Young Children's Emotion Research Articles

The Spiritual Education Value and Practical Approaches of Early Childhood Dance

Early childhood dance is an art activity for young children created according to the characteristics of their physical and mental development, which is characterized by intuitive image, sociality, and children's fantasy. It is characterized by intuitive image to show the form of all things for young children, which shows the knowledge of truth; young children shape their good character in the collective dance environment of cooperation and communication, which is for the sake of goodness; and young children experience the charm of dance art in the dance world of children's fantasy, which is for the sake of cultivating beauty. The truth, goodness and beauty it contains can nourish young children's hearts and promote the formation of positive psychological qualities in young children, which is an important way to educate young children. In this sense, educators should fully explore the value of early childhood dance according to the level of physical and mental development of young children, so as to achieve the dance wisdom - to promote the development of young children's cognitive ability, to dance ideology - to enhance the quality of young children's will, to dance and express their feelings. --Cultivate young children's positive emotions and feelings, nurture children's personality, and guide children's pro-social behavior. To realize dancing to nurture the heart and dancing to nurture people, and to promote the comprehensive and harmonious development of young children's body and mind.

Maternal emotion socialization trajectories in an early-childhood, predominantly White sample.

Several developmental theories identify caregiver emotion socialization (ES) as predicting multiple child psychological outcomes, including anxiety. The present study delineated developmental trajectories of mothers' ES practices, specifically the initial levels and growth across time of their supportive and nonsupportive responses to their young children's emotions. To contextualize the developmental role of these processes, we examined multiple predictors (i.e., maternal emotion dysregulation, child negative emotionality, demographic covariates) and one outcome (i.e., child anxiety) of ES trajectories, as well as how trajectories varied by emotion type-sadness, anger, or worry. We investigated these questions in a community sample of 173 predominantly White, non-Hispanic mother-child dyads who participated at four time points when children were aged 2-5 years, with assessments 1 year apart. Mothers reported on study variables. Results varied by ES type. Mothers' supportive global and emotion-specific ES were highly stable across time and did not relate to predictors, outcomes, or demographic covariates. Mothers endorsed gradual decreases in nonsupportive ES across time, with some variations across emotion type. Nonsupportive responses to worry and sadness each comprised two classes varying by intercept and slope. Nonsupportive worry responses linearly decreased, whereas nonsupportive sadness responses linearly increased. Across global and emotion-specific models, maternal emotion dysregulation, child negative emotionality, and demographic covariates showed unique relations with nonsupportive ES intercept and slope. Trajectories were mostly unrelated to later child anxiety, with the exception of class-specific differences for nonsupportive worry responses. Implications and future directions are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Observing prosociality and talent: the emotional characteristics and behavioral outcomes of elevation and admiration in 6.5- to 8.5-year-old children

Helping and seeing others being helped elicits positive emotions in young children but little is known about the nature of these emotions, especially in middle childhood. Here we examined the specific emotional characteristics and behavioral outcomes of two closely related other-praising moral emotions: elevation and admiration. We exposed 182 6.5- to 8.5-year-old children living in New Zealand, to an elevation- and admiration-inducing video clip. Afterwards children’s emotion experiences and prosocial behaviour was measured. Findings revealed higher levels of happiness, care, and warmth after seeing prosociality in others (elevation condition) and higher levels of upliftment after seeing talent in others (admiration condition). We found no differences in prosocial behavior between the elevation and admiration conditions. This is the first study to assess elevation in childhood and offers a novel paradigm to investigate the role of moral emotions as potential motivators underlying helping.

Undoing mothers' avoidant coping with children's negative emotion: A randomized controlled trial of relational savoring.

