Background: Children with Prader-Willi Syndrome (PWS) display impaired pretend play abilities, reflective of broader social-cognitive challenges. Pretend play interventions for children with PWS demonstrate preliminary efficacy for improving cognitive and affective processes in play. It is unknown which specific intervention strategies, such as…

This article explores the value of teaching walking within the context of PE. It delves into the cognitive, psychomotor, and affective aspects of walking instruction, highlighting its multifaceted benefits for individuals across the lifespan.

A long-asked question in children's literature studies is how the child reads the very same book we (adults) have read. In 1984, Peter Hunt argued for a "childist criticism" proposing that young readers' multiple individual responses to literature should inform adults' critical practice. In this article, I propose that affect theory and…

Socio-cognitive difficulties in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are heterogenuous and often co-occur with irritability symptoms, such as angry/grouchy mood and temper outbursts. However, the specific relations between individual symptoms are not well-represented in conventional methods analyzing aggregated autistic symptoms and ASD…

Across three studies, we examined non-Black children's spontaneous associations with targets who differed by both race and emotional expression. Children aged 5 to 10 years (N = 419; 215 girls; 58% White; 65% of household incomes >$75,000/year) completed Implicit Association Tests (IAT; Greenwald et al., 2003) containing smiling Black and…

Affect-biased attention is an important predictive factor of children's early socio-emotional development, possibly shaped by the family environment. Our study aimed to reveal children's temporal dynamic patterns of affect-biased attention by looking at time series of attention to emotional faces, individual differences in temporal dynamics, and…

We examined the extent to which children's emotion-sharing relationships were unique from friendships. We also examined the association between emotional experience and emotion sharing as well as the association between emotion sharing and prosocial behavior. Participants were 456 children (M[subscript age] = 10.6 years) from the Midwestern United…

Mental health conditions such as anxiety, depression, aggression, and inattention are common in autistic youth and are challenging to treat by community providers. We aim to parse the heterogeneity of autism based on dimensions of executive function and determine whether specific executive function profiles are differentially related to…

Data from 83,423 parent reports of temperament (surgency, negative affectivity, and regulatory capacity) in infants, toddlers, and children from 341 samples gathered in 59 countries were used to investigate the relations among culture, gender, and temperament. Between-nation differences in temperament were larger than those obtained in similar…

When perceiving emotional facial expressions, adults use a template-matching strategy, comparing the perceived face with a stored representation. A rejection of unnaturally exaggerated faces is characteristic of this strategy because the exaggerated expressions do not match the stored template. In contrast, a rule-based perceptual strategy (e.g.,…

Although food selectivity and so-called "picky" eating are well documented in autism spectrum disorder, emotion-linked eating has rarely been investigated. This study examined emotion-linked over- and under-eating based on parent ratings of these behaviors in 4- to 17-year-old children with autism spectrum disorder (n = 190) as compared…

From the perspective of positive psychology, the study and measurement of subjective well-being has popularized a growing interest towards variables such as affective perception. In an attempt to explain and evaluate the affective structure in positive terms (PA) and negative terms (NA), PANASN affect scale (Sandín, 2003) constitutes the version…

Previous studies have shown that social exclusion can have negative effects on the well-being of children and adolescents. However, there is inconsistent evidence regarding how the impact of social exclusion changes with age. This study used the Cyberball paradigm to investigate the effects of exclusion and subsequent inclusion on primary needs…

Background: The purpose of the current study was to examine association between physical activity (PA) of parents of children with developmental disabilities and theory of planned behaviour-related variables. Methods: A total of 95 participants completed questionnaires that measured the following variables: PA behaviours, action planning,…

The Dual-Process Model of grieving suggests that oscillation between negative and positive emotions occurs throughout the grieving process. If either negative or positive emotions are overly emphasized the grieving process could be stymied. To determine how art therapy can support this model, this study evaluated changes in positive and negative…