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Given the legacy of John Bowlby, Attachment theory has often portrayed separation from a caregiver as likely to provoke protest, despair, and ultimately detachment in infants and young children. Indeed, the emotional challenge of separation is built into a key measurement tool of Attachment theory, the Strange Situation. However, James Robertson, one of Bowlby's leading collaborators, voiced dissent. He argued that young children can cope with separations--even when they last for several days or weeks. They are able to keep the absent person in mind provided an alternative, familiar caregiver remains available. Observational and experimental findings lend support to Robertson's claim. Recent analyses of natural language provide further support. Although young toddlers (ranging from 20 to 26 months) often make contact- or attachment-related comments about absent caregivers, such comments become less frequent with age whereas reflective references to absent caregivers--comments that do not express contact-related concerns about their absence--are often produced by young toddlers and remain frequent throughout early childhood. Children's early-emerging ability to keep an absent attachment figure in mind raises intriguing questions about their responses to the permanent absence of an attachment figure--as in the case of death. Consistent with contemporary research showing that many grieving adults report continuing bonds to a deceased attachment figure--rather than a gradual process of emotional detachment--children also report such continuing bonds. By implication, children and adults are prone to construe the death of a loved one not just as a biological endpoint that terminates the possibility of any continuing relationship but instead as a departure that can be bridged by a continuation of the earlier bond in an altered form.

There is extensive research on the development of cheating in early childhood but research on how to reduce it is rare. The present preregistered study examined whether telling young children about a story character's emotional reactions towards cheating could significantly reduce their tendency to cheat (N = 400; 199 boys; Age: 3-6 years). Results showed that telling older kindergarten children about the story character's negative emotional reaction towards rule violation significantly reduced cheating, but telling them about the positive emotional reaction towards rule adherence did not. These results show that children as young as age 5 are able to use information about another child's emotional reaction to guide their own moral behavior. In particular, highlighting another child's negative emotional reaction towards a moral transgression may be an effective way to reduce cheating in early childhood. This finding, along with earlier cheating reduction findings, suggests that although cheating is common in early childhood, simple methods can reduce its occurrence.

We investigated children's information seeking in response to a surprising claim (Study 1, N = 109, 54 Female, Range = 4.02-6.94 years, 49% White, 21% Mixed Ethnicity, 19% Southeast Asian, infStudy 2, N = 154, 74 Female, Range = 4.09-7.99, 50% White, 20% Mixed Ethnicity, 17% Southeast Asian, September 2020-December 2020). Relative to younger children, older children more often expressed skepticism about the adult's surprising claims (1-year increase, OR = 2.70) and more often suggested exploration strategies appropriate for testing the specific claim they heard (1-year increase, OR = 1.42). Controlling for age, recommending more targeted exploration strategies was associated with a greater likelihood of expressing skepticism about the adult's claim.

Including robots in children's lives calls for reflection on the psychological and moral aspects of such relationships, especially with respect to children's ability to differentiate intentional from unintentional false statements, that is, lies from mistakes. This ability calls for an understanding of an interlocutor's intentions. This study examined the ability of 5-6-year-olds to recognize, and morally evaluate, lies and mistakes produced by a human as compared to a NAO robot, and to attribute relevant emotions to the deceived party. Irrespective of the agent, children had more difficulty in understanding mistakes than lies. In addition, they were disinclined to attribute a lie to the robot. Children's age and their understanding of intentionality were the strongest predictors of their performance on the lie-mistake task. Children's Theory of Mind, but not their executive function skills, also correlated with their performance. Our findings suggest that, regardless of age, a robot is perceived as an intentional agent. Robot behaviour was more acceptable for children because his actions could be attributed to someone who programmed it to act in a specific way.

This study investigated cross-cultural similarities and variations in children's developing understanding of mixed emotions. Four- to 9-year-old US (n = 56) and Chinese (n = 98) children listened to stories in which the protagonist encountered a situation combining positive and negative components. Children were asked whether the story protagonist would feel the appropriate positive emotion as well as the appropriate negative emotion. Despite being able to recall the positive and negative components of the stories, both US and Chinese children often agreed to only one emotion. However, when children did not agree to only one emotion, US children were more likely than Chinese children to agree to both emotions, whereas Chinese children were more likely than US children to deny both emotions. Overall, the findings confirm that the recognition of mixed emotions is challenging for children under the age of 10. They also suggest, however, that mixed emotions are conceptualized differently in the two cultures: US children tend to assume that positive and negative emotions can coexist whereas Chinese children tend to assume that they neutralize each other.

