Universality without uniformity - infants' reactions to unresponsive partners in urban Germany and rural Ecuador.

Previous studies based on non-WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) samples provide initial evidence that the still-face effect is universal. Based on the assumption that - independent of their cultural niches - infants share some fundamental expectations of social interactions, we put forth the assumption that a universal response exists for when a social interaction is interrupted. At the same time, we hypothesized that the size of the effect depends on the typicality of the interaction that precedes the adult partners' interruption.

Explaining Variation in Parents' and Their Children's Stress During COVID-19 Lockdowns.

The coronavirus pandemic poses a substantial threat to people across the globe. In the first half of 2020, governments limited the spread of virus by imposing diverse regulations. These regulations had a particular impact on families as parents had to manage their occupational situation and childcare in parallel.

Culture and early social-cognitive development.

From a developmental systems perspective, this chapter focuses on the question whether culture matters for children's early social-cognitive development. Based on a review of the current cross-cultural literature, we evaluate the current state of research on cross-cultural similarities and differences in major developmental milestones of early social cognition, namely (i) the development of self-awareness and an understanding of self and others as intentional agents, (ii) advanced forms of social learning and (iii) prosocial cognition and behavior. Overall, the current cross-cultural research suggests universality without uniformity: the common suite of social-cognitive skills emerges reliably and, at the same time, there are culture-specific accentuations of social-cognitive development across domains that mostly are in line with cultural values, beliefs and practices.

The Development of Context-Sensitive Attention in Urban and Rural Brazil.

Human perception differs profoundly between individuals from different cultures. In the present study, we investigated the development of context-sensitive attention (the relative focus on context elements of a visual scene) in a large sample ( = 297) of 5- to 15-year-olds and young adults from rural and urban Brazil, namely from agricultural villages in the Amazon region and the city of São Paulo. We applied several visual tasks which assess context-sensitive attention, including an optical illusion, a picture description, a picture recognition and a facial emotion judgment task.

Modeling Prosocial Behavior Increases Helping in 16-Month-Olds.

In two experiments, the imitation of helping behavior in 16-month-olds was investigated. In Study 1 (N = 31), infants either observed an adult model helping or not helping another individual before they had the opportunity to assist an unfamiliar experimenter. In one of two tasks, more children helped in the prosocial model condition than in the no model control condition.

The Differential role of parenting, peers, and temperament for explaining interindividual differences in 18-months-olds' comforting and helping.

This study analyzes temperamental and social correlates of 18-month-olds' (N=58) instrumental helping (i.e., handing over out-of-reach objects) and comforting (i.

Explaining interindividual differences in toddlers' collaboration with unfamiliar peers: individual, dyadic, and social factors.

During their third year of life, toddlers become increasingly skillful at coordinating their actions with peer partners and they form joint commitments in collaborative situations. However, little effort has been made to explain interindividual differences in collaboration among toddlers. Therefore, we examined the relative influence of distinct individual, dyadic, and social factors on toddlers' collaborative activities (i.

Socio-cognitive influences on the domain-specificity of prosocial behavior in the second year.

The main aim of this study was to explain the domain-specificity of early prosocial behavior in different domains (i.e., helping, comforting, and cooperation) by simultaneously assessing specific socio-cognitive factors (i.