<p> Past studies examining child care and externalizing behaviors have produced conflicting results. This study examined whether an association exists between type of child care that a child attended the year before kindergarten and externalizing problem behaviors as rated by the child&rsquo;s kindergarten teacher. Ordinary least-squares regression was used to examine variables that impact ratings of externalizing behavior by evaluating data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 2010&ndash;2011 (ECLS-K:2011). The ECLS-K:2011 has up-to-date data that includes a nationally representative sample of children in the United States. Participants were 13,544 children. Additionally, SES and the total number of hours of weekly care were analyzed to see if they moderated the relationship between type of care and externalizing behaviors. Findings indicated that children who attended center care only exhibited more externalizing behaviors than children who attended other types or combinations of care. Children from lower SES families had significantly more externalizing behaviors than children from higher SES families. Findings also indicated that SES had less of an effect on externalizing behavior among children who attended relative and center care than children who attended center care only. The more hours a child spent in care each week, the greater their ratings of externalizing problem behaviors. Additionally, the effects of total hours on externalizing behaviors were lower for children who attended relative care only and relative and center care than those who attended center care only. Study implications for policymakers, parents, and researchers are discussed in depth. For instance, if parents wish to send their children to center care, they may want to incorporate an additional type of weekly care, which may act as a buffer to externalizing problem behaviors. Additionally, policymakers may want to facilitate greater access for child care other than center care only.</p><p>

The appearance-reality distinction refers to the understanding that objects can have misleading appearances that contradict reality. Traditionally, studies investigating children's ability to make this distinction have used a verbal-based task that requires children to answer two questions regarding the appearance and reality of a target object whose appearance has been altered. In general, these studies have found that children are not successful in this task until 4–5 years of age. The purpose of the current study was to investigate three different hypotheses regarding why 3-year-olds fail the traditional verbal-based task in order to determine whether their poor performance truly represents an inability to distinguish appearance from reality. In Experiment 1, the hypothesis that 3-year-olds fail the traditional task simply because they are unfamiliar with the property-distorting devices typically used to alter the appearances of target objects, rather than an inability to distinguish appearance from reality, was examined. Experiments 1 and 2 also examined the hypothesis that 3-year-olds' failure in this task may be due to an inability to assign conflicting, dual representations to a single object. Finally, the role of the language used in making the appearance-reality distinction also was examined in both experiments. In this case, the hypothesis that 3-year-olds may be able to distinguish appearances from reality in an action-based, but not verbal-based task, was evaluated. In Experiment 1, all of this was done using a property-distorting device typically used in traditional appearance-reality studies, whereas a completely new method for altering the appearances of objects was used in Experiment 2. No supporting evidence for the familiarity or dual representation hypotheses was found in either experiment, however, children in both experiments performed better on an action-based task than on two verbal-based tasks. Children went from answering the traditional appearance-reality questions on the basis of misleading perceptual information to overriding this misleading information in an action-based task. Together, these results provide evidence that 3-year-olds have some competence in distinguishing appearances from reality that is masked by the language demands of the traditional verbal-based task.

<p>The aim of this project is to examine the relationships between two approaches to the measurement of life history strategies. The traditional method, termed here the biodemographic approach, measures developmental characteristics like birthweight, gestation length, inter-birth intervals, pubertal timing, and sexual debut. The alternative method under exploration, termed here the psychological approach, measures a suite of cognitive and behavioral traits such as altruism, sociosexual orientation, personality, mutualism, familial relationships, and religiosity. Although both approaches are supported by a large body of literature, they remain relatively segregated. This study draws inspiration from both views, integrating measures that assess developmental milestones, including birthweight, prematurity, pubertal timing, and onset of sexual behavior, as well as psychological life history measures such as the Mini-K and a personality inventory. Drawing on previous theoretical work on the fundamental dimensions of environmental risk, these measures are tested in conjunction with several scales assessing the stability of early environmental conditions, including both &ldquo;event-based&rdquo; measures that are defined with an external referent, and measures of internal schemata, or the predicted psychological sequelae of early events. The data are tested in a three-part sequence, beginning with the measurement models under investigation, proceeding to an exploratory analysis of the causal network, and finishing with a cross-validation of the structural model on a new sample. The findings point to exciting new directions for future researchers who seek to integrate the two perspectives. </p>

