Infants engage in a range of prosocial behaviors from a young age. Caregiver scaffolding, through encouragement and requests, plays a key role in shaping these early tendencies. However, how scaffolding practices vary with socialization goals across cultural contexts, and whether their effects on infant behavior are culturally specific, remains unanswered. In this study, we took a longitudinal, cross-cultural approach to examine variation in maternal socialization goals, scaffolding strategies, and infant helping at 16 and 22 months across three distinct sociocultural settings. A total of 273 infants participated in rural Uganda (n = 49; 24 females, 25 males), urban Uganda (n = 162; 76 females, 86 males), and in the United Kingdom (n = 62, 29 females, 33 males). We assessed maternal socialization goals via questionnaires, scaffolding strategies during a requested helping task, and infant prosocial behavior through both requested and spontaneous helping tasks. Scaffolding was more assertive in the Ugandan samples compared with those in the United Kingdom, where scaffolding was more deliberate. Maternal assertiveness positively predicted both spontaneous and requested helping at the individual level. However, at the group level, spontaneous helping rates were higher in Uganda than in the United Kingdom, whereas requested helping was higher in the United Kingdom than Uganda. These findings reveal important cross-cultural variation in how caregivers shape infant helping and point to a nuanced interplay between culturally specific caregiving practices and emerging prosocial behavior. Our study underscores the importance of examining both universal and context-specific pathways in the development of prosociality. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Internal working models (IWMs) are considered key mechanisms linking early parent-child relationships with children's sociocognitive outcomes, yet little research has integrated the roles of the parent and child IWMs in social information processing. We proposed a cascade from parental IWMs of the infant, defined as mind-mindedness (MM), to children's IWMs of parents in toddlerhood to children's memory for relational events at preschool age. In 200 mothers, fathers, and children in the U.S. Midwest (96 girls), parents' appropriate MM (aligned with infant mental state) was coded during interactions at 16 months. At 3 years, children's IWMs were assessed in narratives elicited by story stems. At 4.5 years, we assessed children's memory for key, relationship-themed details and extraneous details for stories depicting a responsive versus unresponsive caregiver. Children remembered responsive stories better than unresponsive ones, consistent with extant evidence that they generally expect caregivers to be responsive. In an innovative extension, we highlight a longitudinal path to individual differences. Parents' appropriate MM at 16 months predicted children's more positive IWMs of parents at 3 years, which predicted better recall for key details of stories depicting a responsive caregiver at 4.5 years, in both mother- and father-child dyads. We bridge research on parent-child relationships and social information processing by identifying parental MM as one critical early relational factor that shapes children's representational and memory systems and by providing novel evidence that children's IWMs function as cognitive filters, selectively enhancing memory for details congruent with their mental representations formed early in development. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Gender-nonconforming (GNC) youth challenge the cultural assumption of the gender binary and are at risk for social rejection and negative appraisals from their peers. Parent-child conversations are a critical socialization context in which gender-related attitudes are formed. How do parents discuss gender nonconformity with their children, and what tactics do they use to support or challenge children's attitudes toward their GNC peers? To address this question, we employed a thematic analysis of conversations between a relatively homogenous sample of 30 dyads of parents (83% mothers; predominantly upper middle class and moderately liberal) and children (87% White, 18 girls, child Mage = 7.2 years, SD = 9.4 months) living in a progressive city in the United States. We asked dyads to discuss vignettes of GNC exemplars engaged in a variety of activities. Our analysis revealed four themes of conversational content and strategies used during the task, each of which represented varying levels of knowledge and experience with gender nonconformity. These themes included the following: conversations centered around the gender binary, including use of gender stereotypes and negative reactions to the exemplars; emphasizing the individual psychological motivations of exemplars and expressing gender-egalitarian attitudes; scaffolding children's perspective-taking through personalized examples and rhetorical questions; and acknowledging the reality of gender norms in the social world and deeply discussing the meaning of gender identity. Together these findings provide important insight into parents' role in socializing children's understanding of gender nonconformity and suggest pathways for facilitating inclusive attitudes toward GNC youth. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

