Longitudinal association between callous-unemotional traits and friendship quality among adjudicated adolescents.

Introduction: Youth with callous-unemotional (CU) traits show severe and chronic forms of antisocial behavior, as well as deficits in socioaffiliative processes, such as empathy, guilt, and prosocial behavior. Adolescence represents a critical developmental window when these socioaffiliative processes can help to deepen the strength of supportive peer friendships. However, few studies have explored the relationship between CU traits and friendship quality during adolescence.

Emotion versus cognition: differential pathways to theory of mind for children with high versus low callous-unemotional traits.

Background: Theory of mind (ToM) serves as a foundation for developing social cognition. Developmental theory suggests that early emotion understanding supports the development of ToM, but few studies have tested this question within longitudinal designs. Additionally, children with callous-unemotional (CU) traits directly challenge this theory as they appear to develop intact ToM despite deficits in emotion understanding.

Explicit scaffolding increases simple helping in younger infants.

Infants become increasingly helpful during the second year. We investigated experimentally whether adults' explicit scaffolding influences this development. Infants (N = 69, 13-18 months old) participated in a series of simple helping tasks.

Helping the One You Hurt: Toddlers' Rudimentary Guilt, Shame, and Prosocial Behavior After Harming Another.

This study explored the role of guilt and shame in early prosocial behavior by extending previous findings that guilt- and shame-like responses can be distinguished in toddlers and, for the first time, examining their associations with helping. Toddlers (n = 32; M  = 28.9 months) were led to believe they broke an adult's toy, after which they exhibited either a guilt-like response that included frequently confessing their behavior and trying to repair the toy; or a shame-like response that included frequently avoiding the adult and seldom confessing or attempting to repair the toy.

Individual differences in toddlers' social understanding and prosocial behavior: disposition or socialization?

We examined how individual differences in social understanding contribute to variability in early-appearing prosocial behavior. Moreover, potential sources of variability in social understanding were explored and examined as additional possible predictors of prosocial behavior. Using a multi-method approach with both observed and parent-report measures, 325 children aged 18-30 months were administered measures of social understanding (e.