Some mothers report using avoidant coping strategies (minimizing, punishing) in response to their young children's negative emotion, an aspect of insensitive parenting that places children at risk for emotional or behavioral dysregulation (Fabes et al., 2001) and insecure attachment (De Wolff & van Ijzendoorn, 1997). In prior work, an in-home attachment-based relational savoring (RS) intervention, administered over a month's time, positively affected maternal emotion and sensitive behavior with young children (Borelli et al., 2023); further, a one-time online RS protocol had greater impacts on emotion and relationship satisfaction for mothers with greater attachment avoidance (Burkhart et al., 2015). However, we do not yet know whether a brief, laboratory intervention impacts highly avoidant mothers' behavior with their children and not just their self-reports of satisfaction. Here, we examine whether mothers' endorsement of avoidant coping strategies moderates the effect of an RS versus active control intervention on mothers' use of emotion-coaching during an emotionally charged conversation with their child. Mothers (N = 122; Mage = 33.42, SD = 5.40) and their preschoolers (Mage = 41.80 months, SD = 4.65; 48.4% female) from diverse backgrounds (41% Latina, 40% White [non-Latina]; 42% under $60,000 annual income) participated. The interaction between condition and level of avoidant coping on mothers' emotion-coaching behaviors was significant. Mothers high in avoidant coping (top quartile) displayed better emotion-coaching during the emotion conversation if they had been in the RS condition. Savoring may be a valuable tool to promote effective emotion-coaching among parents most prone to avoid their children's negative emotion. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

어머니의 양육태도와 유아의 정서조절능력이 유아의 문제행동에 미치는 영향

Objectives In this study, we aimed to examine how maternal parenting attitudes and young children's emotion regulation abilities influence problem behaviors in young children.
 Methods For the study, 291 young children aged 3-5 years old and 291 mothers enrolled in a daycare center located in G city were surveyed from December 12, 2022 to January 8, 2023. A questionnaire survey was conducted on attitude, emotional regulation ability of young children, and problem behaviors of young children. For the collected data, Pearson's correlation analysis was performed to analyze the correlation between each variable using the SPSS 21.0 program, and multiple regression analysis was performed to analyze the effect relationship of the variables.
 Results The analysis results are as follows. Firstly, it was found that the mother's parenting attitude and the young children's emotional regulation ability were correlated with the young children's problem behavior. Secondly, in the relative explanatory power of independent variables that affect young children's intrinsic problem behaviors, negative emotional expression, affectionate, controlling, and rejecting influences in the order shown. In the relative explanatory power of independent variables that affect extrinsic problem behaviors of young children, affectionate, negative emotional expression, controlling, and positive emotional expression were found to have an effect in the order.
 Conclusions This study provides valuable information on the variables affecting young children's problem behaviors, such as maternal parenting attitudes and young children's emotion regulation abilities. It can serve as foundational data to enhance maternal parenting attitudes and young children's emotion regulation abilities, which, in turn, may help improve young children's problem behaviors.

Parent-partner and parent-child attachment: Links to children's emotion regulation

We investigate the interconnections between couple and parenting relationships and young children's emotion regulation across time. Our goals were to: (1) examine whether mothers' and fathers' attachment security towards their romantic partners relates to mothers- and fathers-child attachment quality; (2) investigate the bidirectional relations between mother- and father-child attachment quality, and children's emotion regulation. We followed 206 children (95 girls, Mage = 4.01 years, SD = 0.57), their mothers, and fathers over 3-time points during the preschool period. Parents reported attachment security towards their romantic partner and the quality of their attachment relationships with the child. Teachers reported children's emotion regulation. Results from a dyadic cross-lagged panel model indicated a consistent negative association between mothers' and fathers' insecure attachment and parents-child attachment quality. Despite some variations according to children's sex and age, overall, findings suggest that a higher father- and mother-child attachment quality links to children's higher emotion regulation abilities.

Clinical utility of diagnosing limited prosocial emotions in young children using the Clinical Assessment of Prosocial Emotions (CAPE).

This study evaluated the interrater reliability, convergent and divergent validity, incremental validity, and clinical prognostic utility of the Clinical Assessment of Prosocial Emotions (CAPE; Frick, 2013) for assessing limited prosocial emotions (LPE). Participants were 232 young children (Mage = 3.94 years, SD = 1.46, range = 2-8; 74.6% boys) clinic-referred for conduct problems. We scored the CAPE using binary and dimensional scoring approaches and measured outcomes using parent-report and child laboratory measures. CAPE LPE symptom ratings had good interrater reliability. Children diagnosed with pretreatment LPE had more severe externalizing problems and lower empathy than children without LPE but did not differ in emotion recognition accuracy or anxiety. Dimensional CAPE symptom sum scores were associated with criterion variable scores in expected ways and offered incremental validity beyond scores on the parent-report Inventory of Callous-Unemotional Traits for predicting conduct problem severity, aggression, empathy deficits, and global emotion recognition accuracy. Among children who completed parent management training (n = 44), those diagnosed with LPE ended treatment with more severe aggressive behavior than those without LPE. Overall, children diagnosed with CAPE LPE have severe externalizing problems and achieve reduced benefits from standard parent management training, supporting the need for tailored and intensive interventions to maximize treatment outcomes. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Silencing screaming with screens: The longitudinal relationship between media emotion regulation processes and children's emotional reactivity, emotional knowledge, and empathy.

