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Sleep is a support for cognitive development in childhood. Most of the studies in the field have focused on school‐age children and sleep problems, but less research focuses on the relation between the normative course of sleep and executive functions in preschoolers. Thus, the aim of the present study was to analyze the association between nighttime sleep duration and executive functioning in a 158 non‐clinical sample of Spanish participants (Mage = 56.35 months, SD = 11.24; ages 38–78 months; 48.1% girls). Sleep habits were measured by parents' self‐reports; Shape School task was applied to assess inhibition and cognitive flexibility; Word Span task was used to assess working memory; and Vocabulary subtest from the Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence‐III was used to assess verbal ability. The findings revealed that the relation between sleep and executive functioning was only significant in the cases of inhibition and working memory. Further, age and verbal ability were related and were predictors of inhibition, working memory, and cognitive flexibility. We consider it necessary to continue researching in this area given the importance of forming a correct sleep habit during the preschool age and its impact on health, cognition, and well‐being in childhood. In short, our results represent the first approach to the subject under study, which should be completed with objective sleep measures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives: The ability to think about future events serves a range of important functions. People with schizophrenia show impairments in future thinking. However, whether these impairments are specific to positive or negative events and to what extent they are associated with impairments in verbal fluency and autobiographical memory remains poorly understood. Methods: People with schizophrenia (n = 93) and people without psychiatric diagnoses (n = 111) were asked to generate future events and retrieve past autobiographical events and they also completed a test of verbal fluency. Participants also completed questionnaire measures of the positive and negative dimensions of schizophrenia and depression symptoms. Results: People with schizophrenia generated significantly fewer positive and negative future events than controls. In a linear regression, the interaction between diagnosis and autobiographical memory retrieval explained a significant amount of variance in the number of future events that participants generated even when accounting for symptoms and verbal fluency. Past and future thinking abilities were correlated in controls but not in people with schizophrenia. Conclusions: People with schizophrenia may not rely on autobiographical content to imagine the future and may rely instead on semantic processes. Interventions that improve past and future thinking amongst people with schizophrenia are warranted. Practitioner points: Compared to control participants, people with schizophrenia have marked difficulty generating possible, positive and negative, future events.Unlike controls, for people with schizophrenia there is no relation between their ability to remember past events and their ability to think about the future.People with schizophrenia may have difficulty using their memories for their past to imagine and simulate possible future events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives: People with schizophrenia have difficulty recalling specific autobiographical events from their past. However, the nature of this difficulty (e.g., whether these problems are only for memories that are negative or positive) and the mechanisms associated with it remain poorly understood. Methods: The present investigation asked patients with schizophrenia (n = 91) and healthy controls (n = 109) to recall memories related to several positive and negative cue words. Participants also completed self‐report measures of rumination and depressive symptoms and a measure of verbal fluency to assess executive functioning. Participants' memories were coded for specificity (whether or not they referred to a specific event lasting <24 hr) and valence (positive vs. negative). Results: Patients recalled fewer specific memories than controls and they showed particular difficulty recalling specific negative memories cued by negative words. For healthy controls, impoverished verbal fluency was associated with recall of fewer specific memories and particularly recall of fewer positive specific memories. These variables were unrelated to specificity amongst patients. Rumination was not associated with specificity in either group. Conclusions: These findings are discussed with reference to other mechanisms that might contribute towards reduced specificity in schizophrenia, such as the tendency to avoid negative affect, and the implications of this for interventions for schizophrenia and memory specificity problems. Practitioner points: The experience of schizophrenia is associated with problems recalling specific events from one's past.In particular, patients have difficulty recalling specific negative memories from their past.These memory problems are independent of executive functioning difficulties, ruminative tendencies, and also depression symptoms.Interventions for memory problems in schizophrenia must target the difficulty people have in recalling specific negative events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]