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Due to the impact of COVID-19, children and their parents are spending more time at home, which increases parent--child interactions. The goals of the present study were to examine the mediating effects of children's learning engagement on the relationships of parental involvement in Chinese, English, and math performance and to investigate whether parent-perceived parental involvement and child-perceived parental involvement consistently affected children's academic performance. Data were collected from 253 Chinese primary school students (117 boys, Mage = 10.53) during the COVID-19 pandemic. We included parental involvement perceived by the parents and by the children to comprehensively describe parental involvement (in wave 2); we collected children's learning engagement (wave 2); and we compared children's Chinese, English and math academic performances before (wave 1) and after (wave 3) China's first wave of COVID-19 in 2020. The results showed that after controlling for gender, age, and SES, the parental involvement perceived by parents could be directly and positively related to children's learning engagement, and it also indirectly influenced children's learning engagement through the children's perceived parental involvement. Learning engagement was a mediator of the relationship between parental involvement and children's academic performance. Parental involvement significantly predicted children's Chinese and English performances through their learning engagement, while parental involvement failed to predict children's mathematics performances during the COVID-19 pandemic. The current research provides insights into the underlying mechanisms of how parental involvement affects children's academic performances during school closures and hopes to guide parents and schools to consider how to cooperate and continue to use rapidly developing digital education resources amid the long-term impact of COVID-19 to provide children using more effective and suitable guidance in the future.

Understanding emotions based on false beliefs is a necessary component of theory of mind. Previous research has indicated a lag in children's understanding of belief-based emotions as compared to false beliefs. Experiment 1 involved 83 Chinese 3- to 5-year-old children who were tested for the developmental change of the belief-emotion lag. Experiment 1 identified a lag effect in 3- and 4-year-olds who had better performance at the false belief task than the belief-based emotion understanding task. To further examine the potential influence of material familiarity on the lag, 27 3-year-old children participated in Experiment 2. The results of Experiment 2 showed that 3-year-olds performed slightly better in the belief-based emotion understanding task when familiar materials were replaced by unfamiliar materials. A possible reason for the diminished level of the lag effect was discussed in light of children's emotional arousal. The findings have practical implications for implementing social and emotional learning programmes that foster young children's theory of mind understanding.

The current study investigated whether and how each component of the working memory model was associated with kindergarten children's arithmetic performance. A total of 103 Chinese kindergarten children were administered tests of the visuospatial sketchpad, the phonological loop, the central executive, and basic number processing (i.e., number line estimation, nonverbal numerosity estimation and numerical magnitude comparison). The results showed that among the three working memory components, the central executive accounted for a significant proportion of the variance in young children's arithmetic performance. In terms of basic number processing, number line estimation and numerical magnitude comparison had significant influences on young children's arithmetic performance. Furthermore, numerical magnitude comparison played a mediating role between the visuospatial sketchpad and early arithmetic skills. These findings highlight the importance of working memory and basic number processing in early arithmetic skills and reveal different pathways through which the three working memory components influence young children's arithmetic performance., Author(s): Yue Qi [sup.1] [sup.2] , Yinghe Chen [sup.1] [sup.2] , Xiujie Yang [sup.1] , Yusi Hao [sup.1] Author Affiliations: (1) grid.20513.35, 0000 0004 1789 9964, Faculty of Psychology, Beijing [...]

In this longitudinal study, 64 kindergartners (mean age at T1 = 4.69 ± 0.33 years; 34 girls) were tested on visual perception skills (T2 and T3) and mathematics performance (T1 to T3) with 6-month intervals between the three testing waves. Cross-lagged path analysis showed a bidirectional relationship between visual perception and mathematics performance from T2 to T3. Specifically, children's visual perception at T2 significantly predicted their mathematics performance at T3 (B = 0.30, SE = 0.14, p = 0.03, [beta] = 0.19). Children's mathematics performance at T1 accounted for unique variance in visual perception at T2 (B = 0.79, SE = 0.11, p < 0.001, [beta] = 0.68) and visual perception at T3 (B = 0.27, SE = 0.12, p = 0.02, [beta] = 0.32). Their mathematics performance at T2 also significantly predicted visual perception at T3 (B = 0.21, SE = 0.10, p = 0.04, [beta] = 0.28). Totally, they explained 61% of the variance in mathematics performance and 39% of the variance in visual perception at T3. The results highlight the developmental courses as well as the reciprocal facilitations between visual perception and mathematics performance in the kindergarten period., Author(s): Xiao Yu [sup.1] , Yinghe Chen [sup.2] , Weiyi Xie [sup.3] , Xiujie Yang [sup.4] Author Affiliations: (1) grid.66741.32, 0000 0001 1456 856X, Department of Psychology, School of Humanities [...]

