Thoughtful Friends: Executive Function Relates to Social Problem Solving and Friendship Quality in Middle Childhood.

The present study examined links between best friendship quality, social problem solving in response to a transgression and conscious control of behavior (i.e., executive function or EF).

Effort as Person-Focused Praise: "Hard Worker" Has Negative Effects for Adults After a Failure.

Although work with children demonstrates a benefit of process-focused praise relative to person-focused praise on post-failure motivation, few studies have examined this result in adults. We tested the effect of three types of praise on adults' post-failure outcomes: person-focused intelligence ("high intelligence"), person-focused effort ("hard worker"), and process-focused effort ("worked hard") in a sample of 156 adults recruited from Amazon's MTurk. Participants completed a set of easy visual pattern recognition problems and were told that they performed better than most adults and were given one of the three types of feedback.

A self-affirmation exercise does not improve intentions to vaccinate among parents with negative vaccine attitudes (and may decrease intentions to vaccinate).

Two studies investigated the effectiveness of a self-affirmation exercise on vaccine safety beliefs and intent to vaccinate future children. In Study 1, a sample of 585 parents with at least one child under the age of 18 in the home participated through Amazon's MTurk. Participants were randomly assigned to one of four conditions in a 2 x 2 design.

Trajectories of Peer Victimization: The Role of Multiple Relationships.

This study examined early elementary school children's trajectories of peer victimization with a sample of 218 boys and girls. Peer victimization was assessed (via peer report) in kindergarten, 1(st), 2(nd), and 5(th) grades. Hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) was used to examine multiple types of relationships (mother-child, student-teacher, friendship) as predictors of kindergarten levels of peer victimization and changes in peer victimization across time.

The Role of Emotion Regulation and Children's Early Academic Success.

This study investigated the role of children's emotion regulation skills and academic success in kindergarten, using a sample of 325 five-year-old children. A mediational analysis addressed the potential mechanisms through which emotion regulation relates to children's early academic success. Results indicated that emotion regulation was positively associated with teacher reports of children's academic success and productivity in the classroom and standardized early literacy and math achievement scores.