The relationship between emotion understanding and social skills in preschoolers: The mediating role of verbal ability and the moderating role of working memory

Tang, Yulong; Harris, Paul L.; Zou, Hong; Wang, Juan; Zhang, Zhinuo

doi:10.1080/17405629.2020.1854217

Cited by 14 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 32 publications

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“…Mediation analyses. The mediation analyses were conducted following the same statistical logic adopted by various authors in recent previous studies 12,13,26,62 . We used the PROCESS macro (Version 3.5.3) for SPSS, Model 4 63 to test both of our simple mediation models, which assumed that (a) social behaviour mediated the effect of emotion knowledge on mathematics, and (b) emotion knowledge mediated the effect of locomotor activity on academic-mathematic performance scores.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Emotion knowledge, social behaviour and locomotor activity predict the mathematic performance in 706 preschool children

Cavadini

Richard

Dalla-Libera

et al. 2021

Sci Rep

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What are the foundational abilities that young children must develop at the beginning of school for their future academic success? Little is known about how emotion knowledge, social behaviour, and locomotor activity are associated and how these abilities may be predictors of academic-mathematic performance (less correlated with the children’s SES than pre-reading and linguistic achievement) in a large cohort of preschool children. Here we show that emotion knowledge, locomotor activity, social behaviour, and academic-mathematic performance are interrelated in 706 French preschool children aged 3 to 6. Mediation analyses reveal that the increase in academic-mathematic performance is explained by the increases in emotion knowledge and social behaviour and, in turn, children with a greater comprehension of emotions tend to have better locomotor skills and higher academic-mathematic scores. Additionally, sequential mediation analysis reveals that the increase in emotion knowledge, locomotor activity and social behaviour partially explains the increase in academic-mathematic performance. These results are discussed in relation to three possible mechanisms. Our findings are consistent with the political and scientific consensus on the importance of social-emotional abilities in the academic world at the beginning of school and suggest adding locomotor activity to these foundational abilities.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Emotion knowledge, social behaviour and locomotor activity predict the mathematic performance in 706 preschool children

Cavadini

Richard

Dalla-Libera

et al. 2021

Sci Rep

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“…Another possible explanation for the correlation across recognition tests might be that all tasks require an understanding of language to complete the test. The relation between the three tests may thus result from their association with verbal IQ (see Jones et al 2011;Tang et al 2020). To directly account for this possibility, we exploratorily examined correlations between the three recognition tasks when controlling for individual differences in verbal IQ.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Emotion Recognition from Realistic Dynamic Emotional Expressions Cohere with Established Emotion Recognition Tests: A Proof-of-Concept Validation of the Emotional Accuracy Test

et al. 2021

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Individual differences in understanding other people’s emotions have typically been studied with recognition tests using prototypical emotional expressions. These tests have been criticized for the use of posed, prototypical displays, raising the question of whether such tests tell us anything about the ability to understand spontaneous, non-prototypical emotional expressions. Here, we employ the Emotional Accuracy Test (EAT), which uses natural emotional expressions and defines the recognition as the match between the emotion ratings of a target and a perceiver. In two preregistered studies (Ntotal = 231), we compared the performance on the EAT with two well-established tests of emotion recognition ability: the Geneva Emotion Recognition Test (GERT) and the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (RMET). We found significant overlap (r > 0.20) between individuals’ performance in recognizing spontaneous emotions in naturalistic settings (EAT) and posed (or enacted) non-verbal measures of emotion recognition (GERT, RMET), even when controlling for individual differences in verbal IQ. On average, however, participants reported enjoying the EAT more than the other tasks. Thus, the current research provides a proof-of-concept validation of the EAT as a useful measure for testing the understanding of others’ emotions, a crucial feature of emotional intelligence. Further, our findings indicate that emotion recognition tests using prototypical expressions are valid proxies for measuring the understanding of others’ emotions in more realistic everyday contexts.

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“…In another study, verbal skills mediated the relation between cognitive flexibility and emotion knowledge (15). The zero-order correlations between emotion knowledge and working memory and emotion knowledge and cognitive flexibility (as a component parts of executive functions) were small to medium sized (15,20). Moreover, executive functions work as predictors of emotion knowledge above and beyond the effects of language abilities: Set shifting predicted emotion knowledge over and above mothers' age, and children's IQ, language ability, and Theory of Mind in a sample of N = 75 preschool children (21).…”

Section: Emotion Regulation Strategies (4-8 Years)mentioning

confidence: 91%

“…Oftentimes all three variables interact. A recent study suggests that children's executive functions play a role in linking their emotion knowledge and their social competence via verbal skills, namely by moderating the mediating effect of language skills on the relation (20). This…”

Section: Emotion Knowledge Language Skills and Executive Functionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Adaptive Test of Emotion Knowledge for 3-to 9-Year-Olds: Psychometric Properties and Validity

Voltmer

Salisch

2022

Front. Psychiatry

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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.

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The relationship between emotion understanding and social skills in preschoolers: The mediating role of verbal ability and the moderating role of working memory

Cited by 14 publications

References 32 publications

Emotion knowledge, social behaviour and locomotor activity predict the mathematic performance in 706 preschool children

Emotion knowledge, social behaviour and locomotor activity predict the mathematic performance in 706 preschool children

Emotion Recognition from Realistic Dynamic Emotional Expressions Cohere with Established Emotion Recognition Tests: A Proof-of-Concept Validation of the Emotional Accuracy Test

The Adaptive Test of Emotion Knowledge for 3-to 9-Year-Olds: Psychometric Properties and Validity

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