In this article, the forms and role of compliments in French are analysed to identify preferred behaviours in two types of discourse. Forty-five instances of compliments were extracted from everyday interactions and 83 instances from television programmes (talk-shows and talent shows). The linguistic-discursive approach used provides the key to understanding these corpora, revealing processes specific to each genre. In everyday interaction, the use of situational deictics, onomatopoeia, dislocated forms, elliptical structures or the intensifier ‘too’ in its high degree value is favoured, whereas in television programmes, it is rather the high degree of axiological praise, the repetition or successive use of adverbs, or the amplification of paraverbal and extraverbal signals (emphatic intonation or detachment of syllables in certain key terms) are preferred. It shows that ordinary interactions give priority to situational anchoring and a certain spontaneity, whereas television programmes tend to intensify the expression of compliments to capture the audience’s attention by turning exchanges into a spectacle.

The interdisciplinary field of developmental psychopathology has made great strides by including context into theoretical and empirical approaches to studying risk and resilience. Perhaps no context is more important to the developing child than their relationships with their caregivers (typically a child’s parents), as caregivers are a key source of stimulation and nurturance to young children. Coupled with the high degree of brain plasticity in the earliest years of life, these caregiving relationships have an immense influence on shaping behavioral outcomes relevant to developmental psychopathology. In this article, we discuss three areas within caregiving relationships: (1) caregiver–child interactions in everyday, naturalistic settings; (2) caregivers’ social cognitions about their child; and (3) caregivers’ broader social and cultural context. For each area, we provide an overview of its significance to the field, identify existing knowledge gaps, and offer potential approaches for bridging these gaps to foster growth in the field. Lastly, given that one value of a scientific discipline is its ability to produce research useful in guiding real-world decisions related to policy and practice, we encourage developmental psychopathology to consider that a focus on caregiving, a modifiable target, supports this mission.