It has been established that whereas young children who use their fingers to solve arithmetic problems outperform those who do not, this trend reverses in older children around the age of 7. One possible interpretation is that finger counting is helpful for solving simple problems but becomes inadequate as problem complexity increases, leaving finger users reliant on strategies that are no longer efficient. Another possibility is that nonfinger users after the age of 7 are, in fact, ex-finger users who have already transitioned to efficient mental strategies. These contrasting interpretations carry significant theoretical and educational implications. In the first case, finger counting may be viewed as an ultimately limiting tool, potentially trapping children in immature strategies, and, in the second, as a powerful tool that has not only immediate benefit but also long-term positive effect on children's arithmetic development. To disentangle these interpretations, 192 children from middle to high socioeconomic status (mainly White, 96 girls) were followed from the age of 4.5 to 7.5 across seven testing points. While virtually all children were observed using their fingers at some point during the study, most nonfinger users by age of 6.5 were in fact ex-finger users. Importantly, they presented higher arithmetic performance than finger users and genuine nonfinger users of the same age. These original findings provide the first empirical evidence that finger counting acts as a developmental scaffold toward efficient mental arithmetic, rather than as a mere useful but limiting strategy eventually hindering development. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Helping others may serve as a resiliency-promoting factor for adolescents during challenging times, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. The present study examined short- and long-term within-person associations between providing emotional support and mood (i.e., vigor) among adolescents. We used data from an eight-wave longitudinal study with 6 months in-between timepoints (May 2020 and December 2023) among 2,430 adolescents aged 12-25. We performed random intercept cross-lagged panel models to examine daily and half-yearly lagged associations between emotional support and vigor and tested how sense of contribution and purpose, and age moderated these associations. Results revealed bidirectional lagged effects. Higher levels in emotional support to family were followed by subsequent higher vigor levels a day later, while higher vigor was followed by higher levels of emotional support to friends a day later. However, at the half-year level, higher vigor was associated with lower levels of emotional support to friends. Moderation analyses revealed that for adolescents who have a higher sense of contribution and purpose, providing emotional support to friends is more strongly associated with vigor increases, whereas providing emotional support to family is less strongly associated with such increases. Preliminary evidence also suggested that emotional support to friends was more strongly associated with vigor for older adolescents, whereas support to family showed stronger associations with vigor for younger adolescents. Our study highlights the potential of prosocial behavior to buffer against the negative effects of societal challenges for today's youth through feelings of purpose. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Individual differences in early language input are rampant but hard to quantify without resource-intensive naturalistic recordings, posing a challenge for testing links between individual experience and facets of language development like vocabulary growth. We tested whether a quick parent survey on infants' exposure to common nouns could reliably predict nouns' frequency in home recordings (testing its validity) and children's own vocabulary (testing input-learning links). In Study 1 (n = 44; 95% White, 5% mixed-race), we gathered monthly home recordings and exposure surveys every 2 months from 8 to 18 months. Parent-reported exposure to each noun (16/time point, 5-point scale) was compared to the noun's relative frequency in infants' home recordings and to comprehension and production of each noun via parent vocabulary survey (Communicative Development Inventory). Reported exposure significantly predicted noun frequency in home recordings. It also predicted both reported noun comprehension and production, even after accounting for age. Results from an age- and gender-matched cross-sectional sample (Study 2, n = 264, 78% White, 11% mixed-race, 11% other) with the same vocabulary and exposure surveys were consistent, supporting generalizability. These findings suggest a brief word exposure survey can reliably estimate individualized word input and knowledge, at least for highly common nouns. This method complements naturalistic recordings and corpus-based norms by capturing individual variation and enabling more scalable research across linguistic and sociocultural contexts. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

