Although children can use social categories to intelligently select informants, children’s preference for in-group informants has not been consistently demonstrated across age and context. This research clarifies the extent to which children use social categories to guide learning by presenting participants with a live or video-recorded action demonstration by a linguistic in-group and/or out-group model. Participants’ (N = 104) propensity to imitate these actions was assessed. Nineteen-month-olds did not selectively imitate the actions of the in-group model in live contexts, though in-group preferences were found after watching the demonstration on video. Three-year-olds selectively imitated the actions demonstrated by the in-group member regardless of context. These results indicate that in-group preferences have a more nuanced effect on social learning than previous research has indicated.

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How does emotion regulation in one social context spillover to functioning in another? We investigate this novel question by drawing upon recent evidence that 3 categories underpin the most commonly assessed emotion regulation strategies: disengagement, aversive cognitive perseveration, and adaptive engagement. We examine how these emotion regulation categories during marital conflict are associated with conflict resolution and assess the associated implications for functioning during a subsequent family activity. We also develop and compare observational and self-report measures of emotion regulation. Couples (N = 101) were video-recorded discussing a major conflict and reported on their emotion regulation during the discussion. Couples then participated in a family activity with their 5-year-old child, and reported on the quality of the family experience and responsiveness toward their child. Observational coders rated how much each participant exhibited each type of emotion regulation during the conflict discussion. Greater disengagement and aversive cognitive perseveration were associated with lower conflict resolution, and in turn, less positive experiences and poorer parental responsiveness during the family activity. Greater adaptive engagement had the opposite effects, but only disengagement and aversive cognitive perseveration had independent effects when controlling for the other emotion regulation categories. Finally, observational and self-report measures were only weakly associated, but illustrated the same pattern of effects. These novel findings suggest that emotion regulation strategies have important flow-on effects beyond the context initially enacted. The results also indicate that self-report versus observed measures of emotion regulation reveal similar patterns, but may capture different intrapersonal and interpersonal elements of emotion regulation.

Perception of the social world in terms of agents and their intentional relations is fundamental to human experience. In this chapter, we review recent investigations into the origins of this fundamental ability that trace its roots to the first year of life. These studies show that infants represent others’ actions not as purely physical motions, but rather as actions directed at goals and objects of attention. Infants are able to recover intentional relations at varying levels of analysis, including concrete action goals, higher-order plans, acts of attention, and collaborative goals. There is mounting evidence that these early competencies are strongly influenced by infants’ own experience as intentional agents. Action experience shapes infants’ action perception.

As with all culturally relevant human behaviours, words are meaningful because they are shared by the members of a community. This research investigates whether 9-month-old infants understand this fundamental fact about language. Experiment 1 examined whether infants who are trained on, and subsequently habituated to, a new word-referent link expect the link to be consistent across a second speaker. Experiment 2 examined whether 9-month-old infants distinguish between behaviours that are shared across individuals (i.e., words) from those that are not (i.e., object preferences). The present findings indicate that infants as young as 9 months of age expect new word-referent links, but not object preferences, to be consistent across individuals. Thus, by 9 months, infants have identified at least one of the aspects of human behaviour that is shared across individuals within a community. The implications for children’s acquisition of language and culture are discussed.

We assessed 19‐month‐olds' appreciation of the conventional nature of object labels versus desires. Infants played a finding game with an experimenter who stated her intention to find the referent of a novel word (word group), to find an object she wanted (desire group), or simply to look in a box (control group). A 2nd experimenter then administered a comprehension task to assess infants' tendency to extend information to a 2nd person who was not present at the time of learning. Results indicate that infants chose the target object when the 2nd experimenter asked for the referent of the novel label but not when she requested the referent of her desire. These findings demonstrate that 19‐month‐olds understand that words are conventional, but desires are not.

The COVID-19 pandemic is placing demands on parents that may amplify the risk of parents' distress and poor parenting. Leveraging a prepandemic study in New Zealand, the current research tested whether parents' psychological distress during a mandated lockdown predicts relative residual changes in poorer parenting and whether partner support and cooperative coparenting buffer this potentially detrimental effect. Participants included 362 parents; 310 were from the same family (155 dyads). Parents had completed assessments of psychological distress and parenting prior to the pandemic and then reported on their distress, parenting, partner support, and cooperative coparenting during a nationwide COVID-19 lockdown. Parents' distress during the lockdown predicted relative residual increases in harsh parenting, but this effect was buffered by partner support. Parents' distress also predicted residual decreases in warm/responsive parenting and parent-child relationship quality, but these effects were buffered by cooperative coparenting. Partner support and cooperative coparenting are important targets for future research and interventions to help parents navigate challenging family contexts, including COVID-19 lockdowns.

Collaboration is fundamental to our daily lives, yet little is known about how humans come to understand these activities. The present research was conducted to fill this void by using a novel visual habituation paradigm to investigate infants’ understanding of the collaborative-goal structure of collaborative action. The findings of the three experiments reported here suggest that 14-month-old infants understand that the actions of collaborative partners are complementary and critical to the attainment of a common collaborative goal. Importantly, 14-month-olds do not interpret the actions of two individuals in terms of a collaborative goal when their actions are not causally related. The implications of our findings for theories of collaboration and folk psychology are discussed.