Change over time in interactions between unfamiliar toddlers.

The frequency and length of games, conflicts, and contingency sequences that took place between toddlers as they got to know one another were studied using archival data. The sample consisted of 28 unfamiliar 20- and 30-month-old toddlers (predominantly White, 16 males) who met separately with each of two other toddlers for 18 play dates. The frequency of games increased over time, while the frequency of conflict and contingency sequences decreased.

Positive and negative actions early in the relationship predict later interactions among toddlers.

Very little is known about the role of early interactions in the development of peer relationships among toddlers. The present study examined whether behaviors early in the formation of toddler relationships predict interactions later in their relationships. Twenty-eight unfamiliar 20- and 30-month-old toddlers from a predominately European background met separately with each of two other toddlers for 18 playdates.

Gender minoritized students and academic engagement in Brazilian adolescents: Risk and protective factors.

Gender minoritized students experience unique challenges in their school environments that may have consequences for their educational outcomes, including academic engagement. The goal of the current study was to understand the association between gender identity and academic engagement among adolescents attending public high schools in Paraná, Brazil (N = 10,828). In particular, student perceptions of student-teacher relationships, school rule fairness and clarity, school-wide academic engagement, and peer victimization were examined as four facilitator/barrier factors that may account for lower levels of academic engagement for gender minoritized students as compared to their cisgender peers, and these processes were tested for differences across race/ethnicity.

The Juxtaposition of Revenge and Forgiveness in Peer Conflict Experiences of Youth Exposed to Violence.

In a sample of 95 urban Colombian mid-adolescents, this mixed-method study examined how youths' retaliatory desires and actions were juxtaposed with forgiveness and nonforgiveness in their narrative accounts of peer conflict. Quantitative analyses examined how retaliatory desire and action were associated with variations in youths' lifetime exposure to violence (ETV) and recent victimization by peers at school. These measures of violence exposure were related to revenge only in the context of unforgiven harms.

Self-Continuity Moderates the Association Between Sexual-Minority Status Based Discrimination and Depressive Symptoms.

Self-continuity, or how an individual understands their sense of self as persisting from past to present and present to future, is an important aspect of the self-concept that is linked to mental health outcomes. This self-concept construct may be particularly pertinent for sexual minority populations, as living in a heterosexist environment may prove detrimental for the development of self-continuity. The current study examined self-continuity among sexual minority and heterosexual community college and university students (N = 292).

Differentiating typical from atypical perpetration of sibling-directed aggression during the preschool years.

Background: Sibling aggression is common and often viewed as benign. Although sibling aggression can be harmful for the victims, it may also be a marker of clinical risk for the aggressor. We differentiated typical from atypical levels of perpetration of sibling-directed aggression among preschoolers, a developmental period in which aggression is a normative misbehavior, by (a) identifying how frequently aggressive behaviors targeted at a sibling must occur to be psychometrically atypical; (b) mapping the dimensional spectrum of sibling-directed aggression from typical, more commonly occurring behaviors to rarer, more atypical, actions; and (c) comparing the psychometric atypicality and typical-to-atypical spectrum of sibling-directed aggression and peer-directed aggression.

Family Perspectives on Siblings' Conflict Goals in Middle Childhood: Links to Hierarchical and Affective Features of Sibling Relationships.

This study examined parents' and children's descriptions of older and younger siblings' conflict goals in the late preschool and middle childhood years, and how these attributions were related to sibling relationship quality. Parents and 4- to 10-year-old children from 62 families were interviewed separately about siblings' motivations in two disputes and completed assessments of sibling relationship quality. Goal attributions varied across respondents in ways reflecting their family roles and positioning within disputes.

Sibling relationships as sources of risk and resilience in the development and maintenance of internalizing and externalizing problems during childhood and adolescence.

Sibling relationships are a unique and powerful context for children's development, characterized by strong positive features, such as warmth and intimacy, as well as negative qualities like intense, potentially destructive conflict. For these reasons, sibling interactions may be both a risk and a protective factor for the development and maintenance of emotional and behavioral dysfunction. We review evidence indicating that sibling interactions are linked to internalizing and externalizing symptoms and identify possible mechanisms for these associations.

Children's and Adolescents' Accounts of Helping and Hurting Others: Lessons About the Development of Moral Agency.

This study examined children's and adolescents' narrative accounts of everyday experiences when they harmed and helped a friend. The sample included 100 participants divided into three age groups (7-, 11-, and 16-year-olds). Help narratives focused on the helping acts themselves and reasons for helping, whereas harm narratives included more references to consequences of acts and psychological conflicts.

The construction of moral agency in mother-child conversations about helping and hurting across childhood and adolescence.

This study examined mother-child conversations about children's and adolescents' past harmful and helpful actions. The sample included 100 mothers and their 7-, 11-, or 16-year-old children; each dyad discussed events when the child (a) helped a friend and (b) hurt a friend. Analyses suggested that conversations about help may serve to facilitate children's sense of themselves as prosocial moral agents; mothers focused on children's feelings of pride, positive judgments of the child's behavior, and positive insights about the child's characteristics that could be drawn from the event.

Emotion and the moral lives of adolescents: vagaries and complexities in the emotional experience of doing harm.

Far from being unthinking energies or irrational impulses that control or push people around, emotions are intricately connected to the way people perceive, understand, and think about the world. As such, emotions are also an inextricable part of people's moral lives. As people go about making moral judgments and decisions, they do not merely apply abstract principles in a detached manner.

Power and conflict resolution in sibling, parent-child, and spousal negotiations.

This study used a within-family observational design to examine conflict strategies (planning, opposition) and resolutions (standoff, win-loss, compromise) across family subsystems, with an emphasis on power differences between parents and children during relatively symmetrical within-generation (spousal, sibling) and relatively asymmetrical between-generation (parent-child) dyadic interactions. Up to six dyads in 67 families (children's ages ranging from 3 to 12 years) discussed an unresolved conflict. Results revealed that within-generation discussions ended more in standoff, whereas between-generation discussions ended with more win-loss resolutions.

Children's understanding and production of verbal irony in family conversations.

This study examined how children use and understand various forms of irony (sarcasm, hyperbole, understatement, and rhetorical questions) in the context of naturalistic positive and negative family conversations in the home. Instances of ironic language in conversations between mothers, fathers, and their two children (M(ages) = 6.33and4.

Associations between social understanding, sibling relationship quality, and siblings' conflict strategies and outcomes.

Sibling relationship quality and social understanding (second-order false belief, conflict interpretation, and narrative conflict perspective references) were examined as unique and interactive correlates of sibling conflict behavior in 62 dyads (older M age = 8.39 years and younger M age = 6.06 years).

Sibling relationship quality moderates the associations between parental interventions and siblings' independent conflict strategies and outcomes.

This study extends research on sibling conflict strategies and outcomes by examining unique and interactive associations with age, relative birth order, sibling relationship quality, and caregivers' interventions into conflict. Each of 62 sibling dyads (older sibling mean age = 8.39 years; younger sibling mean age = 6.