What Parents and Children Say When Talking about Children's Gratitude: A Thematic Analysis.

Parent-child conversations are a widely recognized socializing mechanism, linked to children's developing moral agency, empathy, and emotional competence. Similarly, parent-child conversations about gratitude have been linked to growth in children's gratitude. However, the messages that parents and children exchange in conversations about children's gratitude have yet to be investigated in depth.

COVID-19 Life Events Spill-Over on Family Functioning and Adolescent Adjustment.

We examined US parent and youth perceptions of how life events, both positive and negative, associated with COVID-19 resulted in changes in family and youth functioning. Families ( = 105, 80% white, 48% male, and 87% mothers) completed surveys during the pandemic (May to July 2020) and 3 years prior (for youth ages . Declines in youth, though not parent, report of open family communication, parental support, and family satisfaction were found.

Parasympathetic response to challenge in infancy moderates the effects of sociodemographic risk on academic achievement at school entry.

Exposure to higher levels of sociodemographic risk is associated with lower levels of academic achievement among young children. However, there is variability in the strength of this association, which may be traced to individual differences in physiological processes underlying self-regulation. In the current study, we examined whether the response of the parasympathetic nervous system to challenge, indexed by change in respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA), moderated the association between risk and school readiness at 5 years of age in a diverse sample of young children.

Parents' responses to children's ingratitude are associated with children's gratitude and internalizing 3 years later.

The current study is the first to examine how parents respond to children's ingratitude and how such responses impact children's later gratitude and internalizing symptoms. We focused on parental responses in families with children aged 6-9 years when gratitude may be actively forming as part of socioemotional learning and other-oriented behavior. Parent-child dyads (n = 101; 52% female; 81% European American, 9% Asian/Asian American, 5% African American, 4% Latino) completed lab-based assessments at baseline and 3 years later.

Coping and Mental Health in Early Adolescence during COVID-19.

The current longitudinal study examines changes in overall mental health symptomatology from before to after the COVID-19 outbreak in youth from the southeastern United States as well as the potential mitigating effects of self-efficacy, optimism, and coping. A sample of 105 parent-child dyads participated in the study (49% boys; 81% European American, 1% Alaska Native/American Indian, 9% Asian/Asian American; 4% Black/African American; 4% Latinx; and 4% other; 87% mothers; 25% high school graduate without college education; 30% degree from 4-year college; 45% graduate or professional school). Parents completed surveys when children were aged 6-9, 8-12, 9-13, and 12-16, with the last assessments occurring between May 13, 2020 and July 1, 2020 during the COVID-19 outbreak.

Examining Maternal Elaborative Reminiscing as a Protective Factor in the Intergenerational Transmission of Psychopathology.

Most research examining the impact of early parental depression on the developing child has focused on the nature of parenting practices observed in depressed adults. Maternal elaborative reminiscing, or the extent to which mothers elaboratively discuss past shared experiences with their children, has a considerable influence on children's emotional and social development and is understudied within the context of maternal depression. The current study is the first to examine whether maternal elaborative reminiscing in middle childhood mediates the association between exposure to maternal depressive symptoms in infancy and later internalizing and externalizing problems.

Observed Peer Competence Moderates Links between Children's Self-Regulation Skills and Academic Performance.

The current study focuses on the relations between observed measures of children's self-regulation and academic achievement, as well as the extent to which observations of children's peer competence in preschool moderates these links. Data were drawn from 102 students (male = 48; = 4.82 years, = 0.

Gratitude Conversations: An Experimental Trial of an Online Parenting Tool.

Gratitude is associated with a host of positive outcomes; yet, little is understood about the ways in which parents may foster gratitude in their children. The current study allows for the examination of one possible mechanism, namely parent-child conversations, that may be used to encourage gratitude in children. Using a rigorous experimental design, we tested whether an online program that was designed to enrich parents' skills in having conversations about gratitude with their children was effective in changing parents' socialization behaviors and children's gratitude.

Raising Grateful Children One Day at a Time.

The current study examined micro-developmental processes related to the socialization of children's gratitude. Specifically, we tested whether parents who engage in more frequent daily socialization practices targeting children's gratitude reported more frequent displays of gratitude by their children after controlling for potential confounds (i.e.

Pore Engineering for Enhanced Mass Transport in Encapsulin Nanocompartments.

Encapsulins are robust and engineerable proteins that form hollow, nanosized, icosahedral capsids, making them attractive vehicles for drug delivery, scaffolds for synthetic bionanoreactors, and artificial organelles. A major limitation of native encapsulins is the small size of pores in the protein shell. At 3 Å diameter, these pores impose significant restrictions on the molecular weight and diffusion rate of potential substrates.

The Socialization of Children's Memory: Linking Maternal Conversational Style to the Development of Children's Autobiographical and Deliberate Memory Skills.

