The mapping of developmental relations between social cognition and real‐world social behaviors has theoretical and practical importance. In the domain of social anxiety, however, studies examining links between social cognitive ability and anxiety have produced mixed results. One potential explanation is that varied facets of social cognition are differentially linked to social anxiety across development. To better understand how social cognition relates to social anxiety, we assessed multiple facets of two important social cognitive capacities—mind‐mindedness and theory of mind— in school‐aged children aged 7–12 and young adults aged 18–24. We also measured social anxiety traits. We found that, across ages, mind‐mindedness and theory of mind were not related to each other. Additionally, for children and adults, higher levels of social anxiety correlated with higher levels of mind‐mindedness toward close social partners, indicating an increased propensity to describe partners using mental state terms. By contrast, social anxiety was not correlated with theory of mind, which measured the ability to decipher or attribute mental states to photographs, videos, or story characters. These findings offer insight into how different components of social cognition are related and how more naturalistic measures of social cognition involving relationships may relate to social anxiety across development.

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The ways that parents respond to children's negative emotions shape the development of self‐regulation across early childhood. The objective of this study was to examine child self‐regulation in the context of intimate partner violence (IPV) exposure in a sample of Black, economically marginalized mothers and their young children (aged 3–5 years, N = 99). The study investigates the conditional effects of emotion socialization practices that (1) encourage expression of and problem‐solving around negative affect (“supportive”), and (2) encourage suppression of affective displays (“suppressive”) on children's self‐regulation. We found a significant association between higher child self‐regulation and supportive parental reactions in the context of psychological IPV. We also found a significant association between higher child self‐regulation and suppressive parental reactions in the context of psychological IPV. Our findings are consistent with prior research suggesting Black parents who teach varied strategies for emotional expression may promote children's adaptation in high‐stress family environments. Macrosystem factors such as systemic racism and discrimination as well as the threat of family violence may shape how parents approach emotion socialization and the teaching of affective self‐expression and self‐regulation.