Symbolic play is a powerful vehicle for supporting emotional development and communication. It embraces all developmental capacities. This article describes how symbols are formed and how emotional themes are symbolized whereby children reveal their understanding of the world, their feelings and relationships, and how they see themselves in the…

The development of group creativity can be challenging for both young students and their teachers. This study examined the processes and learning outcomes of group creativity training from the perspectives of elementary school students and teachers while identifying critical factors that contributed to the success of the training. Data were…

Problem Statement: Adolescence is a stage of major growth and development in terms of significant cognitive, behavioral, psychological, and physiological changes. For adolescents, these developmental changes could be accompanied by stressful situations. Adolescents need to cope with these stressors successfully, yet the developmental period of…

The following article describes the Asperger syndrome (AS), an autism spectrum disorder, including an explanation of the main difficulties involved, especially with regard to social interaction, communication and imagination. In addition, specific examples help provide a more concrete understanding of the topic. Based on the principal explanatory…

Play is a complex phenomenon that occurs naturally for most children; they move through the various stages of play development and are able to add complexity, imagination, and creativity to their thought processes and actions. However, for many children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), the various stages of play never truly develop, or occur…

Research related to how young children's drawings change and develop is well documented and an extensive literature on this area can be traced back to the nineteenth century. Most of this literature, however, focuses on developmental aspects and largely fails to explore what would seem to be an essential ingredient in each drawings…

Three possibilities for the pathogenesis of childhood autism are considered. Little evidence exists for autism as a basic affective disorder, as proposed by R. P. Hobson, but growing evidence supports childhood autism as a basic cognitive disorder, as the author argues. The author's original theoretical perspectives are revised. (SLD)

Synergistic psychology has been proposed as a meta theory for synthesizing different psychological theories into an explanation of how social, cognitive, and biological factors interact in human behavior. The basic theoretical assumption in synergistic psychology is that internalized social interactions become higher mental functions that regulate…

The IADIS CELDA 2012 Conference intention was to address the main issues concerned with evolving learning processes and supporting pedagogies and applications in the digital age. There had been advances in both cognitive psychology and computing that have affected the educational arena. The convergence of these two disciplines is increasing at a…