David A. Leavens

We were pleased to read the comments on our target article expressing views from diverse disciplines, including biology, philosophy, psychiatry, anthropology, and numerous branches of psychology (i.e., developmental, cultural, evolutionary, and comparative psychology). In this response, we discuss their ideas about routes to increasing inclusivity in theories of developmental psychology and present our disagreements with the few who argue that there is no need for change to theories. We highlight the commentators’ broad agreement with the main themes of the WILD (Worldwide, In situ, Local, & Diverse) approach and the practical guide of 5 Steps to Inclusivity, and we consolidate commentators’ views on infrastructural changes that are necessary to reach our collective goal of increasing inclusivity in theories of developmental psychology.

Central to many contemporary theories of language development is the idea that humans possess species-specific cognitive adaptations for understanding directional social cues, whereas contrasting theoretical positions emphasize the influence of domain-general learning mechanisms on this comprehension. We sought to test whether presumptive domain-general learning was sufficient to instill the comprehension of pointing and other cues by asking just how much training is required to train 44 mature, captive chimpanzees to follow deictic cues, using both a complex set of social cues (pointing, head/body orientation, and verbal cue) and a nonsocial cue (an object adjacency). We found that successful performance on an object choice task-a commonly used measure of receptive joint attention capacity-required relatively little explicit training. Thus, if chimpanzees can acquire this understanding with relatively little experience, humans may also acquire receptive joint attention from their learning experiences. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Short For decades, we have known that developmental psychological findings primarily describe Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic (WEIRD) samples, unrepresentative of the developmental landscape of all humans. A new approach advocates for a W orldwide, I n situ, L ocal, and D iverse (WILD: Newson et al., 2021) psychology. Here we evaluate the extent (Bard, 2022) to which developmental theories are WEIRD or WILD, by considering potential bias in one bottom-up theory (Shared Intentionality) and in one top-down theory (Attachment). Theories drive research and we provide Five Steps to Increase Inclusivity (from Bard et al., 2021) that will contribute to re-building developmental psychological theories to embrace WILDness.

Domestic dogs are very successful at following human communicative gestures in paradigms such as the object-choice task. Pet dogs also prefer responding to cues given by a familiar cue-giver and this had not been found in working dogs. Therefore, we tested three groups of dogs in the object-choice task (n = 54): the groups were “Actively working” dogs from working dog breeds, pet dogs from “Non-working breeds” and pet dogs from “Working breeds”. We found that “Actively working” and “Working breeds” dog groups outperformed “Non-working breeds” in following a point in the object-choice task. We also found that both “Actively working” and “Working breeds” preferred a familiar cue-giver over an unfamiliar one, in contrast to previous findings. Therefore, we conclude that dogs’ abilities to perform well in the object-choice task is influenced by the selective history of the breed, and this is then increased by life experience and training.

While researchers have consistently found that music can evoke discrete emotions in people cross-culturally, there is little consensus regarding the mechanisms underpinning this effect. The present study aimed to gain further insight into how music influences emotions, investigating whether the lyrics or the melody of a sad piece of non-classical music had a greater influence on mood. The researchers presented a sample of 251 participants with isolated melody, isolated lyrics, and the original version of a sad pop-ballad in turn, measuring the influence of each on mood using the Brief Mood Introspection Scale (BMIS). A one-way repeated measures ANOVA revealed that all versions of the song significantly reduced mood scores from baseline, with the isolated lyrics and original version of the song reducing mood to a greater magnitude than the melody. The results suggested that both the lyrics and melody of the music influenced mood, though the lyrics appeared to do so to a greater extent. Furthermore, a thematic analysis of open-response questions provided preliminary evidence that the semantic content of lyrics was more influential on mood than the vocal expression of lyrics. Future research should aim to replicate these findings, using both positively and negatively emotionally valenced musical stimuli.