In this article, we conduct a selective review of the literature on emotion regulation in early childhood (e.g., preschool, generally defined as ages 3–5) in regard to school readiness. Emotion regulation (ER), the process of modulating emotional arousal and expression, plays a key role in a child’s ability to adapt to novel demands of school environments. This, in turn, has significant implications for both the socioemotional and academic components of a child’s readiness to enter kindergarten. We begin our article with a brief review of the ER construct at this developmental stage, then review research on the impact of ER on both components of school readiness during the preschool and early elementary school years. We then discuss strategies for teachers and parents to promote ER strategy use in young children, and end with challenges regarding operationalization at this age and directions for future research.
Natural selection acts upon learning and memory processes, much as it does with other physical and behavioral characteristics. For example, numerous lines of inquiry using nonhuman species hypothesize adaptive specializations of Pavlovian conditioned responses and spatial memory. Comparatively less is known about the influence of evolution on learning and memory processes in humans, but the past decade has seen a growing interest in this area; particularly since the publication of Nairne, Thompson, and Pandeirada's (2007) paper reporting the survival processing effect (SPE). The SPE describes a mnemonic advantage of considering one's survival in an evolutionarily relevant scenario: Words encoded in such a scenario are better remembered than are words encoded in relation to survival irrelevant scenarios. Numerous publications inspired by Nairne et al.'s paper have subsequently attempted to describe the specific mechanisms, evolutionary and otherwise, that account for the SPE.In four experiments we tested whether manipulating levels of inclusive fitness in survival scenarios influences recall. In our scenarios we asked participants to consider the survival of kin, and other categories of social relationships (self, strangers, family, a famous person), in an evolutionarily relevant context. The basic SPE was replicated in three of the four experiments. However, although kin selection is an important evolutionary mechanism, it appears to be unrelated to the SPE in our sample.
Extant research supports a direct association between parent’s own emotional eating and their child’s emotional eating, and demonstrates correlations among parent emotional eating, feeding practices, and child emotional eating. However, the majority of this work focuses on the separate influences of these factors. The current study aims to add to the literature by simultaneously examining the indirect effects of three major parental feeding practices (i.e., emotion regulation, instrumental, and restrictive feeding) in the association between parent emotional eating and child emotional eating, and exploring how these indirect effects vary based on parent gender. Parents (86 fathers, 324 mothers) of an elementary school-age child (M = 8.35, SD = 2.29, range = 5–13) completed an online survey through Qualtrics Panels. Results suggested that restrictive feeding partially accounted for the association between parent and child emotional eating in the combined sample of mothers and fathers. Exploratory analyses revealed that the indirect effects of parental feeding practices in the association between parent emotional eating and child emotional eating varied based on parent gender. Among mothers, restrictive feeding was the only feeding practice that partially accounted for the association between maternal and child emotional eating, whereas all three feeding practices fully accounted for the association between father and child emotional eating. As the bulk of the literature on parent emotional eating and feeding has solely focused on mothers, these findings offer insight into how feeding practices may differentially function in the relation between parent emotional eating and child emotional eating for mothers versus fathers.
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