This longitudinal study explores the associations between children's executive functions at the beginning of preschool and their learning behaviors, namely competence motivation and attentional persistence, at the end of preschool. Participants were 218 Portuguese children (M[subscript age]= 40.4 months, SD= 4.2; 52% boys) and their preschool…

This study examined the direct and indirect relationships between playfulness (social and cognitive spontaneity), executive functions, convergent thinking, divergent thinking, and academic skills in Hong Kong Chinese kindergarten children. Participants were 181 second-year (4 to 5 years) kindergarten children (45.9% boys) and their parents.…

Attendance at preschool represents an important transition, as it is often here that children have their first experience with unfamiliar adults. In this context, several factors can affect children's adjustment. Two important protective factors are the attachment relationship with the teacher and the level of executive functions. We investigate…

Objective: Executive Function (EF) is thought to be a core component of various cognitive processes. Two common ways to measure EF are through report-based measures that assess EF by collecting informant(s) reports on children's behaviors, and performance-based measures that assess EF through the completion of a task related to EF dimension(s).…

Japan's Social Thinking and Academic Readiness Training (START) program Academic Readiness (AR) lesson aims to improve self-regulation, executive function, and behavior problems in kindergarten children, but the effects of the START program AR lessons in unfavorable circumstances are unclear. Therefore, this study investigated the effects of the…

Prior work has conceptualized children's executive function and self-regulation skills as relatively stable across short periods of time. Grounded in long-standing contextual theories of human development, this study introduces a new observational tool for measuring children's regulatory skills across different naturally occurring situations…

Social-emotional development is impacted in children exposed to chronic trauma (Neitzel, 2020). Children who do not learn how to express healthy reactions to their thoughts and feelings grow up to be adults with long-term health concerns (Loomis, 2018; Miller, 2019; Bartlett & Smith, 2019). The problem addressed through this study was that…

Self-regulation forms the rudiments for children's academic achievement and socialization. Although one's executive control and verbal skills are needed in both of the core aspects for academic performance: processing to regulate one's own learning and behavior, young students' cognitive capacity for that is still immature influencing the…

Background & Context: Developmental theorists and researchers have long argued that children's early skill development is critical to subsequent positive developmental outcomes (Bailey & Jones, 2019; Masten et al., 2006; Cichetti & Rogosh, 2002) and is shaped by ecological contexts (Bronfenbrenner & Morris, 1998). Yet, there is…

Measures of self-regulation may not capture adequate variability in children with low levels of self-regulation. This can limit a measure's ability to accurately demonstrate relations with other variables. The present study addressed this issue with a revised version of the Head-Toes-Knees-Shoulders task (HTKS-R), which includes a new downward…

Background: A large evidence base suggests that without effective early intervention, young children who exhibit persistent challenging behavior often face a host of long-term social and academic challenges (Bulotsky-Shearer & Fantuzzo, 2011; Hauser-Cram & Woodman, 2016; Kazdin, 1995; Lane et al., 2008; Miller et al., 2017). Challenging…

This study was conducted to investigate whether a translated and adapted conversational training programme enhances emotion understanding in preschool children. Given the lack of such research in Pakistan (and outside the West in general), the training study reported here was conceived to fill this gap. Thirty-nine 5- to 6-year-olds at two school…

Evidence points to the possibility of promoting executive functions (EF) through school interventions. Little is known, however, about the effectiveness of this type of intervention in situations of social vulnerability. This study investigated the effectiveness of an EF intervention program applied with a sample of preschool children, in a…

To successfully navigate their social worlds, children must adapt their behaviors to diverse situations and do so in a fluid fashion. The current study explored preschool-aged children's sensitivity to a gameplay context (cooperative/competitive) and messages from another (fictional) player (team-oriented/self-oriented) while distributing gameplay…

The present study used data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study--Kindergarten Cohort of 2011 (N = 15,827; 51.1% male; 48.4% White, 13.5% Black/African-American, 24.3% Hispanic/Latino, 7.5% Asian, and 6.3% other ethnicity) to examine the unique contribution of specific executive function processes (working memory and cognitive flexibility)…