The relations of children’s emotion knowledge to their observed social play and reticent/uninvolved behavior in preschool: Moderation by effortful control

Evidence for Protective Effects of Peer Play in the Early Years: Better Peer Play Ability at Age 3 Years Predicts Lower Risks of Externalising and Internalising Problems at Age 7 Years in a Longitudinal Cohort Analysis

Peer play ability may be a protective factor against childhood mental health difficulties but there is lack of empirical evidence to support this hypothesis. We conducted longitudinal structural equation modelling study over a population cohort (N = 1676) to examine the effect of age 3 peer play ability on children's age 7 mental health outcomes (measured by the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire subscales). We modelled effects for the entire population and two sub-groups at high-risk for mental health problems based on age 3 temperament. Controlling for demographic variables, temperament, maternal distress, play with parents and number of siblings, better peer play ability at age 3 years predicted lower risk of problems on all 4 SDQ subscales at age 7 years for the general population. For the low-persistence subgroup, better peer play ability at age 3 predicted lower risk of age 7 hyperactivity, emotional and peer problems, whereas better peer play ability at age 3 predicted only lower risk of age 7 hyperactivity for the high-reactivity group. Taken together our results provide evidence that supports the hypothesis that early peer play ability may be a protective factor against later mental health difficulties. We conclude that further research aimed at establishing causation is worth pursuing.

Examining the influence of shyness on children's helping and comforting behaviour

Introduction

Shy children, who tend to feel anxious around others and withdraw from social interactions, are found to be less prosocial than their not-shy peers in some studies, though not in others. To examine the contexts in which shy children may be more or less likely to engage in prosocial behaviour, we compared children's willingness and ability to intervene during in-person tasks that differed in social engagement demands and complexity, factors that have been conflated in past research.

Methods

We presented 42, 3.5- to 4.5-year-old children with prosocial problems that varied, in a 2 x 2 within-subjects design, by the type of intervention required (i.e., simple helping or complex comforting) and the source of the problem (i.e., social: within the experimenter's personal space; or object: a target object distanced from her).

Results

Most of the children acted prosocially, with little prompting, in the two helping tasks and in the object-centered comforting task. In contrast, fewer than half of the children acted prosocially in the social-centered comforting task. Shyer children were not less likely to intervene in any of the four tasks, but they were slower to intervene in the object-centred comforting task, in which the experimenter was upset about a broken toy.

Discussion

Thus, providing social-centered comfort to a recently-introduced adult is challenging for young children, regardless of shyness, though shy children do show hesitancy with object-centered comforting. Further, these findings provide insights into the methodological challenges of disentangling children's prosocial motivation and understanding, and we propose solutions to these challenges for future research.

More to the story than executive function: Effortful control soon after injury predicts long-term functional and social outcomes following pediatric traumatic brain injury in young children

OBJECTIVE

To examine the impact of early traumatic brain injury (TBI) on effortful control (EC) over time and the relationship of EC and executive functioning (EF) to long-term functional and social outcomes.

METHOD

Parents of children (N = 206, ages 3-7) with moderate-to-severe TBI or orthopedic injuries (OIs) rated EC using the Child Behavior Questionnaire at 1 (pre-injury), 6, 12, and 18 months post-injury. Child functioning and social competence were assessed at 7 years post-injury. Mixed models examined the effects of injury, time since injury, and their interaction on EC. General linear models examined the associations of pre-injury EC and EC at 18 months with long-term functional and social outcomes. Models controlled for EF to assess the unique contribution of EC to outcomes.

RESULTS

Children with severe TBI had significantly lower EC than both the OI and moderate TBI groups at each post-injury time point. Both pre-injury and 18-month EC were associated with long-term outcomes. Among those with low EC at baseline, children with moderate and severe TBI had more functional impairment than those with OI; however, no group differences were noted at high levels of EC. EC had main effects on parent-reported social competence that did not vary by injury type.

CONCLUSIONS

Findings suggest that EC is sensitive to TBI effects and is a unique predictor of functional outcomes, independent of EF. High EC could serve as a protective factor, and as such measures of EC could be used to identify children for more intensive intervention.

Growth in emotion understanding across early childhood: A cohort-sequential model of firstborn children across the transition to siblinghood

Emotion understanding develops rapidly in early childhood. Firstborn children (N = 231, 55% girls/45% boys, 86% White, 5% Black, 3% Asian, 4% Latinx, M_age  = 29.92 months) were recruited into a longitudinal study from 2004 to 2008 in the United States and administered a series of tasks assessing eight components of young children's emotion understanding from ages 1 to 5. Cohort sequential analysis across three cohorts (1-, 2-, and 3-year-olds) demonstrated a progression of children's emotion understanding from basic emotion identification to an understanding of false-belief emotions, even after controlling for children's verbal ability. Emotion understanding scores were related to children's theory of mind and parent reports of empathy, but not emotional reactivity, providing evidence of both convergent and discriminant validity.

The Adaptive Test of Emotion Knowledge for 3-to 9-Year-Olds: Psychometric Properties and Validity

Children with an advanced knowledge of emotions are generally more socially competent, less likely to suffer from psychopathology, and more likely to succeed in school, both socially and academically. The assessment of children's emotion knowledge has thus gained importance in recent decades - both in psychiatric practice and in developmental and educational psychology. However, there is still a lack of appropriate instruments for assessing children's emotion knowledge in a performance test reliably, and for a broad age range. The Adaptive Test of Emotion Knowledge (ATEM 3-9) is a newly developed measure which encompasses seven components of emotion knowledge in 3-9-year-olds. The ATEM 3-9 is an adaptive test which uses skip and dropout rules to adjust for children's varying levels of knowledge. In addition to German, the ATEM has been translated into English and Hebrew. The German norming sample of the ATEM 3-9 comprises N = 882 (54% female, 21% bilingual) children between the ages of 3 and 9 years, who were divided into seven age groups. Test items, which are ordered according to the item response theory, showed a good fit to a seven-dimensional model reflecting the seven components. The internal consistencies of the dimensions are acceptable to good. Construct validity was examined by means of correlations with other measures of emotion knowledge, as well as measures on language skills and executive functions in a subsample. This resulted in medium size correlations in the expected directions. In addition, children with externalizing and internalizing disorders who were recruited in psychiatric in- and outpatient clinics showed deficits in various components of emotion knowledge when compared to their agemates in the norming sample. Overall, the ATEM 3-9 is well suited to measure individual components of emotion knowledge in children and to obtain a differentiated picture of the various aspects of emotion knowledge. The ATEM 3-9 thus supports the investigation of the development of social-emotional competencies in normative development (e.g., school readiness) and in social-emotional-learning interventions. Furthermore, it is suitable as an instrument for the differentiated assessment of (progress of) children's emotion knowledge in clinical child psychology and psychiatry.