Research on the development of children's decontextualized language has focused primarily on their references to events displaced in time. Here, we examine children's early emerging ability to talk about individuals who are elsewhere and therefore not participating in the conversation. We analyzed the references made by three Mandarin-speaking children aged 20-40 months to absent members of their social network. Even in the earliest period of the study (20-26 months), children produced a considerable number of such references, with the majority initiated either fully or partially by the children themselves. Thus, children were not simply echoing references made by their interlocutors. These early references often expressed attachment-related concerns with respect to absent family members. For example, children expressed a desire for the absent family member, called out their name, or asked about their location. Over time, however, they talked about absent individuals, including family members, in a more neutral or reflective fashion, commenting on their characteristics and activities. The findings highlight the early emergence of references that are displaced in space from the utterance context.

Research with adults has increasingly moved beyond the focus on a small set of allegedly basic emotions, each associated with a signature facial expression. That expansion has been accompanied by a greater emphasis on the potential variability of emotion concepts across different cultural settings. In this conceptual review of children's understanding of emotion, we argue that it is also important in developmental research to look beyond the small set of emotions associated with distinctive facial expressions. At the same time, we caution against any premature rejection of a universalist approach to children's understanding of emotion. We review three different lines of evidence in support of this stance: (1) children's ability to appropriately cite situational elicitors for emotions beyond the basic set; (2) their developing understanding of the relations between emotions and other mental processes; and (3) their realization that a person's facially expressed emotion may not indicate their felt emotion. In each of these three domains, we target studies that have included children from a variety of cultures to assess how far they respond similarly or differently. We conclude that there is robust evidence for similar conceptual progress in children's understanding of emotion across a range of cultural settings.

Recent research has shown that a religious upbringing renders children receptive to ordinarily impossible outcomes, but the underlying mechanism for this effect remains unclear. Exposure to religious teachings might alter children's basic understanding of causality. Alternatively, religious exposure might only affect children's religious cognition, not their causal judgments more generally. To test between these possibilities, 6- to 11-year-old children attending either secular (n = 49, 51% female, primarily White and middle-class) or parochial schools (n = 42, 48% female, primarily White and middle-class) heard stories in which characters experienced negative outcomes and indicated how those characters could have prevented them. Both groups of children spontaneously invoked interventions consistent with natural causal laws. Similarly, when judging the plausibility of several counterfactual interventions, participants endorsed the intervention consistent with natural laws at high levels, irrespective of schooling. However, children's endorsement of supernatural interventions inconsistent with these laws revealed both group similarities and differences. Although both groups of children judged divine intervention (i.e., via prayer) as more plausible than mental (i.e., via wishing) and magical (i.e., via magical powers) interventions, children receiving religious (vs. secular) schooling were more likely to do so. Moreover, although children with a secular upbringing overwhelmingly chose naturalistic interventions as the most effective, children with a religious upbringing chose divine as well as naturalistic intervention. These results indicate that religious teaching does not alter children's basic understanding of causality but rather adds divine intervention to their repertoire of possible causal factors.

Recent work has probed the developmental mechanisms that promote fair sharing. This work investigated 2.5- to 5.5-year-olds' (N = 316; 52% female; 79% White; data collected 2016-2018) sharing behavior in relation to three cognitive correlates: number knowledge, working memory, and cognitive control. In contrast to working memory and cognitive control, number knowledge was uniquely associated with fair sharing even after controlling for the other correlates and for age. Results also showed a causal effect: After a 5-min counting intervention (vs. a control), children improved their fair sharing behavior from pre-test to post-test. Findings are discussed in light of how social, cognitive, and motivational factors impact sharing behavior.

