Research has shown that the first few years of a child's life are critical for developing executive functioning and emotional regulatory skills. This study aimed to evaluate how begin to ECSEL (Emotional, Cognitive and Social Early Learning), an intervention designed to promote young children's emotional competence, influenced children's…

In this study we investigated how early childhood teachers' emotion socialization behaviors contribute to children's social-emotional competence (SEC), as well as whether these contributions differ by culture. Participants included 117 teachers and 381 preschoolers in US or Italian classrooms. Teachers' and children's emotions and reactions to…

Research Findings: This study examined associations between observed emotion-focused teaching practices and preschool children's emotion expression, emotion-related behaviors, and learning behaviors. Four centers located in large midwestern and mid-Atlantic metropolitan areas participated in the study. Of these, one center was a Head Start…

As part of a larger longitudinal project on the assessment of preschoolers' social-emotional development, children's social information processing (SIP) responses to unambiguous hypothetical situations of peer provocation were assessed for 239 preschoolers from Head Start and private childcare settings. SIP measurement focused on emotions children…

In the present study, the relation between children's emotion knowledge and preschool teachers' book reading behaviors during shared book reading in the classroom was examined. A new coding system, the Book Readings for an Affective Classroom Education (BRACE), was developed to capture teachers' macro-level book reading behaviors (i.e., dialogic…

Preschool teachers' consistency of warm, sensitive, and responsive interactions with children may be more important than average levels and may moderate the association between children's cognitive and emotion regulation and their preschool adjustment. A sample of 312 boys and girls aged 32-68 months in 44 classrooms at 16 privately-funded centers…

Based on the emotion socialization and bioecological models, the present study examined the contributions of teacher emotion socialization (i.e., teacher reactions to child emotions) on children's social-emotional behaviors, and the moderating effect of child temperamental surgency on these relations in the preschool context. A total of 337…

To facilitate preschoolers' emotional development, it is useful to have a developmentally and culturally appropriate measure of emotion knowledge. The Affect Knowledge Test (AKT), a widely used measure of emotion knowledge, has been previously used with diverse cultural groups, including Japanese preschoolers, despite scarce reliability and…

Between three and five years of age, both emotional competence (EC) and cognitive self-regulation (CSR) have been documented as undergoing remarkable growth and as being strong predictors of concurrent and future positive outcomes. EC encompasses three interrelated and progressively developing skills: emotion knowledge, emotion regulation, and…

Background: Preschoolers' emotional competence is of prime importance in their concurrent and later social and academic success. Parents are primary socializers of these abilities, but more and more early childhood educators are also important in their development. However, their means of socializing emotional competence are understudied, and…

Early childhood centres are vibrant social communities where child and adult emotions are integral to learning. Previous research has focused on teaching practices that support children's social-emotional learning; fewer studies have attended to relevant centre-level factors, such as the emotional leadership practices of the centre director. The…

Recent years have witnessed a surge in evidence on preschoolers' emotional development as crucial for both concurrent and later well-being and mental health, and for learning and academic success. Given the importance of building such strengths, assessing emotional competence skills is important to aid early childhood educators in focusing…

Starting on positive trajectories at school entry is important for children's later academic success. Using partial least squares, we sought to specify interrelations among all theory-based components of social-emotional learning (SEL), and their ability to predict later classroom adjustment and academic readiness in a modelling context.…

Identifying and understanding the predictors of preliteracy skills can set the stage for success in a child's academic career. Recent literature has implicated social-emotional competence as a potential component in helping children learn preliteracy skills. To further understand the role of social-emotional competence in preliteracy, the…

Differences in emotion knowledge by children's age, gender, and socioeconomic risk status, as well as associations of emotion knowledge with executive control, social competence, and early classroom adjustment, were investigated. On emotion knowledge, 4- and 5-year-olds scored higher than 3-year-olds, with girls showing this effect more strongly.…