Children aged three, four and five years, drawn equally from one secular and one religious school in Spain, were questioned about the psychological and biological constraints that apply to two different types of person: an ordinary human being (their best friend) and an extraordinary being (God). Children were asked to assess whether: (1) the knowledge available to either being is constrained by perceptual processes and (2) the life cycle of either being is constrained by biological processes. Three year olds provided few signs of distinguishing between the two types of being. Five year olds, on the other hand, were quite systematic in their differentiation. They judged that the knowledge available to a friend-but not to God-would be constrained by the need for perceptual access and they judged that the life cycle of a friendbut not that of God-would be constrained by the biological processes of birth, growth and death. Implications for current accounts of children's conceptual development are discussed. Recent research has shown that children increasingly recognize major constraints on psychological and biological processes (Rosengren, Gelman,

The phenomenon of imaginary companions (ICs) has received little attention in developmental psychology, even though it can be observed in approximately 25% of preschool-aged children. Only a few studies have investigated the effect of ICs on children's theory of mind and emotion understanding, and the results are partial or inconsistent. This study used comprehensive measures to assess emotional understanding and theory of mind in children aged four to six with ICs (N = 24) and compared their performance to that of children without ICs (N = 24). Results showed that children with ICs, regardless of age and gender, have a better theory of mind and emotion understanding than children without ICs. The greatest impact of ICs was on girls' emotion understanding. The results are discussed in relation to gender differences.

Spain has been one of the countries most affected by the health crisis derived from COVID-19. Within this country, the city of Madrid has registered the highest number of infections and deaths. This circumstance led to the adoption of strict confinement measures for a period of 6 weeks. The objective of the present study was to investigate the psychological effects that this confinement has had on the psychological well-being of a sample of children from Madrid. A total of 167 families with children aged between 3 and 11 years participated in this study. The parents evaluated the children through the System of Evaluation of Children and Adolescents (SENA) scale in the month of February and refilled part of the same scale after the children had spent between 4 and 6 weeks confined. The comparison between the two measures showed no change among the 3-year-old children. However, change was observed among the 6–10-year-old. Children in Primary Education obtained lower scores in dimensions related to self-regulation (emotional, attentional, and behavioral) and in willingness to study. The results are discussed in light of the situation experienced between the months of March and May 2020.

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Children's affective experiences and cognitive abilities have an impact on emotion understanding. However, their relative contribution, as well as the possibility of an interaction between them, has rarely been examined. The aim of the present study was to evaluate the influence of severe abuse and learning difficulties on simple and complex components of emotion understanding in late childhood and early adolescence. A total of 28 older children and young adolescents were selected for the study. Half of the participants had suffered from severe abuse, and half of these abused children additionally had learning disabilities. The remaining half of the sample had no history of abuse but were matched with the abused children on learning difficulties, age and gender. The participants' emotion understanding was assessed with the Test of Emotion Comprehension (TEC). Results showed that (a) learning difficulties but not abuse had an impact on emotion understanding, (b) there was no interaction effect of abuse and learning difficulties on emotion understanding, and (b) the observed effects of learning difficulties were most apparent for the understanding of relatively complex components of emotion and not for simple components. The results are discussed in terms of their theoretical and practical implications.

The aim of the present study was to examine whether the effect of empathy on the role children play in bullying situations, as either bullies, defenders or outsiders, was moderated by children's social status within their classroom, and whether this moderation was gender dependent. For this purpose, we used a representative sample of 2,050 Spanish primary school children (50.80% girls) from grades 3-6 (M = 9.80 years; SD = 1.24), recruited from 27 primary schools. Results showed that the effect of empathy on bullying behavior was moderated by the sociometric rating only in girls. Both empathy and social rating had an effect on defending behavior. However, neither the children's sociometric rating nor their gender moderated the relationship between empathy and defending and outsider behaviors. These findings are discussed in terms of their implications for interventions designed to prevent bullying in school settings.

Numerous studies have shown the important role of both emotion regulation (ER) and emotion knowledge (EK) in child development. Despite the number of studies carried out on both variables, there is practically no research on the developmental relationship between these two constructs. We present a longitudinal study to explore the relationship between EK and ER in preschoolers in which we measured these variables over 3 academic years in a cohort of 108 preschool children using the Test of Emotion Comprehension (TEC) and the Emotion Regulation Checklist (ERC). The ERC is divided into 2 subscales: Emotional Regulation (ER) and Lability/Negativity (L/N). Two cross-lagged models were constructed in order to examine the predictive power of ER and L/N on EK across the three time points. The results suggest that ER is an ability that precedes and predicts EK during preschool years. We also discuss the theoretical and practical implications of these findings.