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The occurrence of major life events is associated with changes in well-being and personality. To better understand these effects, it is important to consider how individuals perceive major life events. Although theories such as appraisal theory and affective adaptation theory suggest that event perceptions change over time and that these changes are relevant for personality and well-being, stability and change of perceived event characteristics have not been systematically examined. This article aims to fill this gap using data from a longitudinal study (N = 619 at T1). In this study, participants rated nine perceived characteristics of the same major life event up to five times within 1 year. We estimated rank-order and mean-level stabilities as well as intraclass correlations of these life event characteristics with continuous time models. Furthermore, we computed continuous time models for the stability of affective well-being and the Big Five personality traits to generate benchmarks for the interpretation of the stability of the life event characteristics. Rank-order stabilities for the life event characteristics were lower than for the Big Five, but higher than for affective well-being. Most of the variance in life event characteristics was explained by between-person differences. Furthermore, we found a significant mean-level increase for the life event characteristic change in world views and a significant decrease for extraordinariness. These mean-level changes are in line with the meaning-making literature and affective adaptation theory, whereas the rather high rank-order stability of the life event characteristics challenges the importance of reappraisal processes of major life events. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

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Major life events (MLEs) are studied in many different areas in psychology such as personality development, clinical psychology, or posttraumatic growth. In all of these areas, a common finding is that MLEs differ in their effects on psychological outcomes. However, a framework that allows a systematic examination of these differences is still absent. This article presents a systematic literature review and 4 empirical studies (Ns between 226 and 449, total N = 1,477) in which we developed and evaluated a dimensional taxonomy of 9 perceived characteristics of MLEs: valence, impact, predictability, challenge, emotional significance, change in worldviews, social status changes, external control, and extraordinariness. These event characteristics can be measured reliably with the Event Characteristics Questionnaire (ECQ). Perceived event characteristics predicted individual differences in changes in subjective well-being in both retrospective and longitudinal data after MLEs over and above established predictors of subjective well-being such as personality and demographic characteristics. A comparison between the ECQ and established taxonomies of situation characteristics such as the DIAMONDS (Rauthmann et al., 2014) showed high conceptual and empirical convergence between some ECQ subscales (e.g., valence, challenge) with characteristics of situations, whereas other ECQ subscales (e.g., social status changes, external control) were conceptually and empirically distinct from situation characteristics. In sum, including measures of perceived event characteristics in studies on MLEs may enhance our understanding of why MLEs differ in the direction, strength, and duration of their effects on psychological outcomes. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

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Caucasian infants were presented 15 pairs of Caucasian own-race faces and 15 pairs of African other-race faces. The infants were assessed longitudinally at ages three, six and nine months. Two measures were obtained from the infants' eye-movements: (1) the length of fixations on either stimulus of a pair presented for 5.5 s (fixation duration) and (2) the amount of fixation shifts between the two stimuli (shift frequency). The study analyzes the changes in both measures with age and across the within-race face pair presentations. Despite general age-related improvements reflected in shorter fixation durations and a higher shift frequency, the results reveal differences between African face pairs and Caucasian face pairs at six and nine months. During the first trials (spontaneous looking behavior) the infants shift more often between the Caucasian own-race faces than between the African other-race faces. The fixation durations, however, which are typically of focus in Visual Pair Preference Tasks, do not differ significantly between the face races. The results are interpreted in terms of processing differences for own-race faces and the emerging Other-Race-Effect by six months of age. Furthermore, the usability of fixation duration as the only measure in the pair comparison setting is discussed.

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This study analyzes the relation of socio-economic status and psychological well-being in a sample of 327 Turkish immigrant mothers in Germany. We assessed maternal psychological well-being with the CES-D-10, the Satisfaction with Life Scale, and selected items of the Hassles Scale referring to daily hassles. Mothers' SES was assessed by means of household income and maternal education. The sample has a predominantly low to very low household income. A cluster analysis on maternal education and household income identified three SES-groups: A low-income cluster, a low-education cluster, and a third cluster of mothers who were slightly more advantaged in terms of household income and education. When applying the 10-point criterion of the CES-D-10, the three clusters differed regarding depression. About 40% of the mothers with lowest income and lowest education were depressed, compared to 28% of the more-advantaged cluster. The clusters further differed with respect to daily hassles and life-satisfaction. A higher SES was associated with less daily hassles, a higher life satisfaction, and less depression. This replicates findings of other studies regarding the relation of SES and psychological well-being. A follow-up assessment for about 60% of the mothers after 1 year revealed no changes in the well-being scales for each SES cluster, and a significant multivariate effect of the SES clusters. This suggests that SES is a long-term influential factor on psychological well-being. We discuss our findings in terms of the importance to integrate Turkish immigrant mother into the Germany society and in terms of the importance of maternal psychological well-being for children's positive development.