The purpose of this study was twofold, first, to examine potential changes in young children's media use starting a year prior to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and 2 years following onset (between 2½ and 4½ years of child age). Second, to examine links between children's screen time and their emerging regulatory functioning as indexed by respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA). Participants (N = 269, 48% female at Wave 3) were drawn from Waves 3 to 5 of Project Media Effects on Development from Infancy to Adulthood, a longitudinal study on the impact of early media use on children's development. Parents reported children's time using media across different medium (e.g., television, tablets, book reading, smartphones). At Waves 3 and 5, children's baseline RSA was recorded in their homes. Results revealed an increase in nearly all forms of media during the first year of COVID-19 pandemic (W4) and decreases during year 2 (W5) with some but not all forms of media returning to W3 levels. A growth mixture model found two distinct classes of participants primarily across measures of socioeconomic status (SES). Higher levels of screen time pre-COVID-19 pandemic were linked to lower RSA 2 years later, regardless of SES. Protective factors were observed for children from lower SES families, including if they had higher income relative to other class members. Findings are framed in the context of displacement and polyvagal theory, suggesting that higher levels of media consumption early in life may displace opportunities that support children's emerging regulatory systems. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Adults hold a broad range of beliefs about intellectual ability. Key examples include beliefs about its malleability, its distribution in the population, whether high levels of it ("brilliance") are necessary for success, its origins, and its responsiveness to intervention. Here, we examined the structure and motivational significance of this network of consequential beliefs in a sample of elementary school-age children (5- to 11-year-olds, N = 231; 116 girls, 112 boys, three gender nonbinary children; predominantly White and Asian children from relatively high-income backgrounds). We assessed five beliefs: (a) growth mindsets (malleability), (b) universal mindsets (distribution), (c) brilliance beliefs (necessity for success), and beliefs about ability's (d) innateness and (e) responsiveness to intervention. Even among the youngest children, these beliefs were empirically distinguishable and also largely coherent, in that they related to each other in expected ways. Moreover, the five beliefs assessed here were differentially related to children's learning (vs. performance) goals, preference for challenging tasks, and evaluative concern (i.e., concern that mistakes will lead others to evaluate the self negatively). Even when adjusting for age, children with growth mindsets were oriented toward learning goals and preferred challenging tasks; children who believed ability has innate origins preferred performance goals; and younger (but not older) children who thought success required brilliance expressed more concern over being evaluated. These findings speak to the multifaceted nature of children's concepts of ability and highlight their significance for children's achievement-related attitudes and behavior in the early school years. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Despite the recent upsurge of interest in scientific reasoning in early childhood, limited research has addressed early scientific argumentation abilities and their development. The present longitudinal study investigated the development of young children's ability to refute a false claim utilizing unconfounded disconfirming evidence. Children were tested when they were 4.0 (N = 191, 85 girls, 106 boys) and 5.5 years old (N = 179, 82 girls, 97 boys). At both time points, children learned the true cause of a light effect and were presented with a false claim about its cause. We assessed children's verbal counterarguments and the generation of physical disconfirming evidence. At 4 years, approximately half of the children demonstrated the ability to provide valid verbal causal counterarguments, which increased to 70% at 5.5 years. Remarkably, at 4 years, 90% of the children selected causally efficacious unconfounded evidence over an ambiguous alternative. Furthermore, developmental progress was observed from 4 to 5.5 years in flexibly utilizing different types of disconfirming evidence. These findings indicate that as early as 4 years old, children exhibit a genuine understanding of falsification through evidence, distinguishing confounded from unconfounded evidence when confronted with a claim they know to be false. The associations with cognitive abilities suggest that development in argumentation from 4 to 5.5 years primarily revolves around the capacity to utilize diverse evidence, related to children's ability to represent multiple higher order rules and perspectives. The potential educational implications for fostering young children's scientific reasoning and argumentation abilities are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).