Research Findings: Anthropomorphized animal characters have been associated with negative influences on educational outcomes for young children, for example story comprehension and prosocial learning from moral tales. In this study we investigate how character realism and moral theme influence young children's recall of the story content. Retells…

Research Findings: Emotion knowledge is one facet of social and emotional learning (SEL) that emerges in early childhood. Various interventions and measures target preschoolers' emotional skills to bolster these foundational competencies prior to formal schooling. One measure of emotion knowledge specifically with preschool children is the Affect…

The purpose of the present study was to investigate children's connected communication during play with a sibling and friend from early to middle childhood. Participants included 65 4-year-old focal children at time 1 (T1) and 46 7-year-old focal children at time 2 (T2) who were videotaped at home in separate semi-structured free play sessions…

Research Findings: In this research, 487 Chinese children age 3 to 5 years took part in a number line estimation task. This task was used to assess children's estimation accuracy and their estimation patterns along a number line in two different estimation circumstances. Situation A had the same line lengths for different numeric ranges, whereas…

Research Findings: Since 2011, China has started to loosen its tight on the One-child Policy (OCP), which has impacted parent's child-rearing beliefs and the provision of home learning environment that constitutes family environment. Utilizing parent-reported data on 4,364 zero- to eight-year-olds from the China Family Panel Study (CFPS, wave…

Research Findings: Empathy plays an important role in children's early social-emotional development. However, there are not many instruments available for measuring the different aspects/levels of empathy in preschool children. Moreover, few studies examined the validity of the existing measures for empathy in Chinese children. The present study…

This study investigated the effect of moral stories on children's honesty during a temptation resistance paradigm in a large sample of 3 to 6-year-olds (N = 296). Both children and their parents were also asked to anticipate if a child vignette protagonist would confess to a minor misdeed and also to predict the consequences of this potential…

This study investigated parents' and siblings' knowledge use during naturalistic teaching episodes in the home. Thirty-seven middle-class families were observed for six 90-minute sessions (siblings aged 4 and 6 years). Parent and sibling teaching sequences were coded for knowledge type (conceptual, procedural), conceptual subcategories (social…

Research Findings: The current study explored the average levels, latent profiles, and predictors of preschoolers' cultural cognition, in a sample of 8774 preschoolers' parents in Shanghai, China. Parents with children aged 3-6 years completed measures of "Cultural Cognition Scale for Preschoolers" (CCSP) which was newly developed and…

Research Findings: This study examined age-based developmental trajectories of four key number sense (NS) skills within an accelerated longitudinal design. Using data from 408 preschoolers, ages 45 to 68 months, linear and latent basis growth curves were evaluated. Results indicated growth across NS skills was best represented as nonlinear for all…

Narratives have been extensively studied in recent decades, but studies investigating differences and similarities in the narrative features from a cross-cultural or cross-linguistic point of view are limited. This study investigated the narrative language of typically developing monolingual four- and eight-year-old Finnish, Italian and Canadian…

The present study examined features of sibling and friend dyads' connectedness (e.g., length and emotional tone of connected sequences) and the quality of the dyads' interactions during play from early to middle childhood. Forty-four families with a 4-year-old focal child were observed at Time 1 (T1) and again at Time 2 (T2) at age 7 in two…

"Research Findings:" The present study aims to investigate the relationship between physical fitness and visuomotor integration in young children. A total of 242 three- to six-year-old preschoolers were randomly selected from a preschool in Shenzhen, China and their visuomotor integration and physical fitness were evaluated using the…

Research Findings: This study aims to examine the latent profiles of parents' mediation and their predictors, as well as links between different profiles and children's problematic media use. A total of 1415 children aged 3-6 years (47.8% boys) and their paired parents were recruited in Shanghai, China and surveyed demographic information,…

Research Findings: This study compared the peer interaction patterns in mixed-age and same-age Chinese preschool classrooms using videotaped behavioral observations. A total of 179 children (ages 3-6) from three mixed-age classes and three same-age classes were involved in this study. A total of 170 valid videos were obtained, including 85 videos…