Data from a large-scale, longitudinal research study with an ethnically and socioeconomically diverse sample were utilized to explore linkages between maternal elaborative conversational style and the development of children's autobiographical and deliberate memory. Assessments were made when the children were 3, 5, and 6 years of age, and the results reveal concurrent and longitudinal linkages between maternal conversational style in a mother-child reminiscing task and children's autobiographical memory performance. Maternal conversational style while reminiscing was also significantly related to children's strategic behaviors and recall in two deliberate memory tasks, both concurrently and longitudinally.

Grateful parents raising grateful children: Niche selection and the socialization of child gratitude.

Given that children's exposure to gratitude-related activities may be one way that parents can socialize gratitude in their children, we examined whether parents' niche selection (i.e., tendency to choose perceived gratitude-inducing activities for their children) mediates the association between parents' reports of their own and their children's gratitude.

Automated respiratory sinus arrhythmia measurement: Demonstration using executive function assessment.

Respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) is a quantitative metric that reflects autonomic nervous system regulation and provides a physiological marker of attentional engagement that supports cognitive and affective regulatory processes. RSA can be added to executive function (EF) assessments with minimal participant burden because of the commercial availability of lightweight, wearable electrocardiogram (ECG) sensors. However, the inclusion of RSA data in large data collection efforts has been hindered by the time-intensive processing of RSA.

Intimate Partner Violence, Maternal Sensitive Parenting Behaviors, and Children's Executive Functioning.

Objective: Despite knowledge that intimate partner violence (IPV) can negatively affect children's socioemotional and behavioral development, less is known about the impact of IPV on children's cognitive development, including whether it influences their executive functioning (EF). The goal of the current study was to address this gap in the literature, by examining the association between IPV that occurs early in life and EF at school entry. This study also allowed for the investigation of maternal sensitive parenting behaviors as a possible mediator of this relation.

Change over Time: Conducting Longitudinal Studies of Children's Cognitive Development.

Developmental scientists have argued that the implementation of longitudinal methods is necessary for obtaining an accurate picture of the nature and sources of developmental change (Magnusson & Cairns, 1996; Morrison & Ornstein, 1996; Magnusson & Stattin, 2006). Developmentalists studying cognition have been relatively slow to embrace longitudinal research, and thus few exemplar studies have tracked individual children's cognitive performance over time and even fewer have examined contexts that are associated with this growth. In this article we first outline some of the benefits of implementing longitudinal designs.

Intimate partner violence and children's memory.

The current study was designed to examine the relation between intimate partner violence (IPV) and children's memory and drew from a socioeconomically and racially diverse sample of children living in and around a midsized southeastern city (n = 140). Mother-reported IPV when the children were 30 months old was a significant predictor of children's short-term, working, and deliberate memory at 60 months of age, even after controlling for the children's sex and race, the families' income-to-needs ratio, the children's expressive vocabulary, and maternal harsh-intrusive parenting behaviors. These findings add to the limited extant literature that finds linkages between IPV and children's cognitive functioning and suggest that living in households in which physical violence is perpetrated among intimate partners may have a negative effect on multiple domains of children's memory development.

The effect of teachers' memory-relevant language on children's strategy use and knowledge.

Building on longitudinal findings of linkages between aspects of teachers' language during instruction and children's use of mnemonic strategies, this investigation was designed to examine experimentally the impact of instruction on memory development. First and second graders (N = 54, M(age) = 7 years) were randomly assigned to a science unit that varied only in teachers' use of memory-relevant language. Pretest, posttest, and 1-month follow-up assessments revealed that although all participating children learned new information as a result of instruction, those exposed to memory rich teaching exhibited greater levels of strategic knowledge and engaged in more sophisticated strategy use in a memory task involving instructional content than did students exposed to low memory instruction.

Relations between children's metamemory and strategic performance: time-varying covariates in early elementary school.

Although much is known about the development of memory strategies and metamemory during childhood, evidence for linkages between these memory skills, either concurrently or over time, has been limited. Drawing from a longitudinal investigation of the development of memory, repeated assessments of children's (N=107) strategy use and declarative metamemory were made to examine the development of these skills and the relations between them over time. Latent curve models were used first to estimate the trajectories of children's strategy use and metamemory and then to examine predictors of children's performance in each of these domains.

Linking teachers' memory-relevant language and the development of children's memory skills.

This longitudinal study was designed to (a) examine changes in children's deliberate memory across the 1st grade; (b) characterize the memory-relevant aspects of their classrooms; and (c) explore linkages between the children's performance and the language their teachers use in instruction. To explore contextual factors that may facilitate the development of skills for remembering, 107 first graders were assessed 3 times with a broad set of tasks, while extensive observations were made in the 14 classrooms from which these children were sampled. When the participating teachers were classified as high or low in terms of their "mnemonic orientation," in part on the basis of their use of metacognitive information and requests for deliberate remembering during instruction in language arts and mathematics, differences were observed in the use of mnemonic techniques by the children in their classes.