Background: Children's ability to remain focused on a task despite the presence of emotionally salient distractors in the environment is crucial for successful learning and academic performance. Aims: This study investigated first-graders' allocation of attentional resources in the presence of distracting emotional, school-related social…

This study investigated associations between quality of the teacher-student relationship (closeness and conflict) and teachers' (N = 48) visual focus of attention in Grade 1 classrooms in fall and spring, and it explored to what extent students' (N = 650) gender and task-avoidant behaviour moderated the associations. Results showed first that…

The authors investigated the relationships among effortful control and frustration and literacy proficiency of preadolescence to determine which subcomponent of effortful control and/or emotion might be critical in achieving academic success. The participants included 72 children recruited from a larger longitudinal study. Children's frustration,…

This paper examines how young children experience the moral and bodily discipline of the modern English 'on-task' primary classroom, in which they are expected to sit quietly and still for long periods on the classroom carpet, listening to what teachers know. It details the conditions of the classrooms, a performance-focused environment centred on…

Background: Physical Education (PE) programmes are expanding to include alternative activities yet what is missing is a conceptual model that facilitates how the learning process may be understood and assessed beyond the dominant sport-technique paradigm. Purpose: The purpose of this article was to feature the emergence of a Function-to-Flow (F2F)…

A recent meta-analysis found that across studies individual differences in aspects of children's emotionality predict social status [Dougherty, L.R., (2006). Children's emotionality and social status: a meta-analytic review. Social Development, 15, 394-417.]. In the present study we extended these findings by examining the emotion of interest and…

We tested a conceptual model involving the inter-relations among affective decision-making (indexed by a gambling task), autonomic nervous system (ANS) activity, and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and oppositional defiant disorder (ODD) symptoms in a largely impoverished, inner city sample of first through third grade children (N…

The current study examined the relations between two aspects of emotional competence--emotion knowledge and emotion expression, and children's attentional competence during one school year. Participants were 263 first- and second-grade students at two rural elementary schools. A multiple regression analysis showed that emotion knowledge predicted…