Poster #197 - Socio-Emotional Knowledge, Executive Functions, and Patterning

• In Event: 3-053 - Poster Session 10
  In Poster Session: PS 10 Section - Social Cognition

Integrative Statement

The importance of emotional competence in young children is receiving increased attention because it affects eventual academic outcomes. At the preschool level, emotional competence can be measured effectively by the Affect Knowledge Test (AKT: Denham, 1986) and the Challenging Situations Test (CST: Denham, Bouril, & Belouad, 1994). Cognitive competence can be readily measured via executive functions (EF), such as cognitive flexibility and inhibition of interfering responses. A more applied expression of cognitive competence is “patterning” – children’s understanding of visual patterns whose elements alternate. An example is square oval square oval square oval. Patterning is taught explicitly as a cognitive intervention in most preschools and nearly all kindergartens in this country.. The present study explored potential links between emotional competence, EF, and patterning.
Method
Participants
Three- and 4-year-olds of diverse ethnicity (Asian, MidEastern, Hispanic/Latino, African-American, and Caucasian) enrolled in a private preschool in a suburb in northern Virginia participated.
Instruments
AKT. Children’s understanding of emotion was assessed using puppets and flannel faces displaying happy, sad, angry, and scared emotions (Denham, 1986).
CST. Children were asked whether they would feel happy, sad, angry, or just okay in hypothetical peer-oriented scenarios, and then asked what they would do (choices are prosocial, aggressive, avoidant, or crying responses).
ABLLS-R Patterning Assessment. Children were shown 20 repeating patterns - ABAB, AABAAB, ABBABB, ABCABC, AABBAABB - of geometric shapes. They were asked to replicate the first ten patterns, and extend the last ten.
Card Sort. First, children were asked to sort three sets of cards with different colors and shapes by color. Then they were asked to sort the same three sets of cards by shape, assessing their cognitive flexibility (Zelazo, 2006).
Day/Night Inhibition. Children were shown 20 pictures of suns and moons in a counterbalanced order, and told to say "day" to the moon, and "night" to the sun, thus testing their ability to inhibit their normal response.
Research Design: The same children were tested individually on these five tests in counterbalanced order during the fall and again in the spring.
Results: In the fall, children who expressed more positive emotions in challenging situations (CST) showed more cognitive flexibility, r(29) =.495, p<.05), which in turn correlated significantly with patterning, r(29) =.368, p<.05, and inhibition, r(29) =.475, p<.05. Children’s knowledge of other children’s emotions (AKT) also correlated with inhibition, r(29) =.386, p<.05. In the spring, only the correlation between cognitive flexibility and patterning remained significant, r(29) =.68, p<.05.
A time-lagged (cross-lagged) analysis showed that fall cognitive flexibility correlated with spring patterning, r(29) =.382, p<.05, but the converse was not true, r(29) =.053, p<.05. Hence, it appears that cognitive flexibility leads to better patterning, not vice versa (but see Rogosa, 1960,1962).
Discussion: There were relationships between EF and social-emotional competence at the outset of preschool. These relations became insignificant as the children completed their year in preschool. This result is surprising, but Cartwright’s (2012) review indicated that EF change rapidly in such young children. Why these changes occur remains to be determined.

Authors

• Mandana Mohtasham, George Mason University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Allyson B. Patterson, George Mason University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Katherine C. Vennergrund, George Mason University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Eileen S. Chen, George Mason University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Robert Pasnak, George Mason University
  Presenting Author