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The development of self-regulation has been studied primarily in Western middle-class contexts and has, therefore, neglected what is known about culturally varying self-concepts and socialization strategies. The research reported here compared the self-regulatory competencies of German middle-class (N = 125) and rural Cameroonian Nso preschoolers (N = 76) using the Marshmallow test (Mischel, 2014). Study 1 revealed that 4-year-old Nso children showed better delay-of-gratification performance than their German peers. Study 2 revealed that culture-specific maternal socialization goals and interaction behaviors were related to delay-of-gratification performance. Nso mothers' focus on hierarchical relational socialization goals and responsive control seems to support children's delay-of-gratification performance more than German middle-class mothers' emphasis on psychological autonomous socialization goals and sensitive, child-centered parenting.

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The present multimethod longitudinal study aimed at investigating development and stability of implicit memory during infancy and early childhood. A total of 134 children were followed longitudinally from 3 months to 3 years of life assessing different age-appropriate measures of implicit memory. Results from structural equation modeling give further evidence that implicit memory is stable from 9 months of life on, with earlier performance predicting later performance. Second, it was found that implicit memory is present from early on, and no age-related improvements are found from 3 months on. Results are discussed with respect to the basic brain structures implicit memory builds on, as well as methodological issues.

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When employing between-infant designs young infants' looking style is related to their development: Short looking (SL) infants are cognitively accelerated over their long looking (LL) peers. In fact, looking style is a within-infant variable, and depends on infant i's look distribution over trials. For the paired array setting, a model is provided which specifies the probability, π i ∈ [0, 1], that i is SL. The model is employed in a face preference study; 74 Caucasian infants were longitudinally assessed at 3, 6, and 9 months. Each i viewed same race (Caucasian) vs. other race (African) faces. Infants become SL with development, but there are huge individual differences in rate of change over age. Three month LL infants, [Formula: see text], preferred other race faces. SL infants, [Formula: see text], preferring same race faces at 3, and other race faces at 6 and 9 months. Looking style changes precede and may control changes in face preference. Ignoring looking style can be misleading: Without considering looking style, 3 month infants show no face preference.

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The authors explored priming in children from different cultural environments with the aim to provide further evidence for the robustness of the priming effect. Perceptual priming was assessed by a picture fragment completion task in 3-year-old German middle-class and Cameroonian Nso farmer children. As expected, 3-year-olds from both highly diverging cultural contexts under study showed a priming effect, and, moreover, the effect was of comparable size in both cultural contexts. Hence, the children profited similarly from priming, which was supported by the nonsignificant interaction between cultural background and identification performance as well as the analysis of absolute difference scores. However, a culture-specific difference regarding the level of picture identification was found in that German middle-class children identified target as well as control pictures with less perceptual information than children in the Nso sample. Explanations for the cross-cultural demonstration of the priming effect as well as for the culturally diverging levels on which priming occurs are discussed.

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This study aims to analyze culture-specific development of maternal interactional behavior longitudinally. Rural Cameroonian Nso mothers (n = 72) and German middle-class mothers (n = 106) were observed in free-play interactions with their 3- and 6-month-old infants. Results reveal the expected shift from a social to a nonsocial focus only in the German middle-class mothers' play interactions but not the rural Nso mothers' play. Nso mothers continue their proximal interactional style with a focus on body contact and body stimulation, whereas German middle-class mothers prefer a distal style of interaction with increasing object-centeredness. These cultural differences are in line with broader cultural models and become more accentuated as the infants grow older.

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The other-race effect (ORE) implies the better recognition of faces of one's own race compared with faces of a different race. It demonstrates that face recognition is shaped by daily experience with human faces. Such experience mainly includes structural information of own-race faces and also information on the way faces are usually seen, as a whole or partly covered by scarves or other headwear. In two experiments, we investigated how this mode of presentation is related to the occurrence of the ORE during childhood. In Experiment 1, 4-year-old German children (N = 104), accustomed to seeing faces without headwear in daily life, were asked to recognize female Caucasian or African faces, presented either as a whole or wearing a woolen hat, in a forced choice paradigm. In Experiment 2, 4-year-olds from rural Cameroon (N = 70), accustomed to seeing faces with and without headwear in daily life, participated in the same task. In both groups, the ORE was present in the familiar mode of presentation, that is, in whole faces in German children and in whole and partly covered faces in Cameroonian children. The results are discussed in relation to the role of experience for face recognition processes.

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Recognizing individual faces is an important human ability that highly depends on experience. This is reflected in the so called other-race effect; adults are better at recognizing faces from their own ethnic group, while very young infants do not show this specialization yet. Two experiments examined whether 3-year-old children from two different cultural backgrounds show the other-race effect. In Experiment 1, German children (N = 41) were presented with a forced choice paradigm where they were asked to recognize female Caucasian or African faces. In Experiment 2, 3-year-olds from Cameroon (N = 66) participated in a similar task using the same stimulus material. In both cultures the other-race effect was present; children were better at recognizing individual faces from their own ethnic group. In addition, German children performed at a higher overall level of accuracy than Cameroonians. The results are discussed in relation to cultural aspects in particular.