Prospective relations among preschoolers' play, coping, and adjustment as moderated by stressful events

Pretend play as abstraction: Implications for early development and beyond

Humans are the only species that engages in sustained, complex pretend play. As pretend play is practically ubiquitous across cultures, it might support or afford a context for developmental advances during the juvenile period that have implications for functioning in adulthood. Early in development, learning to separate our thoughts from reality is practiced in pretend play and is associated with changes not just in cognition, but in emotional and social domains as well. Specifically, pretend play affords opportunities to engage in abstractions that could support abilities such as perspective-taking, emotion recognition and regulation, and cooperation and negotiation in childhood. In turn, the abstraction skills promoted by early pretend play might underlie creativity, innovation, and our capacity to feel empathy and moral obligation to others in later childhood and adulthood. In fact, because pretend play affords sharing our abstractions with others, it might be an early context for behaviors that ultimately promote the shared abstractions of human culture itself.

You Pretend, I Laugh: Associations Between Dyadic Pretend Play and Children's Display of Positive Emotions

Background: Understanding how pretend play is related to positive emotions is important for supporting children's development and promoting their wellbeing. However, previous studies have mainly examined this association at individual levels and overlooked the potential links at interpersonal levels. This is an important knowledge gap because pretend play is commonly performed in social contexts. The current study investigates how peer pretend play is associated with children's display of positive emotions at both individual and dyadic levels.

Methods: One hundred and eight Chinese children (M_age = 8.95 years, SD = 0.99, 51.9% girls) were observed playing in peer dyads with toys. An interaction of 10 min was coded for each child's pretend play behavior, social and emotional pretend play themes, and display of positive emotions. Multilevel modeling was used to examine age and gender differences in peer pretend play. Actor–Partner Interdependence Models (APIM) were estimated to test the hypothesized associations between dyadic pretend play and children' display of positive emotions.

Results: Compared to children whose playmates engaged in less pretend play, children whose playmates engaged in more pretend play were more likely to display positive emotions (p = 0.021). Additionally, children's display of positive emotions was predicted by both their own (p = 0.027) and their playmate's (p = 0.01) pretend play with emotional themes. Compared to younger children, older children were less likely to engage in pretend play (p = 0.002), but more likely to engage in pretend play with social themes (p = 0.03) when the total frequency of pretend play was controlled for. Boys were 4.9 times and 2.16 times as likely as girls to create aggressive pretend themes (p < 0.001) and non-aggressive negative pretend themes (p = 0.007), respectively. No significant gender differences were found in positive pretend themes.

Conclusions: Pretending with peers may increase not only children's own, but also their play partner's display of positive emotions. Pretend play may not simply decline in middle childhood as previously assumed.

From Research to Clinical Settings: Validation of the Affect in Play Scale - Preschool Brief Version in a Sample of Preschool and School Aged Italian Children

Affect in Play Scale-Preschool (APS-P) is one of the few standardized tools to measure pretend play. APS-P is an effective measure of symbolic play, able to detect both cognitive and affective dimensions which classically designated play in children, but often are evaluated separately and are scarcely integrated. The scale uses 5 min standardized play task with a set of toys. Recently the scale was extended from 6 to 10 years old and validated in Italy preschool and school-aged children. Some of the main limitations of this measure are that it requires videotaping, verbatim transcripts, and an extensive scoring training, which could compromise its clinical utility. For these reasons, a Brief version of the measure was developed by the original authors. This paper will focus on an APS-P Brief Version and its Extended Version through ages (6-10 years), which consists "in vivo" coding. This study aimed to evaluate construct and external validity of this APS-P Brief Version and its Extended Version in a sample of 538 Italian children aged 4-to-10 years. Confirmatory factor analysis yielded a two correlated factor structure including an affective and a cognitive factor. APS-P-BR and its Extended Version factor scores strongly related to APS-P Extended Version factor scores. Significant relationships were found with a divergent thinking task. Results suggest that the APS-P-BR and its Extended Version is an encouraging brief measure assessing pretend play using toys. It would easily substitute the APS-P and its Extended Version in clinical and research settings, reducing time and difficulties in scoring procedures and maintaining the same strengths.

How Do You Play? A Comparison among Children Aged 4-10

Pretend play has a central role for children's development and psychological well-being. However, there is a paucity of standardized and valid measures specifically devoted to assess the core domains involved in play activities in preschool and primary school children. The Affect in Play Scale-Preschool (4–5 years) and the Affect in Play Scale-Preschool Extended Version (6–10 years) are semi-structured parallel tools designed to explore child's cognitive and affective processes using a standardized play task. The current study administered this 5-min play task to 538 Italian children aged 4–10. The purposes were to compare play abilities in boys vs. girls and in preschool vs. primary school children, to correlate pretend play with divergent thinking and to evaluate the structural validity of the measure along the considered age span. No differences, excepting for Organization, were found between boys and girls, whereas school age children reported higher play abilities then the younger ones. External validity was assessed using correlational analysis with the divergent thinking task (the Alternate Uses Test) for preschoolers and primary school-aged children, in line with findings from Manova. Construct validity, assessed through the Confirmatory Factor Analysis, showed good fits for the two-factor model with cognitive and affective factor for both the Affect in Play Scale-Preschool and its Extended Version. A multi-group factor analysis suggested a partial invariance of the two-factor model across preschool (4–5 years old) and primary school-aged (6–10 years old) children. Results supported the use of the Affect in Play Scale-Preschool and its Extended Version as adequate measures to assess the interplay of cognitive and affective skills in preschool and school age children. The discussion highlights clinical and research implications linked to the possibility to have a unique play task able to assess child's affective and cognitive abilities throughout a quite wide life span (from 4 to 10 years old).

The Meaning of Emotional Overinvolvement in Early Development: Prospective Relations With Child Behavior Problems

Emotional overinvolvement (EOI) in parents’ Five Minute Speech Samples (FMSSs; Magaña-Amato, 1993) is thought to measure overconcern and enmeshment with one’s child. Although related to maladaptive outcomes in studies of adult children, FMSS EOI evidences varied relations with behavior problems in studies with young children. These mixed findings may indicate that certain FMSS EOI criteria reflect inappropriate and excessive involvement with adult children, but do not indicate maladaptive processes when parenting younger children. Thus, this study evaluated relations of each FMSS EOI criterion with changes in child behavior problems from preschool to first grade in a community sample of 223 child–mother dyads (47.98% female; Wave 1 M(age) 49.08 months; 56.50% Hispanic/Latina). Maternal FMSS EOI ratings were obtained at Wave 1, and independent examiners rated child externalizing and internalizing behavior problems at Wave 1 and again 2 years later. Path analyses indicated that both the self-sacrifice/overprotection (SSOP) and statements of attitude (SOAs) FMSS EOI criteria predicted increased externalizing problems. In contrast, excessive detail and exaggerated praise were not related to child externalizing behavior problems, and Emotional Display was not evident in this sample. None of the FMSS EOI criteria evidenced significant relations with internalizing behavior problems. Multigroup comparisons indicated that the effect of SOAs on externalizing behavior problems was significant for boys but not for girls, and there were no significant group differences by race/ethnicity. These findings point to the salience of SSOP and SOAs for understanding the developmental significance of EOI in early development.