<p> Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a developmental disorder that is defined by deficits in communication, socialization, and cognitive abilities that make it more challenging for individuals to form and maintain relationships. Previous research has found that mothers with children with ASD-related symptoms report increased maternal stress and decreased maternal self-efficacy and maternal empathy. However, this research mainly examined the medical side of ASD, omitting the emotional aspect that is frequently and importantly associated with child developmental and behavioral outcomes. Alternatively, parent-child connectedness is a way to understand how parents feel emotionally connected to their children. The aim of this study was to understand how ASD-related behaviors and symptomology influenced maternal connectedness to their children, and evaluating maternal stress, maternal self-efficacy, and maternal empathy as mediating variables. Mothers (N = 125) of children between 3 and 5 years of age reported on their children&rsquo;s ASD-related symptomology, maternal stress, maternal self-efficacy, maternal empathy, and parent-child connectedness. The results showed a negative effect of ASD behaviors on maternal feelings of parent-child connectedness. Maternal stress, maternal self-efficacy, and maternal empathy were tested as mediating variables and the findings demonstrated how these parenting dimensions contributed to the negative relationship between ASD symptomology and parent-child connectedness. The results are discussed regarding the possible factors influencing the parent-child connectedness, as well as implications for further research in the field of Infant Mental Health.</p><p>

Objective: The present study evaluated the effectiveness of a parenting program designed specifically for hyperactive preschoolers. Method: Participants were 31 preschool-aged children whose parents were randomly assigned to a treatment or waitlist group. Parents who were assigned to the treatment group took part in a 14-week parenting program that involved teaching parenting strategies to manage hyperactive and disruptive behavior as well as emotion socialization strategies to increase children's emotion regulation. Results: The present study's findings were mixed. There were significant changes on a number of measures of child functioning and parent behavior for families who took part in the parenting program, but these findings were tempered by several nonsignificant findings. Compared to control families, families who participated in the parenting program evidenced significant changes in mothers' reports of child inattentive and hyperactive/impulsive symptoms, observations of mothers' positive parenting and negative affect, and mothers' self-reported verbosity, punitive reactions, and minimizing/discouraging reactions. Moreover, parent training fathers reported decreases in child inattentive and hyperactive/impulsive symptoms. However, treatment families did not significantly differ on mothers' ratings of child lability/negativity and internalizing behavior; audiotaped child behavior; or mothers' self-reported overreactivity, laxness, expressive encouragement, and emotion- and problem-focused reactions. Conclusions: Results provide some support for the effectiveness of the parenting program for reducing ADHD symptoms in preschool-aged children.

The experiments in this thesis explored the development of executive function in 5- to 11-year-old children. Developmentally-appropriate versions of the task-switching paradigm, go/no-go task and self-ordered pointing test were used to measure shifting, inhibition and working memory respectively. These executive skills were examined independently and within-task experimental manipulations were used to explore both the executive and non-executive processes that influenced children’s performance. These allowed the investigation of not only when, but also how executive function develops. It was found that shifting development, as measured by the task-switching paradigm was highly influenced by the specific tasks switched between and the conflict created by the overlap of the tasks, as well as by previous task experience. Working memory for pictures was also influenced by previous experience and task difficulty, however the predicted relationship between memory for nameable objects and language ability was not found. Inhibition on the go/no-go paradigm appeared to be driven by an improvement in the efficiency of response inhibition enabling older children to inhibit a response at an earlier stage during the movement. Shifting, inhibition and working memory all showed developmental improvements during mid-childhood, demonstrating the protracted development of executive function. Shifting and working memory showed a similar pattern of development whereas inhibition reached a stable level of performance at an earlier age. There were no correlations between the three executive skills studied in this thesis, supporting the fractionation of executive function.

The aim of this thesis is to examine the cognitive processes of social learning from the bottom up. In the field of comparative psychology, an overemphasis on understanding complex cognitive processes in nonhuman animals (e.g. empathy, imitation), may be detrimental to the study of simpler mechanisms. In this thesis, I report five studies of simple cognitive processes related to social learning. A series of experiments with human children and capuchin monkeys (Sapajus sp.), examined action imitation and identified a possible role for associative learning in the development of this ability. An analysis of observational data from captive capuchins explored a number of lesser-studied social learning phenomena, including behavioural synchrony, the neighbour effect, and group-size effects. The results of this study emphasise the importance of exploring behaviour at a number of levels to appreciate the dynamic nature of social influence. Two final experiments examined social contagion in capuchin monkeys, and highlight the importance of describing the relationship between behaviour and emotion to properly understand more complex social cognition. Together, these studies demonstrate how approaching human and nonhuman behaviour from the bottom up, as well as from the top down, can contribute to a better comparative science of social learning.