A considerable body of research has shown that preschoolers who have a better understanding of emotions also have better social competence. In the present study, we focused on the potential roles that verbal ability and working memory may play in the relationship. A total of 187 4- to 6-year-old preschoolers completed: (i) the Test of Emotion Comprehension for emotion understanding; (ii) the Counting and Labelling test for working memory; and (iii) the Core Vocabulary scales of the WPPSI for verbal ability. Two teachers assessed each participant's social competence. The results showed that preschoolers' emotional understanding is a predictor of their social competence but verbal ability fully mediated the relationship. Furthermore, verbal ability positively predicted children's social abilities only when they also had superior working memory. These findings help us to understand how verbal ability and working memory affect the relationship between emotion understanding and social competence in preschoolers.

Children (N = 278, 34-71 months, 54% girls) were told which of two figurines turned on a music box and also observed empirical evidence either confirming or conflicting with that testimony. Children were then asked to sort novel figurines according to whether they could make the music box work or not. To see whether children would explore which figurine turned on the music box, especially when the observed and testimonial evidence conflicted, children were given access to the music box during their sorting. However, children rarely explored. Indeed, they struggled to disregard the misleading testimony both when sorting the figurines and when asked about a future attempt. In contrast, children who explored the effectiveness of the figurines dismissed the misleading testimony.

I consider three aspects of children's thinking about religious phenomena. It displays intriguing parallels with their thinking about scientific phenomena; it has an impact on their moral behavior; and it is likely to impact their religious experience. Children's gradual conceptual progress in the domain of religion resembles their conceptual progress in the domain science. These parallels suggest the disarming possibility that older children's apparently more advanced thinking in the domain of science might be best interpreted, not as a gain in objectivity, but rather as an acceptance of the prevailing orthodoxy regarding the scientific issue in question. Nevertheless, despite these parallels between the two domains, children resemble their parents in expressing more confidence in the existence of scientific as compared religious phenomena. An increasingly plausible explanation for that differential confidence is that children hear adults take the existence of scientific phenomena for granted but hear them express occasional doubt regarding religious phenomena. With respect to moral behavior, children who show a better understanding of God's special cognitive and observational abilities act more generously when left alone. Finally, recent work on adults' religious experience suggests that it would be fruitful to look for links between children's conceptualization of the boundedness and porosity of the mind (both the human and the supernatural mind) and the frequency and nature of their religious experience.

We examined differences among children in their endorsement of an adult's claim, their subsequent empirical investigation of that claim, and their resolution of any potential conflict between the claim and their empirical investigation. American and Chinese preschool (N = 171, M = 4.71 years) and elementary school (N = 128, M = 7.59 years) children were presented with five, different-sized, Russian dolls and asked to indicate the heaviest doll. Children typically selected the biggest doll. Children then heard either a false, counter-intuitive claim (i.e., smallest doll = heaviest) or a claim confirming their initial intuition (i.e., biggest doll = heaviest). Children frequently endorsed the experimenter's claim even when it was counter-intuitive. The experimenter then left the room. During the experimenter's absence, older children who had heard the counter-intuitive as opposed to the confirming claim explored the dolls more than younger children, especially when subtly prompted to explore. Moreover, only older children who heard the counter-intuitive claim simultaneously picked up the smallest and biggest doll, a more deliberate test of the experimenter's claim. By implication, children engage in selective exploration following a surprising claim. Older children's more systematic explorations of what they have been told may reflect improvements in their ability to test such claims and in their greater sensitivity to the fact that unexpected claims can and should be empirically investigated.

Developmental research has long sought to understand children's social ideas, and particularly how those ideas influence their judgments and behaviors toward other people. We examine the idea of "common humanity," a social idea that has been investigated historically and philosophically, to re-consider what is already known about children's notions of social equality and difference and to suggest how research in this area might be expanded. We review the social cognition literature to argue that studying the idea of common humanity--which combines abstract notions of universal equality with explicit attention to social group differences--could substantially advance our understanding of children's social-cognitive frameworks. We then discuss a subset of the literature related to children's prejudice and describe how the study of common humanity could shed light on the mechanisms behind interventions that successfully reduce prejudice.

