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The impacts of war and displacement on executive function (EF)—what we might call the cognitive signatures of minds under siege—are little known. We surveyed a gender-balanced sample of 12- to 18-year-old Syrian refugees (n = 240) and Jordanian non-refugees (n = 210) living in Jordan. We examined the relative contributions of poverty, trauma exposure, posttraumatic stress, and insecurity to variance in inhibitory control and working memory. We observed associations between poverty and WM, suggesting that, even in populations exposed to substantial violence and fear, poverty is a specific pathway to WM deficit. We did not, however, find associations between EFs and exposures to trauma. Careful distinction between childhood adversities may illuminate which neurocognitive pathways matter for measures of cognitive function.

This study investigated associations among third-grade teachers' (N = 27) symptoms of depression, quality of the classroom-learning environment (CLE), and students' (N = 523, Mage = 8.6 years) math and literacy performance. Teachers' depressive symptoms in the winter negatively predicted students' spring mathematics achievement. This depended on students' fall mathematics scores; students who began the year with weaker math skills and were in classrooms where teachers reported more depressive symptoms achieved smaller gains than did peers whose teachers reported fewer symptoms. Teachers' depressive symptoms were negatively associated with quality of CLE, and quality of CLE mediated the association between depressive symptoms and student achievement. The findings point to the importance of teachers' mental health, with implications for policy and practice.

Deficits in reciprocal social behavior are a characterizing feature of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Autismrelated variation in reciprocal social behavior (AVR) in the general population is continuously distributed and highly heritable—a function of additive genetic influences that overlap substantially with those which engender clinical autistic syndromes. This is the first long-term prospective study of the stability of AVR from childhood through early adulthood, conducted via serial ratings using the Social Responsiveness Scale, in a cohort-sequential study involving children with ASD, other psychiatric conditions, and their siblings (N = 602, ages = 2.5-29). AVR exhibits marked stability throughout childhood in individuals with and without ASD.

The emergence of visual cortex specialization for culturally acquired characters like letters and digits, both arbitrary shapes related to specific cognitive domains, is yet unclear. Here, 20 young children (6.12 years old) were tested with a frequency-tagging paradigm coupled with electroencephalogram recordings to assess discrimination responses of letters from digits and vice-versa. One category of stimuli (e.g., letters) was periodically inserted (1/5) in streams of the other category (e.g., digits) presented at a fast rate (6 Hz). Results show clear right-lateralized discrimination responses at 6 Hz/5 for digits within letters, and a trend for left-lateralization for letters. These results support an early developmental emergence of ventral occipito-temporal cortex specialization for visual recognition of digits and letters, potentially in relation with relevant coactivated brain networks.

Newborn infants orient preferentially toward face-like or \"protoface\" stimuli and recent studies suggest similar reflexive orienting responses in adults. Little is known, however, about the operation of this mechanism in childhood. An attentional-cueing procedure was therefore developed to investigate protoface orienting in early childhood. Consistent with the extant literature, 5- to 6-year-old children (n = 25) exhibited orienting toward face-like stimuli; they responded faster when target location was cued by the appearance of a protoface stimulus than when location was cued by matched control patterns. The potential of this procedure to investigate the development of typical and atypical social perception is discussed.

This study investigated the benefits of self-distancing (i.e., taking an outsider's view of one's own situation) on young children's perseverance. Four- and 6-year-old children (N = 180) were asked to complete a repetitive task for 10 min while having the option to take breaks by playing an extremely attractive video game. Six-year-olds persevered longer than 4-year-olds. Nonetheless, across both ages, children who impersonated an exemplar other—in this case a character, such as Batman—spent the most time working, followed by children who took a third-person perspective on the self, or finally, a first-person perspective. Alternative explanations, implications, and future research directions are discussed.

Adolescents' secrecy is intertwined with perception of parents' behaviors as acts of privacy invasion. It is currently untested, however, how this transactional process operates at the within-person level—where these causal processes take place. Dutch adolescents (n = 244, Mage = 13.84, 38.50% boys) reported three times on perceived parental privacy invasion and secrecy. Cross-lagged panel models (CLPM) confirmed earlier findings. Privacy invasion predicted increased secrecy, but a reverse effect was found from increased secrecy to increased privacy invasion. Controlling for confounding positive group-level associations with a novel random intercept CLPM, negative within-person associations were found. Higher levels of secrecy predicted lower levels of privacy invasive behaviors at the within-person level. These opposing findings within- versus between-persons illustrate a Simpson's paradox.

The many adverse effects of child maltreatment make the scientific investigation of this phenomenon a matter of vital importance. Although the relationship between maltreatment and problematic emotion reactivity and regulation has been studied, the strength and specificity of these associations are not yet clear. We examine the magnitude of the maltreatment—child-emotion reactivity/regulation link. Studies with substantiated maltreatment involving children aged up to 18 were included, along with a smaller number of longitudinal studies (58 papers reviewed, encompassing more than 11,900 children). In comparison to nonmaltreated children, maltreated children experience more negative emotions, behave in a manner indicative of more negative emotion, and display emotion dysregulation. We outline several theoretical implications of our results.

The current study examines the association between parental support and adolescent sleep under varying levels of family stress. Participants included 316 adolescents (Mage = 16.40 years, 43% male) and their parents (Mage = 45.67 years, 91% mothers) from diverse ethnic backgrounds. Both adolescents and parents completed questionnaires and adolescents wore wrist actigraphs and completed self-reports on their sleep for 7 consecutive days. Results indicated that under contexts of family stress, more parental support was linked to longer sleep duration, less sleep variability, and less time spent awake during the night. Findings suggest that under contexts of family stress, cohesive family relationships may provide a sense of stability and security that is necessary for healthful sleep.

Variability in children's language acquisition is likely due to a number of cognitive and social variables. The current study investigated whether individual differences in statistical learning (SL), which has been implicated in language acquisition, independently predicted 6- to 8-year-old's comprehension of syntax. Sixty-eight (N = 68) English-speaking children completed a test of comprehension of four syntactic structures, a test of SL utilizing nonlinguistic visual stimuli, and several additional control measures. The results revealed that SL independently predicted comprehension of two syntactic structures that show considerable variability in this age range: passives and object relative clauses. These data suggest that individual differences in children's capacity for SL are associated with the acquisition of the syntax of natural languages.