Virginia Slaughter

9.4k total citations · 1 hit paper
129 papers, 5.9k citations indexed

About

Virginia Slaughter is a scholar working on Developmental and Educational Psychology, Social Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience. According to data from OpenAlex, Virginia Slaughter has authored 129 papers receiving a total of 5.9k indexed citations (citations by other indexed papers that have themselves been cited), including 83 papers in Developmental and Educational Psychology, 58 papers in Social Psychology and 51 papers in Cognitive Neuroscience. Recurrent topics in Virginia Slaughter's work include Child and Animal Learning Development (80 papers), Autism Spectrum Disorder Research (24 papers) and Action Observation and Synchronization (16 papers). Virginia Slaughter is often cited by papers focused on Child and Animal Learning Development (80 papers), Autism Spectrum Disorder Research (24 papers) and Action Observation and Synchronization (16 papers). Virginia Slaughter collaborates with scholars based in Australia, United States and United Kingdom. Virginia Slaughter's co-authors include Candida C. Peterson, Alison Gopnik, Henry M. Wellman, Julie D. Henry, Kana Imuta, Susan Carey, Mark Nielsen, Susan Johnson, Paul E. Dux and Dana Schneider and has published in prestigious journals such as Psychological Bulletin, PLoS ONE and NeuroImage.

In The Last Decade

Virginia Slaughter

125 papers receiving 5.6k citations

Hit Papers

Theory of mind and prosocial behavior in childhood: A met... 2016 2026 2019 2022 2016 50 100 150 200 250
What are hit papers?

Hit papers significantly outperform the citation benchmark for their cohort. A paper qualifies if it has ≥500 total citations, achieves ≥1.5× the top-1% citation threshold for papers in the same subfield and year (this is the minimum needed to enter the top 1%, not the average within it), or reaches the top citation threshold in at least one of its specific research topics.

  1. Theory of mind and prosocial behavior in childhood: A meta-analytic review.
    2016 287 citations Kana Imuta, Virginia Slaughter et al. profile →

Peers — A (Enhanced Table)

Peers by citation overlap · career bar shows stage (early→late) cites · hero ref

Name h Career Trend Papers Cites
Virginia Slaughter Australia 42 3.6k 2.3k 2.1k 1.3k 1.1k 129 5.9k
Ted Ruffman New Zealand 47 4.1k 1.1× 2.7k 1.2× 3.1k 1.5× 1.5k 1.1× 1.1k 1.0× 124 8.0k
Candida C. Peterson Australia 48 4.2k 1.2× 2.2k 1.0× 2.3k 1.1× 1.7k 1.3× 1.1k 1.1× 149 6.8k
Chris Moore Canada 48 5.5k 1.5× 2.7k 1.2× 3.5k 1.7× 1.4k 1.0× 1.2k 1.1× 139 8.7k
Louis J. Moses United States 31 4.2k 1.2× 2.1k 0.9× 2.5k 1.2× 1.2k 0.9× 1.4k 1.3× 41 6.9k
Janet Wilde Astington Canada 32 6.0k 1.7× 2.3k 1.0× 2.5k 1.2× 1.2k 0.9× 1.7k 1.5× 63 7.7k
Harlene Hayne New Zealand 48 3.6k 1.0× 1.6k 0.7× 3.2k 1.6× 896 0.7× 927 0.8× 155 6.4k
Atsushi Senju United Kingdom 37 2.5k 0.7× 1.8k 0.8× 4.5k 2.2× 894 0.7× 602 0.6× 92 6.2k
Philippe Rochat United States 47 3.3k 0.9× 2.7k 1.2× 2.4k 1.2× 597 0.5× 560 0.5× 124 6.0k
Beate Sodian Germany 41 3.5k 1.0× 1.7k 0.8× 2.2k 1.1× 698 0.5× 1.3k 1.2× 164 5.3k
George Butterworth United Kingdom 38 4.1k 1.1× 1.9k 0.8× 2.5k 1.2× 616 0.5× 799 0.7× 94 6.4k

Countries citing papers authored by Virginia Slaughter

Since Specialization
Citations

This map shows the geographic impact of Virginia Slaughter's research. It shows the number of citations coming from papers published by authors working in each country. You can also color the map by specialization and compare the number of citations received by Virginia Slaughter with the expected number of citations based on a country's size and research output (numbers larger than one mean the country cites Virginia Slaughter more than expected).

Fields of papers citing papers by Virginia Slaughter

Since Specialization
Physical SciencesHealth SciencesLife SciencesSocial Sciences

This network shows the impact of papers produced by Virginia Slaughter. Nodes represent research fields, and links connect fields that are likely to share authors. Colored nodes show fields that tend to cite the papers produced by Virginia Slaughter. The network helps show where Virginia Slaughter may publish in the future.