When presented with a claim that contradicts their intuitions, do children seize opportunities to empirically verify such claims or do they simply acquiesce to what they have been told? To answer this question, we conducted a replication of Ronfard et al. (conducted in the People's Republic of China) in two countries with distinct religious and political histories (Study 1: Belarus, N = 74; Study 2: Turkey, N = 79). Preschool children were presented with five different-sized Russian dolls and asked to indicate the heaviest doll. All children selected the biggest doll. Half of the children then heard a (false) claim (i.e., that the smallest doll was the heaviest), contradicting their initial intuition. The remaining children heard a (true) claim (i.e., that the biggest doll was the heaviest), confirming their initial intuition. Belarusian and Turkish preschoolers typically endorsed the experimenter's claim no matter whether it had contradicted or confirmed their initial intuition. Next, the experimenter left the room, giving children an opportunity to check the experimenter's claim by picking up the relevant dolls. Belarusian and Turkish preschoolers rarely explored the dolls, regardless of the type of testimony they received and continued to endorse the counterintuitive testimony they received. Furthermore, in Study 2, Turkish preschoolers continued to endorse smallest = heaviest even when doing so could have cost them a large reward. In sum, across two different cultural contexts, preschool children endorsed a counterintuitive claim and did not spontaneously seek evidence to test it. These results confirm and extend those of Ronfard et al.

The early use of person perception terms was examined via an analysis of the spontaneous speech of four young children in conversation with their parents at home. All four children were producing such terms early in their third year. Like their parents, children used the terms in two distinguishable ways: to attribute a trait to a person or to characterize a person's ongoing action. Most of these terms were evaluative, whether positive or negative. Parents often made direct comments to their children about both their traits and ongoing actions; children made similar comments about themselves. Parents also used person perception terms to make comments about others who were not party to the conversation; children did likewise. A considerable proportion of the trait terms that children produced served as interpretive comments on someone's actions or preferences. Our findings suggest that from an early age, children are trait theorists. Not only do they describe ongoing actions using trait vocabulary, they interpret those ongoing actions by attributing traits.

When learning about the existence of unobservable scientific phenomena such as germs or religious phenomena such as God, children are receptive to the testimony of other people. Research in Western cultures has shown that by 5 to 6 years of age, children--like adults--are confident about the existence of both scientific and religious phenomena. We examined the beliefs of secular and Christian children growing up in China as well as the beliefs of their parents. All participants--secular and Christian children, as well as their parents--were confident about the existence of the scientific phenomena. No such consensus emerged for religious phenomena. Whereas secular children and their parents were skeptical, Christian children and their parents were confident about the existence of the religious phenomena. Moreover, a similar pattern was found for Christian children in preschools and for Christian children with more extensive exposure to the secular state curriculum. Indeed, for religious phenomena, a positive association was found between the beliefs of Christian children and their parents, highlighting the potential influence of parental input in a predominantly secular society. Overall, the results indicate that children's religious beliefs are related to the beliefs of their parents, even when those beliefs go against the majority view.

What does it take know a moral truth or principle? Although testimony is an undisputed source of empirical knowledge of contingent facts, it is less clear whether it is possible to acquire "second-hand moral knowledge" (Jones, 1999; Wolff, 1998). In the present studies, 3- to 5-year-old Chinese (N = 124) and U.S. American (N = 90) children were asked to judge whether novel, distress-inducing actions were morally permissible, both independently and after either 1 or 3 adult informants had made counterintuitive judgments. Although participants made appropriate moral judgments independently, children from both countries were affected by the counterintuitive testimony provided by the adult informant(s). Moreover, Chinese children were especially receptive to such counterintuitive claims. These findings demonstrate that intuitive moral judgments based on perceived harm are common across 2 cultural groups, but adult testimony can potentially shift those judgments.

Recent work has documented that despite preschool-aged children's understanding of social norms surrounding sharing, they fail to share their resources equally in many contexts. Here we explored two hypotheses for this failure: an "insufficient motivation hypothesis" and an "insufficient cognitive resources hypothesis." With respect to the latter, we specifically explored whether children's numerical cognition--their understanding of the cardinal principle--might underpin their abilities to share equally. In Experiment 1, preschoolers' numerical cognition fully mediated age-related changes in children's fair sharing. We found little support for the insufficient motivation hypothesis--children stated that they had shared fairly, and failures in sharing fairly were a reflection of their number knowledge. Numerical cognition did not relate to children's knowledge of the norms of equality (Experiment 2). Results suggest that the knowledge--behavior gap in fairness may be partly explained by the differences in cognitive skills required for conceptual and behavioral equality.