The development of emotional competence is an important milestone during early childhood. Beyond early experience within the family, the (preschool) classroom is a relevant socialisation context, and both teachers and peers may contribute to children's emotion-related outcomes. Tracking changes in the emotion regulation competence of N = 173…

To address the need for interventions targeting social emotional development and mental health of young children in South Africa, the "Mazi Umntanakho" ('know your child') digital tool was co-designed, and piloted with caregivers and 3-5-year-old children involved in home visiting programmes promoting early childhood development. The aim…

Shyness, which is characterized by social withdrawal behaviours and approaching-withdrawal conflicted social motivations, is suggested to influence children's social-emotional development. This study examined the association between shyness and social-emotional development among Chinese children aged 3 to 12. A systematic search of both Chinese…

Economic difficulties in early childhood are associated with significant adverse long-term socioemotional and cognitive outcomes. In this study, we examine an understudied financial stressor that is often observed during periods of high unemployment--transient familial financial stress (TFS). We use the early childhood longitudinal study--(birth)…

Children's ability to understand and infer the thoughts and feelings of others influences how they develop a unique view of the world. Examining developmental factors that impact young children's success in both social and cognitive domains has important implications for advancing our current knowledge of social cognition. The purpose of this…

The current study examines associations among parents' school readiness beliefs, home-based involvement, and measures of school readiness using data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 2010-2011 (N = 13,999). A structural equation model was estimated, and results show that parents' school readiness beliefs and…

The goal of this study was to examine longitudinal associations among unsociability and indices of socio-emotional functioning in a sample of young Chinese children. Participants were N = 360 children (M[subscript age] = 4.72 years, SD = 0.67) recruited from kindergarten classes in an urban area of China. Assessments of unsociability and…

Maternal singing is considered vital to infant well-being. This study focuses on vocal emotion expressions in infant-directed singing among mothers in war conditions. It examines the questions: (a) how traumatic war events and mental health problems are associated with the content and valence of vocal emotion expressions and (b) how these emotion…

The current study examined whether young children's executive functions and emotionality are related to childcare experiences and whether they work as mediators explaining the associations between childcare experiences and early school outcomes. Findings from a national sample of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD)…

Social-emotional comprehension involves encoding, interpreting, and reasoning about social-emotional information, and self-regulating. This study examined the mediating pathways through which social-emotional comprehension and social behaviour are related to academic outcomes in two ethnically and socioeconomically heterogeneous samples totaling…

Using data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study Kindergarten Class of 2010-2011 (n = 11,000), this study examined the developmental outcomes of 5-year-old children in multigrade classrooms (combined prekindergarten and kindergarten classrooms serving 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds) compared with those of 5-year-olds attending kindergarten-only…

This study explored the development of theory of mind (ToM) in 80 Swedish-speaking 3- to 5-year-olds, a previously unstudied language and culture. The ToM scale was translated and tested in a Swedish context. The results show that the ToM abilities improve significantly with age. In addition, a gender difference was observed for the whole sample,…

The present study applied state-space grid analysis to describe how preschooler-mother dyads co-regulate emotion in the Strange Situation. Second-to-second mother and child affect during pre-separation play (baseline) and the final reunion (post perturbation) episodes of the Strange Situation were coded for 80 dyads. Change in emotion…

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the roles of emotional comprehension and representational drawing skill in children's expressive drawing. Fifty 7- to 10-year-olds were asked to produce two (happy and sad) expressive drawings, two representational drawings (drawing of a man running and drawing of a house) and to answer the…

Children who are able to recognize others' emotions are successful in a variety of socioemotional domains, yet we know little about how school-aged children's abilities develop, particularly in the family context. We hypothesized that children develop emotion recognition skill as a function of parents' own emotion-related beliefs,…