Co-authorship network of co-authors of Virginia Slaughter

This figure shows the co-authorship network connecting the top 25 collaborators of Virginia Slaughter. A scholar is included among the top collaborators of Virginia Slaughter based on the total number of citations received by their joint publications. Widths of edges represent the number of papers authors have co-authored together. Node borders signify the number of papers an author published with Virginia Slaughter. Virginia Slaughter is excluded from the visualization to improve readability, since they are connected to all nodes in the network.

All Works

20 of 20 papers shown
1.
Ruffman, Ted, Kana Imuta, & Virginia Slaughter. (2025). A Review and Critique of Studies Examining Empathy in Infants. Human Development. 69(4). 171–190. 1 indexed citations
2.
Slaughter, Virginia, et al.. (2024). From a crisis management tool to proactive death education in Swedish preschools. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood. 27(1). 52–65. 3 indexed citations
3.
Slaughter, Virginia, et al.. (2023). Revisiting the video deficit in technology-saturated environments: Successful imitation from people, screens, and social robots. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology. 232. 105673–105673. 4 indexed citations
4.
Slaughter, Virginia, et al.. (2023). Not just quantity but also quality of language: Cross-cultural comparisons of maternal mental state talk in New Zealand, Australia, and China. PLoS ONE. 18(3). e0282480–e0282480. 4 indexed citations
5.
Davis, Jacqueline, Jonathan Redshaw, Thomas Suddendorf, et al.. (2021). Does Neonatal Imitation Exist? Insights From a Meta-Analysis of 336 Effect Sizes. Perspectives on Psychological Science. 16(6). 1373–1397. 28 indexed citations
6.
Redshaw, Jonathan, Mark Nielsen, Virginia Slaughter, et al.. (2019). Individual differences in neonatal “imitation” fail to predict early social cognitive behaviour. Developmental Science. 23(2). e12892–e12892. 9 indexed citations
7.
Davidson, Rebecca M., et al.. (2019). Preschool children overimitate robots, but do so less than they overimitate humans. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology. 191. 104702–104702. 16 indexed citations
8.
Peterson, Candida C., et al.. (2019). Children’s moral evaluations of prosocial and self-interested lying in relation to age, ToM, cognitive empathy and culture. European Journal of Developmental Psychology. 17(4). 504–526. 13 indexed citations
9.
Slaughter, Virginia, et al.. (2018). Sources of children's knowledge about death and dying. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B Biological Sciences. 373(1754). 20170267–20170267. 30 indexed citations
10.
Imuta, Kana, et al.. (2017). 心の理論と個人主義vs.集団主義,共感性との関連 : 日本とオーストラリア成人による検討 (ヒューマンコミュニケーション基礎). IEICE technical report. Speech. 116(436). 59–63. 1 indexed citations
11.
Wiles, Janet, Marie Bodén, Scott Heath, et al.. (2016). Hand in Hand: Tools and techniques for understanding children's touch with a social robot. Human-Robot Interaction. 437–438. 5 indexed citations
12.
O’Haire, Marguerite E., Samantha J. McKenzie, Alan M. Beck, & Virginia Slaughter. (2015). Animals may act as social buffers: Skin conductance arousal in children with autism spectrum disorder in a social context. Developmental Psychobiology. 57(5). 584–595. 76 indexed citations
13.
Slaughter, Virginia, et al.. (2014). Cultural Variations in the Development of Mind Reading. Child Development Perspectives. 8(4). 237–241. 43 indexed citations
14.
Schneider, Dana, Virginia Slaughter, & Paul E. Dux. (2014). What do we know about implicit false-belief tracking?. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review. 22(1). 1–12. 56 indexed citations
15.
O’Haire, Marguerite E., Samantha J. McKenzie, Sandra McCune, & Virginia Slaughter. (2013). Effects of Classroom Animal-Assisted Activities on Social Functioning in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder. The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine. 20(3). 162–168. 75 indexed citations
16.
17.
O’Haire, Marguerite E., Jacquie Rand, Samantha J. McKenzie, & Virginia Slaughter. (2010). Guinea pigs as classroom pets. Queensland's institutional digital repository (The University of Queensland). 1 indexed citations
18.
Slaughter, Virginia, et al.. (2007). Death Understanding and Fear of Death in Young Children. Clinical Child Psychology and Psychiatry. 12(4). 525–535. 94 indexed citations
19.
Peterson, Candida C., Virginia Slaughter, & Jessica Paynter. (2007). Social maturity and theory of mind in typically developing children and those on the autism spectrum. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry. 48(12). 1243–1250. 78 indexed citations
20.
Slaughter, Virginia. (2005). Young children's understanding of death. Australian Psychologist. 40(3). 179–186. 85 indexed citations

Rankless uses publication and citation data sourced from OpenAlex, an open and comprehensive bibliographic database. While OpenAlex provides broad and valuable coverage of the global research landscape, it—like all bibliographic datasets—has inherent limitations. These include incomplete records, variations in author disambiguation, differences in journal indexing, and delays in data updates. As a result, some metrics and network relationships displayed in Rankless may not fully capture the entirety of a scholar's output or impact.

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