Upper elementary children today, while retaining many of the characteristics ascribed to them generations ago by theorists such as Piaget, Erikson, and Kohlberg, are different. Developmental characteristics across multiple domains remain relatively predictable for the upper elementary years, but they also reflect changes in society and school…

The present study utilized a short-term longitudinal research design to examine the hypothesis that shyness in preschoolers is differentially related to different aspects of emotion processing. Using teacher reports of shyness and performance measures of emotion processing, including (1) facial emotion recognition, (2) non-facial emotion…

This research project employs a historical methodology to analyze and characterize the growth of the knowledge base in gifted education following the U.S. Department of Education's (1993) report, "National Excellence: A Case for Developing America's Talent." Topical priorities and descriptors of inquiry are compared against the…

Three-, 5-, and 7-year-olds and adults (N = 64) listened to stories depicting 2 protagonists of different ages (infant and child or child and grownup) that encounter an entity that looks like a real (e.g., a snake) or an imaginary (e.g., a ghost) fear-inducing creature. Participants predicted and explained each protagonist's intensity of fear.…

In the author's fourth year of undergraduate studies at the University of Waterloo he had the opportunity to explore the benefits attained by children attending a summer camp by way of an academic literature review. The author worked with Dr. Troy Glover who has been commissioned by a group of camping associations to perform a study on the…

The Preschool Behavioral and Emotional Rating Scale (PreBERS) is a standardized, norm-referenced instrument that assesses the emotional and behavioral strengths of preschool children. Two studies that investigated the test-retest and inter-rater reliability of the PreBERS are reported. In the first study, teachers rated preschool children (N = 96)…

This article explores the research underpinning views of emotional well-being and its development in schools and classrooms. Research concerning the concepts of emotional intelligence, resilience and protective factors, mental health and young people and emotional regulation is examined and its implications interpreted. The author critically…

Gifted kids often share a list of common traits, but ultimately, they are individuals. They have their own strengths, their own weaknesses, and their own needs. One trait that many gifted children "do" share is asynchrony. In other words, gifted children may not follow a typical age appropriate time line. They may be markedly advanced, average, or…

The authors discuss why challenging behavior tends to occur during transitions. They offer strategies for planning and implementing more effective transitions, ideas for using transitions to teach social skills and emotional competencies, and a planning process for working individually with children who continue to have difficulty during…

Research on adolescent emotion has generally focused on expressions of emotion; however, there are reasons to believe that adolescents' experiences of emotion may be related to adolescent development in unique and important ways. This study examined the relation of adolescents' emotional experiences of conflict with their mothers to their…

The "care challenge" to moral psychology, articulated in the justice-care debate, has been borne out in a number of ways. Empirically, claims regarding gender difference in use of justice and care reasoning, gender bias claims regarding early forms of Kohlberg's scoring manual and claims regarding the centrality of cultural conceptions of…

This reflective essay describes the author's experiences as an observer in a behaviorist infant classroom. The author developed four categories of practice to describe what happened in the behaviorist infant room: (1) curricular focus on training typically developing infants to meet typical developmental milestones, (2) the use of highly…

An empirical typology of classroom emotional and behavioral adjustment was developed for preschool children living in urban poverty. Multistage hierarchical cluster analyses were applied to identify six distinct and reliable subtypes of classroom adjustment, differentiated by high and low levels of behavioral (aggressive, inattentive,…

Descriptive and comparative follow-up studies of young adult males with Asperger syndrome (AS) diagnosed in childhood, using both interview, self- and parent assessment instruments for the study of aspects of emotional well-being, social functioning, and cognitive-practical skills have not been performed in the past. One-hundred males with AS…

Developing people's emotional well-being and emotional engagement are official aims in social policy. A growing number of initiatives respond to diverse, often contradictory public, political and professional concerns about individuals' emotional needs. These concerns are a powerful discourse in "personalised learning". The article…