This too shall pass, but when? Children's and adults' beliefs about the time duration of emotions, desires, and preferences.

This research investigated children's and adults' understanding of the mind by assessing beliefs about the temporal features of mental states. English-speaking North American participants, varying in socioeconomic status (Study 1: N = 50 adults; Study 2: N = 112, 8- to 10-year-olds and adults; and Study 3: N = 116, 5- to 7-year-olds and adults; tested 2017-2022), estimated the duration (seconds to a lifetime) of emotions, desires (wanting), preferences (liking), and control trials (e.g.

Guilt promotes honesty in preschoolers.

The current study examined the influence of guilt on young children's honesty about their transgression. Children (N = 192; 4-6 years of age; 49.5% male, 50.

Dichotomous thinking about social groups: Learning about one group can activate opposite beliefs about another group.

Across three studies (N = 607), we examined people's use of a dichotomizing heuristic-the inference that characteristics belonging to one group do not apply to another group-when making judgments about novel social groups. Participants learned information about one group (e.g.

This is not what I expected: The impact of prior expectations on children's and adults' preferences and emotions.

We examined the influence of prior expectations on 4- to 10-year-olds' and adults' preferences and emotions following an undesirable outcome ( = 205; 49% female, 51% male; 6% Asian, 1% Black, 13% Hispanic/Latino [non-White], 57% White, 18% multiracial, and 5% another race/ethnicity; 75% with a college-educated parent). Participants attempted to win a chance game with multiple prizes; the worst prize being a pencil. The game was rigged so that half of the participants lost, and the other half won.

Children's and Adults' Beliefs about the Stability of Traits from Infancy to Adulthood: Contributions of Age and Executive Function.

We examined developmental differences and sources of variability in trait reasoning. Four- to 10-year-olds and adults (=198) rated how mean or nice "medium-mean" and "medium-nice" babies, kids, and teenagers were earlier in their lifetime and would be at older ages. Participants expected nice-labeled characters to be nice throughout their lives (participant age effects were null).

Consistency among social groups in judging emotions across time.

We measured judgments about emotions across time. In Study 1 ( = 254) and Study 2 ( = 162), LGBTQ-Latinx, straight-Latinx, LGBTQ-White, and straight-White emerging adults rated how they would feel if a perpetrator acted positively (P) or negatively (N) toward them in single, isolated events. In Study 2, participants also responded to a new where they judged how they would feel interacting with a hypothetical perpetrator across three timepoints: (1) an initial past event, (2) a recent past event, and (3) an uncertain future-oriented event (e.

Advanced emotion understanding: Children's and adults' knowledge that minds generalize from prior emotional events.

We examined an advanced form of emotion understanding in 4- to 10-year-olds and adults ( = 264): Awareness that people's minds generalize from past emotional episodes to bias how they feel, think, and make decisions in new situations. Participants viewed scenarios on an eye tracker, each featuring an initial perpetrator who caused a character to feel positively (P) and/or negatively (N) in 2-event sequences (NN, PP, NP, PN). Later, the character encountered a new agent who was highly similar to the initial perpetrator.

Optimism and Wishful Thinking: Consistency Across Populations in Children's Expectations for the Future.

Two studies investigated 5- to 10-year-olds' (N = 194) positivity bias when forecasting the future. Children from two geographic locations (mostly Caucasian, higher income college town; mostly African American, lower income urban community) completed a future expectations task (FET). For multiple scenarios, children predicted whether a positive versus negative (optimism items) or a positive versus extraordinary positive (wishful thinking items) outcome would occur, including its likelihood.

Is There a Downside to Anticipating the Upside? Children's and Adults' Reasoning About How Prior Expectations Shape Future Emotions.

Four- to 10-year-olds and adults (N = 205) responded to vignettes involving three individuals with different expectations (high, low, and no) for a future event. Participants judged characters' pre-outcome emotions, as well as predicted and explained their feelings following three events (positive, attenuated, and negative). Although adults rated high-expectation characters more negatively than low-expectation characters after all outcomes, children shared this intuition starting at 6-7 years for negative outcomes, 8-10 years for attenuated, and never for positive.

When Your Kind Cannot Live Here: How Generic Language and Criminal Sanctions Shape Social Categorization.

Using generic language to describe groups (applying characteristics to entire categories) is ubiquitous and affects how children and adults categorize other people. Five-year-olds, 8-year-olds, and adults ( N = 190) learned about a novel social group that separated into two factions (citizens and noncitizens). Noncitizens were described in either generic or specific language.

Try to look on the bright side: Children and adults can (sometimes) override their tendency to prioritize negative faces.

We used eye tracking to examine 4- to 10-year-olds' and adults' (N = 173) visual attention to negative (anger, fear, sadness, disgust) and neutral faces when paired with happy faces in 2 experimental conditions: free-viewing ("look at the faces") and directed ("look only at the happy faces"). Regardless of instruction, all age groups more often looked first to negative versus positive faces (no age differences), suggesting that initial orienting is driven by bottom-up processes. In contrast, biases in more sustained attention-last looks and looking duration-varied by age and could be modified by top-down instruction.

"These Pretzels Are Making Me Thirsty": Older Children and Adults Struggle With Induced-State Episodic Foresight.

We explored children's and adults' ability to disengage from current physiological states when forecasting future desires. In Study 1, 8- to 13-year-olds and adults (N = 104) ate pretzels (to induce thirst) and then predicted and explained what they would want tomorrow, pretzels or water. Demonstrating life-span continuity, approximately 70% of participants, regardless of age, chose water and referenced current thirst as their rationale.

