher education years represent a critical period for social and emotional development, often marked by elevated stress and challenges to self-regulation that impact students' wellbeing and interpersonal functioning. These demands are particularly relevant for future childhood educators, whose professional effectiveness depends partly on their ability to model and support childre…

A key milestone in early self-development is mirror self-recognition: recognizing that the image in the mirror refers to oneself. Cross-cultural research has raised questions about both the developmental timing of this milestone and the validity of the mirror-mark test across diverse cultural contexts. Here, we document a developmental trajectory of mirror self-recognition in a rural horticultura…

IntroductionSeveral studies, in the context of the debate on early implicit theory of mind, have investigated whether infants and toddlers are able to attribute false beliefs concerning the identity of an object. As a result, there is a lack of consensus regarding whether young children are able to understand others' belief about an object's identity when it can be represented in different ways. …

IntroductionIndividuals employ two types of strategies to navigate conflicting identities and reduce dissonance, particularly in contexts where one identity is devalued. They may selectively distance themselves from a subset of traits associated with one group (e.g., gender) which are stereotypically devalued in a particular domain (e.g., science), or they may distance themselves from the devalue…

This study examined 5- to 6-year-old children's categorizations of and behaviors toward peers from different social classes. Participants were 193 children (Mage = 5.45 years, SD = 0.27; 102 boys, 91 girls) recruited from a diverse U.S. metropolitan area. Children completed a matching task using material cues (houses, cars, backpacks) and one-shot, third-party allocation and punishment tasks. Chi…

Executive function (EF) is often considered a domain-general ability or set of component processes related to conscious control best assessed in decontextualized controlled settings. However, recent calls have advocated for more consideration of the role that context may play in EF's conceptualization and assessment. Reconciling these two approaches presents a challenge. This paper explores the p…

ObjectivesTo examine associations between children's and parents' screen time, children's face-to-face talk with adults, and children's language skills.Design, setting, and participantsCross-sectional study based on mother-reported survey data collected from September 2023 to December 2024 in Estonia. Participants were 458 children aged 30–48 months; analyses included 448 children (mean [SD] age,…

Understanding others' prosocial intentions and evaluating them accordingly is a crucial skill for navigating the social world. The current study examined whether 6.5-month-old infants use prosocial intentions in social evaluation. Infants were familiarized with helping and hindering events: in the helping event, a protagonist attempted to climb a hill and a helper pushed him upward, whereas in th…

IntroductionSeveral studies have examined the relationship between gender, age, teaching experience and teachers' self-efficacy. However, the present study is, to the authors' knowledge, the first to investigate how gender, age and teaching experience relate to the self-efficacy of first-year pre-service teachers upon entry into teacher education programmes.MethodsA total of 108 students from Nor…

The Pattern Alphabet (pABC) organizes 32 icons into four categories that illustrate natural growth and movement (Growth), Geometry, Symmetry, and shapes that enable the creation of new shapes (Building Blocks). We presented 4- to 5-year-olds with a pABC matching task, as well as tasks that measured their spatial and mathematical skills. Results from this exploratory research found that children s…

IntroductionActive contribution to civil society is a key aspect of a fulfilling life, yet our understanding of what drives adolescents to contribute meaningfully to their communities remains incomplete. While the original 5C and expanded 7C models of Positive Youth Development (PYD) highlight contribution as a key indicator of thriving, they may not fully capture the motivational factors that dr…

White adults perceive Black men as stronger, taller, heavier, and more capable of harm than White men of the same size. The current study aimed to investigate the development of this race-based size bias. Children (6–11 years), adolescents (12–17 years), and adults (18+-year-old college students) judged the strength, height, and weight of Black and White characters who participated in negative in…

Exclusionary discipline (ExD)—including out-of-school suspensions and expulsions—remains widely used in U.S. public schools despite evidence of its ineffectiveness and disproportionate application. Although prior research has linked ExD to a range of adverse student outcomes, far less is known about whether schools' consistent use of ExD over time predicts chronic student absenteeism (CSA), a maj…

Research in cognitive development has generally been aligned with the explication and understanding of basic mechanisms underlying change in mental development over time. We suggest here that work done in the measurement and assessment of granular cognitive functions be leveraged toward translational or applied work in order to realize enhanced impact and influence. Specifically, we propose the u…