The continuous impact of cognitive flexibility on the development of emotion understanding in children aged 4 and 5 years: A longitudinal study

Does sibling family structure matter in the emotion understanding development in preschoolers?

The objective of the study was to investigate the impact of sibling family structure -including the number of children, age gaps, presence of a twin, sibling position, and gender composition - on emotion understanding and its development in children aged 5-6 years. A total of 409 preschoolers participated. Emotion understanding was assessed using The Test of Emotion Comprehension at the baseline and then again at a 1-year follow-up. In addition to the primary variables, executive functions (comprising visual and verbal working memory and cognitive flexibility) and non-verbal intelligence were controlled for in the analysis. We used the Dimensional Change Card Sort task to assess cognitive flexibility, the Sentence Repetition and Memory for Designs subtests of NEPSY-II to measure verbal and visual working memory, respectively, and Raven's Coloured Progressive Matrices to assess non-verbal intelligence. Sibling data were obtained from the parent surveys, while psychological assessments were administered to children by psychologists. While sibling family structure influences emotion understanding, it does not significantly affect its development over a year. A more advanced reflective emotional understanding is associated with higher cognitive flexibility and having a younger sibling, compared to other sibling positions. The results of this study offer additional knowledge for parents, educators, family therapists, and child psychologists seeking a deeper understanding of emotional development in children. These professionals can design interventions and programs that leverage sibling and peer relationships to foster emotional development, encourage collaboration through age-diverse activities, and promote caregiving roles to enhance family and group dynamics.

Tact Training with Augmentative Gestural Support for Language Disorder and Challenging Behaviors: A Case Study in an Italian Community-Based Setting

BACKGROUND

Gestures or manual signing are valid options for augmentative and alternative communication. However, the data in the literature are limited to a few neurodevelopmental disorders, and less is known about its application in the community setting.

OBJECTIVES

This case report explores the feasibility and preliminary efficacy of tact training with augmentative gestural support intervention for a child affected by a language disorder with challenging behaviors in a community setting.

METHODS

Baseline assessments were conducted using the Verbal Behavior Milestone Assessment and Placement Program (VB-MAPP) and Griffiths Mental Developmental Scale-III (GMDS-III). The patient received six months of standard treatment, consisting of neuropsychomotor and speech therapy each twice a week, with improved cooperation in proposed activities, but no improvement in language. Afterward, a total of 24 sessions of tact training with augmentative gestural support interventions were performed. Data were collected by two independent observers and analyzed to measure language and behavioral outcomes.

RESULTS

VB-MAPP scores increased form minimal communication and social interaction at T0 (baseline) to improved compliance but unchanged language skills at T1 (after standard therapy). After tack training with augmentative gestural support (T2), VB-MAPP scores showed significant improvements, with notable increases in verbal operants, independence in communication, and intersubjectivity skills. GMDS-III scores at T2 also demonstrated growth in social, communicative, and cognitive skills. Additionally, challenging behaviors were reduced by more than 70% and nearly resolved by the end of the intervention.

CONCLUSIONS

Personalized approaches appear to be essential for interventions tailored to developmental age. Further research is needed to determine the effectiveness of these approaches for other neurodevelopmental disorders, identify patient characteristics that may be predictors of outcomes to tailor the intervention, and explore the generalization of the results obtained with these strategies.

Developing conceptions of forgiveness across the lifespan

Understanding how to respond to transgressions is central to cooperation, yet little is known about how individuals understand the consequences of these responses. Accordingly, the current study explored children's (ages 5-9), adolescents' (ages 11-14), and adults' (N = 544, predominantly White, ~50% female, tested in 2021) understandings of three such responses-forgiveness, punishment, and doing nothing. At all ages, participants differentiated between the consequences of these three responses. Forgiveness was associated with more positive and fewer negative outcomes, while the opposite was true for punishment and doing nothing. With age, participants were less likely to expect positive outcomes, and this effect was strongest for punishment and doing nothing. The results of this study allow novel insights into reasoning about three important response strategies.