How do thoughts, emotions, and decisions align? A new way to examine theory of mind during middle childhood and beyond.

The current study examined 4- to 10-year-olds' and adults' (N=280) tendency to connect people's thoughts, emotions, and decisions into valence-matched mental state triads (thought valence=emotion valence=decision valence; e.g., anticipate something bad+feel worried+avoid) and valence-matched mental state dyads (thought-emotion, thought-decision, and emotion-decision).

Beyond Sally's missing marble: further development in children's understanding of mind and emotion in middle childhood.

Research on the development of theory of mind (ToM), the understanding of people in relation to mental states and emotions, has been a vibrant area of cognitive development research. Because the dominant focus has been addressing when children acquire a ToM, researchers have concentrated their efforts on studying the emergence of psychological understanding during infancy and early childhood. Here, the benchmark test has been the false-belief task, the awareness that the mind can misrepresent reality.

Sibling composition, executive function, and children's thinking about mental diversity.

Prior investigations of relations between sibling composition and theory of mind have focused almost exclusively on false belief understanding in children 6 years of age and younger. The current work expands previous research by examining whether sibling composition predicts 4- to 11-year-olds' (N=192) more advanced mental state reasoning on interpretive theory of mind tasks. Even when controlling for age and executive function, children with a greater number of older siblings or with more same-sex siblings demonstrated stronger knowledge in both their predictions and explanations that people with different past experiences can have diverse interpretations of ambiguous stimuli.

Why is happy-sad more difficult? Focal emotional information impairs inhibitory control in children and adults.

This study compared the relative difficulty of the happy-sad inhibitory control task (say "happy" for the sad face and "sad" for the happy face) against other card tasks that varied by the presence and type (focal vs. peripheral; negative vs. positive) of emotional information in a sample of 4- to 11-year-olds and adults (N = 264).

Children's judgments about prosocial decisions and emotions: gender of the helper and recipient matters.

Children ages 5-13 years (N = 82) responded to prosocial and prohibitive moral dilemmas featuring characters whose desires conflicted with another person's need for help or ownership rights. The gender of the characters matched for half the trials (in-group version) and mismatched for the other half (out-group version). Both boys and girls judged that people would more likely help and not harm the gender in-group versus out-group.

Beliefs about thought probability: evidence for persistent errors in mindreading and links to executive control.

Four- to 10-year-olds' and adults' (N = 263) ability to inhibit privileged knowledge and simulate a naïve perspective were examined. Participants viewed pictures that were then occluded aside from a small ambiguous part. They offered suggestions for how a naïve person might interpret the hidden pictures, as well as rated the probability that a naïve person would think of several different pictures (with one picture being the actual item).

Not all past events are equal: biased attention and emerging heuristics in children's past-to-future forecasting.

Four- to 10-year-olds and adults (N = 265) responded to eight scenarios presented on an eye tracker. Each trial involved a character who encounters a perpetrator who had previously enacted positive (P), negative (N), or both types of actions toward him or her in varying sequences (NN, PP, PN, and NP). Participants predicted the character's thoughts about the likelihood of future events, emotion type and intensity, and decision to approach or avoid.

Helping the in-group feels better: children's judgments and emotion attributions in response to prosocial dilemmas.

Five- to 13-year-old European American children (N = 76) predicted characters' decisions, emotions, and obligations in prosocial moral dilemmas. Across age, children judged that characters would feel more positive emotions helping an unfamiliar child from the racial in-group versus out-group (African American), happier ignoring the needs of a child from the racial out-group versus in-group, and greater obligation to help a child from the racial in-group versus out-group. Situations varied by whether the race of the needy child matched versus mismatched that of the focal character.

Do you know how I feel? Parents underestimate worry and overestimate optimism compared to child self-report.

Three studies assessed parent-child agreement in perceptions of children's everyday emotions in typically developing 4- to 11-year-old children. Study 1 (N=228) and Study 2 (N=195) focused on children's worry and anxiety. Study 3 (N=90) examined children's optimism.

Looking on the bright side: children's knowledge about the benefits of positive versus negative thinking.

Five- to 10-year-olds (N = 90) listened to 6 illustrated scenarios featuring 2 characters that jointly experience the same positive event (and feel good), negative event (and feel bad), or ambiguous event (and feel okay). Afterward, one character thinks a positive thought and the other thinks a negative thought. Children predicted and explained each character's emotions.

A new measure for assessing executive function across a wide age range: children and adults find happy-sad more difficult than day-night.

Two experiments examined 4- to 11-year-olds' and adults' performance (N = 350) on two variants of a Stroop-like card task: the day-night task (say 'day' when shown a moon and 'night' when shown a sun) and a new happy-sad task (say 'happy' for a sad face and 'sad' for a happy face). Experiment 1 featured colored cartoon drawings. In Experiment 2, the happy-sad task featured photographs, and pictures for both measures were gray scale.

Forgetting common ground: six- to seven-year-olds have an overinterpretive theory of mind.

Four- to 9-year-olds and adults (N = 256) viewed a series of pictures that were covered with occluders to reveal nondescript or identifiable parts. Participants predicted how 3 characters, 1 who had previously viewed the full picture and 2 who had not, would interpret the obstructed drawings. Results showed significant development between 4 and 9 years and between 9 years and adulthood in understanding thought diversity as well as situations in which people should think alike.

Bridging theory of mind and the personal domain: children's reasoning about resistance to parental control.

Four-, 5-, and 7-year-olds (N = 60) listened to vignettes featuring characters that wanted to do actions that conflicted with parental rules. Desires included behaviors associated with the personal domain: friend, activity, and clothing choice. Scenarios involving moral rules served as a comparison.