Many parents use screens to regulate their young children's emotions. We know very little, however, about how this parenting practice is related to the development of emotional competencies (i.e., emotional reactivity, emotion knowledge, and empathy) over time. The current longitudinal study examined bidirectional associations between media emotion regulation and various emotional competencies across a 1-year period during early childhood (between ages 3.5 and 4.5 on average). Participants included 269 child/parent dyads who completed a number of in-home tasks and questionnaires. Results revealed that higher levels of media emotion regulation were associated with worse emotional knowledge and empathy and higher emotional reactivity at the cross-sectional level. However, early media emotion regulation was associated with higher levels of child empathy 1 year later. We discuss these results in the context of general parenting practices and encourage future research on the topic with a focus on how these processes develop over time. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Psychophysiological responses of shame in young children: A thermal imaging study.

Shame can be defined as the emotional response to one's violations of rules being exposed to others. However, it is difficult to objectively measure this concept. This study examined the psychophysiological indicators of shame in young children using behavioral methods and thermography, which measures facial temperatures that reflect blood flow changes related to emotions. Four- to six-year-old children participated in an "animal guessing game," in which they lied about having violated a rule. They were assigned to either the exposure or the non-exposure group. In the exposure group, participants' lies were exposed by the experimenter, whereas in the non-exposure group, their lies were not. Results showed that at the behavioral level, participants in the exposure group expressed characteristic behaviors of shame (e.g., embarrassed smiles) more often than those in the non-exposure group. Moreover, the nasal temperatures of participants in the exposure group were higher than those of participants in the other group after the lie was exposed. These results suggest that participants' lies being exposed induced psychophysiological responses and consequently raised their nasal temperature. This finding indicates that psychophysiological responses can enable us to objectively measure higher-order emotions in young children.

Diurnal Cortisol Change Moderates the Associations Between Bedtime Parenting Sensitivity and Young Children's Executive Functioning and Emotion Regulation

Abstract: The present study examined children's diurnal cortisol as a moderator of the association between parenting sensitivity at bedtime and young children's executive functioning and emotion regulation. Fifty-one children ( M age = 4.47 years) and their families participated. Parenting sensitivity was assessed from video recordings of child bedtime. Average child morning and evening cortisol levels were measured from saliva across 3 days. A greater decline in cortisol from morning to evening reflected healthy diurnal patterning. Children's executive functioning was measured objectively, and parents reported on children's emotion regulation. Regression analyses showed that lower parenting sensitivity at bedtime was associated with lower executive functioning and more labile and less adaptive emotion regulation only for children who showed less cortisol decline from morning to evening, suggesting that adaptive cortisol patterning may be protective in the context of low parenting sensitivity. The findings identify children at greatest risk and inform interventions targeting children's developmental outcomes.

PoM & ToM - Harnessing the Power of Mind in Theory of Mind by shaping beneficial mental states in Preschoolers and the ICT’s role

The mental processes that constitute the Power of Mind use thinking as their primary tool. Thought creates emotions which in turn cause corresponding behavior. Consequently, thoughts act as motivators that propel the individual to action. Therefore, the quality of each piece of thinking is fundamental to its evolution. The child gradually develops the ability to read the mental states of others, relying both on the beliefs he has created about himself according to his thoughts and perceptions and on subconscious actions that affect him unconsciously. The current literature review studies the importance of the Power of Mind (PoM) in the human factor and its relationship with Theory of Mind (ToM) in preschool age. The conclusions of the research reflect the importance of the Power of the Mind in the formation of thoughts, beliefs, and emotions in young children, presenting several methods of utilizing it in the educational process.