Age Three: Milestone in the Development of Cognitive Flexibility

Although the cognitive flexibility (CF) of preschool children has been extensively studied, the development of CF in children around three years old is unclear. This study aimed to investigate the CF of three-year-olds in a stepwise rule-induction task (sRIT) comprising nine steps in which children are encouraged to switch attention to a new rule and then implicitly inhibit the old one. A pair of boxes was displayed at each step, and children aged 2.5 to 3.5 years were asked to select the target. When children learned a rule (e.g., the shape rule), they were encouraged to switch rules through negative feedback. The results showed that most children (81.10%) passed at least one of the two sets of the sRIT, and children over the age of three years performed better than those under three years. Additionally, a positive correlation existed between rule switching and rule generalization, whereby the old rule was implicitly inhibited. These findings indicate that age three might be a milestone in the development of CF, and inhibitory control might play a vital role in rule switching.

Preschoolers' cognitive flexibility and emotion understanding: a developmental perspective

Introduction

Cognitive flexibility is the ability to adapt to changing tasks or problems, while emotion understanding is the ability to interpret emotional cues and information in different contexts. Both abilities are crucial for preschoolers' socialization.

Methods

This study selected 532 preschool children aged 3-6 years from two kindergartens in a central province of China. The Dimensional Change Card Sorting (DCCS) task and emotion understanding tasks were used to investigate the developmental characteristics of cognitive flexibility, emotion understanding abilities, and their relationship.

Results

The results showed: (1) For cognitive flexibility, children older than 5 years scored significantly higher than younger children, and girls scored higher than boys. (2) For facial emotion recognition: (i) Children's recognition scores for happy, sad, and angry expressions were significantly higher than fear; children could accurately recognize happy, sad, and angry emotions by age 3, while fear recognition developed rapidly after age 5; (ii) Girls scored higher in recognizing fearful faces than boys. (3) For situational emotion understanding: (i) Children's development followed the hierarchical order of external, desire, clue, and belief-based understanding. Situational and desire-based understanding already reached high levels by age 3, while clue and belief-based understanding developed quickly after age 5; (ii) Girls scored higher than boys in belief-based emotion understanding. (4) Cognitive flexibility significantly predicted children's facial emotion recognition, external and desire-based emotion understanding.

Discussion

Parents and teachers should cultivate children's cognitive flexibility and provide personalized support. They should also fully grasp the characteristics of children's emotion understanding development, systematically nurture their emotion understanding abilities, and leverage cognitive flexibility training to improve their emotion understanding.

Predicting the Social-Emotional Competence Based on Childhood Trauma, Internalized Shame, Disability/Shame Scheme, Cognitive Flexibility, Distress Tolerance and Alexithymia in an Iranian Sample Using Bayesian Regression

The purpose of this study was to predict Social Emotional Competence based on childhood trauma, internalized shame, disability/shame scheme, cognitive flexibility, distress tolerance, and alexithymia in an Iranian sample using Bayesian regression. The participants in this research were a sample of 326 (85.3% female and 14.7% male) people living in Tehran in 2021 who were selected by convenience sampling through online platforms. The survey assessments included demographic characteristics (age and gender), presence of childhood trauma, social-emotional competence, internalized shame, the Toronto Alexithymia scales, Young's measure of disability/shame together with measures of cognitive flexibility and distress tolerance. The results from Bayesian regression and Bayesian Model Averaging (BMA) indicated that internalized shame, cognitive flexibility and distress tolerance can be predictive of Social Emotional Competence. These results suggested that Social Emotional Competence can be explained by some important personality factors.

