The minimal group effect, in which people prefer ingroup members to outgroup members even when group membership is trivially constructed, has been studied extensively in psychological science. Despite a large body of literature on this phenomenon, concerns persist regarding previous developmental research populations that are small and lack racial/ethnic diversity. In addition, it remains unclear what role holding membership within and interacting with specific racial/ethnic groups plays in the development of children's group attitudes.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSupportive peers are crucial for transgender children's well-being. Transgender children who live in their affirmed gender face decisions surrounding concealment and disclosure of their transgender identity. We sought to understand how cisgender (N = 115) and gender-diverse children (N = 127), and siblings of gender-diverse children (N = 63) think about transition disclosure and concealment.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWithin "mainstream" developmental science, gender researchers largely study the developmental trajectory of children considered to be "gender-typical", while research housed primarily in psychiatry and clinical psychology often documents the trajectories of gender diverse children. This article aims to bridge the studies of gender diversity and "mainstream" gender development. First, we review literature on the development of four commonly studied subgroups of gender diverse children - children referred to medical clinics because of their gender identity and expression, transgender children, female children with congenital adrenal hyperplasia, and tomboys - highlighting how these gender trajectories do or do not align with modal developmental patterns.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPeople who are in close relationships tend to do and like the same things, a phenomenon termed the "homophily principle." The present research probed for evidence of the homophily principle in 4- to 6-year-old children. Across two experiments, participants ( = 327; 166 girls, 161 boys; located in the Midwestern United States) were asked to predict the closeness of two people based on their preferences.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFRetransitions in youth are critical to understand, as they are an experience about which little is known and about which families and clinicians worry. This study aims to qualitatively describe the experiences of youth who made binary social transitions (came to live as the binary gender different from the one assigned at birth) in childhood by the age of 12, and who later socially transitioned genders again (here, called "retransitioning"). Out of 317 participants in an ongoing longitudinal study of (initially) binary transgender youth, 23 participants had retransitioned at least once and were therefore eligible for this study.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThese studies investigate the influence of adults' explicit attention to commonalities of appearance on children's preference for individuals resembling themselves. Three findings emerged: (1) An adult's identification of two dolls' respective similarity to and difference from the child led 3-year-olds to prefer the similar doll (study 1, n = 32). (2) When the adult did not comment on similarity, children age 6 years but not younger preferred physically similar individuals (study 2, n = 68), suggesting that a spontaneous preference for physically similar others does not emerge before school age.
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