Supplemental Material for Clinical Utility of Diagnosing Limited Prosocial Emotions in Young Children Using the Clinical Assessment of Prosocial Emotions (CAPE)

Supplemental Material for Clinical Utility of Diagnosing Limited Prosocial Emotions in Young Children Using the Clinical Assessment of Prosocial Emotions (CAPE)

Counterfactual thinking elicits emotional change in young children.

Adults often reason about what might have happened had they chosen an alternative course of action in the past, which can elicit the counterfactual emotion of regret. It is unclear whether young children's emotions are similarly impacted by counterfactual thinking about past possibilities. In this study, 4- to 9-year-old children (N = 160) opened one of two boxes, which concealed small and large prizes, respectively. Some children had the means to open either box, whereas other children only had the means to open one box. After seeing that the prize they did not obtain was larger than the one they did obtain, children were significantly more likely to report a negative change in emotion when the non-obtained prize had been a straightforward counterfactual possibility than when it had not. This shows that even young children experience counterfactual emotions following choices, which may ultimately drive them to make better choices in the future. This article is part of the theme issue 'Thinking about possibilities: mechanisms, ontogeny, functions and phylogeny'.

Children's understanding and consent to heart surgery: Multidisciplinary teamwork and moral experiences.

Mainstream law and ethics literature on consent to children's surgery contrasts with moral experiences of children and adults observed in two heart surgery centres. Research interviews were conducted with 45 practitioners and related experts, and with 16 families of children aged 6 to 15, admitted for non-urgent surgery, as well as an online survey. Thematic data analysis was informed by critical realism and childhood studies.Impersonal adult-centric mainstream literature assumes young children cannot consent. It is based on dichotomies: adult/child, competent/incompetent, respect or protect children, inform or distract them, use time swiftly or flexibly, verbal/non-verbal communication, respect or control children and reason/emotion.Through their moral experiences, adults and children resolve these seeming dichotomies. Through understanding young children's reasoning and emotions about complex distressing decisions related to heart surgery, adults share knowledge, control, trust and respect with them. They see children's consent or refusal before non-urgent surgery as a shared personal moral experience within the child's life course, beyond mere legal compliance. Adults help children to understand and 'want' the surgery that offers things they value: better health or to 'be more like their friends'. If children are not convinced, sometimes surgery is postponed or occasionally cancelled.

The Relevance of Virtual-Assisted Early Childhood Education and Occupational Psychotherapy Based on Emotional Interaction.

This paper presents an in-depth study and analysis of the relevance of early childhood education to occupational psychotherapy using a virtual-assisted affective interaction approach. Starting from the educational theory of interactive cognitive psychology, the theoretical basis for parent-child picture book education for interactive learning is explored, as well as the theoretical development after the introduction of AR technology. Firstly, the analysis of young children's emotions involves massive image processing, and the use of cloud computing architecture leads to high latency, while young children's safety is a latency-sensitive service. Secondly, face recognition accuracy based on static images is not high due to problems such as inconspicuous facial features of toddlers and low-quality kindergarten surveillance videos. In this paper, a face identity correction model based on location features is proposed and the superiority of the model is demonstrated through experiments. Finally, this paper analyzes and mines the emotional data of young children. The level of kindergarten teachers' awareness of early childhood mental health education generally showed an upward trend as their titles rose, and there were significant differences in the seven dimensions of early childhood mental health, the purpose and meaning of early childhood mental health education, implementers, targets, content, pathways, and effects; significant differences existed between teachers of different kindergarten natures, and there were significant differences in the purpose and meaning of early childhood mental health education, implementers, targets, content, pathways, effects, and mental health education for young children. Therefore, this paper proposes a face identity correction model based on position information, which considers both the correlation between pixel values in the spatial domain and the correlation between frames in the temporal domain. This paper has developed an emotion analysis system for kindergartens and put it into use in kindergartens to meet the needs of monitoring the safety of young children and evaluating early childhood education and has received good feedback from users, demonstrating the effectiveness of the system.

Reciprocal effects between young children's negative emotions and mothers' mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic.