The Impact of Gross Motor Skills on the Development of Emotion Understanding in Children Aged 3-6 Years: The Mediation Role of Executive Functions

This study investigates the impact of gross motor skills on the development of emotion understanding and the role of executive function in the relation between gross motor skills and emotion understanding. A total of 662 children were tested for gross motor skills, emotion understanding, and executive function. Regression analysis showed that gross motor skills were significantly related to executive function. Multiple regression analyses showed that gross motor skills and executive function were significant predictors for emotion understanding. Furthermore, mediation analysis showed that executive function mediated the impact of gross motor skills on emotion understanding. Gross motor skills contributed to emotion understanding by improving children's executive function. The findings imply that a pathway from gross motor skills to emotion understanding is mediated by executive function, which offers a novel perspective on the developmental mechanisms of children's emotion understanding.

Neurophysiological and behavioral effects of multisession prefrontal tDCS and concurrent cognitive remediation training in patients with autism spectrum disorder (ASD): A double-blind, randomized controlled fNIRS study

BACKGROUND

The clinical effects and neurophysiological mechanisms of prefrontal tDCS and concurrent cognitive remediation training in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) remain unclear.

OBJECTIVE

This two-armed, double-blind, randomized, sham-controlled trial aimed to investigate the beneficial effects of tDCS combined with concurrent cognitive remediation training on adolescents and young adults with ASD.

METHODS

Participants were randomly assigned to either active or sham tDCS groups and received 1.5 mA prefrontal tDCS with left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex cathode placement and right supraorbital region anode placement for 20 min over two consecutive weeks. tDCS was delivered concurrently with a computerized cognitive remediation training program. Social functioning and its underlying cognitive processes, as well as prefrontal resting-state functional connectivity (rsFC), were measured.

RESULTS

The results from 41 participants indicated that multisession prefrontal tDCS, compared to sham tDCS, significantly enhanced the social functioning of ASD individuals [F(1,39) = 4.75, p = .035, η_p² = 0.11]. This improvement was associated with enhanced emotion recognition [F(1,39) = 8.34, p = .006, η_p² = 0.18] and cognitive flexibility [F(1,39) = 4.91, p = .033, η_p² = 0.11]. Specifically, this tDCS protocol optimized information processing efficiency [F(1,39) = 4.43, p = .042, η_p² = 0.10], and the optimization showed a trend to be associated with enhanced rsFC in the right medial prefrontal cortex (ρ = 0.339, pFDR = .083).

CONCLUSION

Multisession tDCS with left dlPFC cathode placement and right supraorbital region anode placement paired with concurrent cognitive remediation training promoted social functioning in individuals with ASD. This appeared to be associated with the enhancement of the functional connectivity of the right medial PFC, a major hub for flexible social information processing, allowing these individuals to process information more efficiently in response to different social situations.

TRIAL REGISTRATION

ClinicalTrials.gov (ID: NCT03814083).

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.

Negative affective processing is associated with cognitive control in early childhood: An fNIRS study. ANNUAL INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE OF THE IEEE ENGINEERING IN MEDICINE AND BIOLOGY SOCIETY. IEEE ENGINEERING IN MEDICINE AND BIOLOGY SOCIETY. ANNUAL INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE 2021;2021:3423-3426. [PMID: 34891975 DOI: 10.1109/embc46164.2021.9629783] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0]

The association between emotion and cognition has recently gathered interest in the field of cognitive neuroscience. However, the neural mechanism of negative emotion processing and its association with cognitive control in early childhood remains unclear. In the present study, we compared the processing of three emotions (i.e., negative, neutral, and positive emotions) and investigated the association between negative emotion processing and cognitive control in children aged 4-6 years (N = 43). Results indicated that children revealed greater brain activation when processing negative emotions than processing neutral and positive emotions. We also found a significant negative association between brain activation during negative emotion processing and reaction times of cognitive control, which represented children with better cognitive control evoked higher brain activation when processing negative emotions. The current study proposes a neural mechanism underlying emotion processing and provides important insights into the risk and future behavioral outcomes of potential psychological disorders.