Frontiers in Developmental Psychology | New and Recent Articles

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…

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,…