ObjectiveTo investigate the relations between young children's negative emotions and their mothers' mental health during the COVID‐19 pandemic.BackgroundThe COVID‐19 pandemic caused the public a certain degree of psychological symptoms, and family environments and relations have been changed dramatically as a result. The relations between young children's negative emotions and their mothers' mental health have not been sufficiently determined for the context of a pandemic or other large‐scale crises.MethodA survey was administrated on 8119 Chinese mothers of 3‐ to 6‐year‐old children with the Symptom Checklist 90 and the Child Negative Emotion Questionnaire.ResultsThe canonical correlation results indicated that there were covariation trends between young children's anger and their mother's obsessive–compulsive symptoms and hostility, children's fear and mothers' phobic anxiety, and children's tension and mothers' interpersonal sensitivity and depression. These correlations were all positively significant.ConclusionDuring the COVID‐19 pandemic, the predictive power of young children's negative emotions to their mothers' mental health was greater than that of the reverse.ImplicationsThis study provides a scientific guidance on the regulation of young children's negative emotions and the improvement of mothers' mental health during the pandemic as well as potential emergencies in the future.

The feeling thinking talking intervention with teachers advances young children's emotion knowledge

AbstractBecause emotion knowledge and language skills each contribute to children's success in school and life, the Feeling Thinking Talking (FTT) intervention combines the advancement of language skills and of emotion knowledge in teachers’ child‐directed conversations. Teachers from centers of early childhood education in Germany were taught language support strategies (LSS) and how to apply them during emotion talk while reading picture books, while reminiscing about emotional events, and in everyday conversations with the children in their care. The evaluation of the FTT intervention entailed a comparison between the FTT group (N = 43) and a business‐as‐usual (BAU) control group (N = 67) with N = 110 children (Mage = 49.41 months, range = 33–66 months at T1) who were individually tested using objective tests on receptive vocabulary and emotion knowledge before (T1) and after the FTT intervention (T2), and in a follow‐up 3–6 months later (T3). After a multiple imputation procedure, mixed multilevel models indicated that the children taught by the FTT group teachers made faster progress in their emotion knowledge than their agemates in the BAU condition, especially in their knowledge of mixed emotions, when numerous covariates were controlled. Results suggest that young children's emotion knowledge can be promoted alongside with language skills by a teacher‐led intervention supporting child‐directed emotion talk in early childhood education. Discussion focuses on emotion talk as the mechanism for the transmission of emotion knowledge.

Mother–Child Language Style Predicts Internalizing Behaviors in Children Exposed to Intimate Partner Violence

Exposure to intimate partner violence (IPV) is associated with children's internalizing and externalizing problems. IPV is thought to impair mothers' ability to scaffold young children's emotion regulation through coregulated interactions. Mother–child language style matching (LSM) is an index of coregulation that has yet to be examined in IPV-exposed samples. We hypothesized that LSM would mediate the association between IPV and children's behavioral problems. Participants were 194 mother–child dyads. IPV was assessed annually when children were ages 1–4. LSM was derived from speech during a free-play interaction at age 4, and children's behavior problems were assessed concurrently and again at age 10. Chronic IPV exposure in early life was associated with lower levels of mother–child LSM. LSM also mediated the association between IPV and later internalizing problems. These findings provide evidence that mother–child LSM may be a useful index of parent–child interaction quality in the context of IPV.

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, Mage =29.92months) 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.

Does talking about emotions impact young Turkish children's emotion recognition, word learning, and story comprehension?

ABSTRACT In this study, we tested the effect of emotion-supported dialogic reading on word learning, story comprehension, and emotion recognition skills of 3–4 years old children. We conducted a within-subject design with a group where the children participated only in dialogic reading sessions (control) and a group where children participated emotion-supported dialogic reading sessions (experimental). 20 Turkish children (11 girls and 9 boys) from low socioeconomic status families participated in the study. Before the intervention, we measured children's basic emotion recognition skills. Eight storybook readings carried out the intervention. Next, we tested children's retelling, word learning, and emotion recognition. The results showed that children did significantly better recognising basic emotions. In addition, children in Emotion-Supported Dialogic Reading understand the stories better than Only Dialogic Reading. However, children's receptive and expressive vocabulary learning did not differ significantly.