Testing of previously studied information potentiates subsequent learning of new information, a phenomenon referred to as the "forward testing effect" (FTE). The current study aimed to investigate the developmental trajectory of the FTE and whether the reset-of-encoding process contributes to the FTE. Younger children, older children, and adults were instructed to study four lists of unrelated words, then either restudied or were tested following studying each of Lists 1-3, and took an interim test on List 4. Results demonstrated that interim testing on Lists 1-3 enhanced learning of List 4 for younger children, older children, and adults. Importantly, this enhancement varies with items' serial list position in both younger children and older children. Early List 4 items at list primacy positions benefited more from interim testing than later ones at non-primacy positions. Overall, this is the first study demonstrating that (1) the FTE generalizes to younger children, older children, and adults, suggesting the FTE emerges quite early in human life; (2) the reset-of-encoding process contributes to the FTE in both younger and older children.

This study investigated whether familiarity and expertise of a dissenter would lessen the trust of a three-person majority among preschoolers in a Chinese sample. The results indicated that preschoolers preferred to trust a majority rather than a stranger dissenter. However, when familiarity and expertise of the dissenter were manipulated in the experiments, the majority was less endorsed by both age groups than the previous condition. Furthermore, the preference for the majority under conflicting conditions depended on age. Especially, five-year-olds trusted the expert more than the majority, and they trusted the majority more than the familiar person. However, three-year-olds did not show any significant preference. These results suggest that older preschoolers tend to value other factors rather than simply accepting the information shared among a majority. The study provided an enhanced understanding of the influences of a dissenter's expertise and familiarity in selective trust and extended the findings to Chinese preschoolers.

Based on the "analytical framework of nature of science" (NOS) in junior school science textbooks, a content analysis method was adopted to analyze the NOS in junior middle school physical textbooks (grade 8) of five editions authorized by the Ministry of Education of China, and the features of NOS were analyzed and compared. It was found that all five textbooks presented poor representations of NOS. None of these five editions were scientifically objective, nor did they include discussions of scientific laws and theories. Furthermore, they rarely presented empirical evidence to support their arguments. The explicit representations of NOS were particularly inadequate.

Overparenting is an emerging topic in parenting research and has gained increasing attention in media. Most studies have focused on adolescents and young adults in Western countries, while it remains unclear whether overparenting is related to young children's outcomes in non-Western contexts. The present study aimed to examine the mechanism by which overparenting was associated with Chinese young children's social preference. The study surveyed 283 Chinese parents of children aged 36–83 months (mean age = 58.61) to examine parenting practices and child social preference. The results suggested that parents' psychological control and parent–child relationship had serial mediating effects on the relationship between overparenting and young children's social preference in terms of shyness and unsociability. The present study further raised the importance of parenting during early childhood and generated practical implications for parents in China and beyond, encouraging parents to reflect on how their beliefs and practices may influence child outcomes from the early years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although previous research suggests that mood can influence creativity, the controversy about the effects of positive and negative moods has raged for years. This study investigated how the relationship between induced mood and creativity is moderated by dispositional and situational autonomy. It contrasted the different moderating effects of the 2 kinds of autonomy. In Experiment 1, 93 participants completed a questionnaire about dispositional autonomy and performed a creative task after watching 1 of 3 film clips, which were to induce positive, negative, or neutral moods. The results of experiment 1 indicated that positive moods prompted creativity and negative moods inhibited creativity when individuals were low in dispositional autonomy (low in autonomous orientation or high in impersonal orientation). In Experiment 2, 73 participants engaged in a game to manipulate levels of situational autonomy and induce positive or negative moods. The results of experiment 2 showed that positive moods fostered greater creativity than did negative moods when individuals were in full-autonomy condition. The different moderating effects of dispositional and situational autonomy are discussed.

To investigate the contributions of cognitive flexibility, inhibition and number label knowledge to children's numerical equivalence, one hundred and one 3‐ to 5‐year‐olds were administered the dimensional change card sorting task, the day‐night task and the give‐a‐number task. The numerical equivalence was assessed with the numerical matching task in three surface similarity conditions. Results showed that, in the high surface similarity condition, cognitive flexibility and label knowledge, rather than inhibition, were significant predictors of children's performance in numerical equivalence. In the low surface similarity and the cross‐mapping conditions, only cognitive flexibility, rather than number label knowledge and inhibition, significantly explained the unique variance in numerical equivalence. Besides, cognitive flexibility explained more variation in numerical equivalence in the cross‐mapping condition compared with the low surface similarity condition. These findings highlight different roles of cognitive flexibility, inhibition and number label knowledge in numerical equivalence in the three surface similarity conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding emotions based on false beliefs is a necessary component of theory of mind. Previous research has indicated a lag in children's understanding of belief-based emotions as compared to false beliefs. Experiment 1 involved 83 Chinese 3- to 5-year-old children who were tested for the developmental change of the belief-emotion lag. Experiment 1 identified a lag effect in 3- and 4-year-olds who had better performance at the false belief task than the belief-based emotion understanding task. To further examine the potential influence of material familiarity on the lag, 27 3-year-old children participated in Experiment 2. The results of Experiment 2 showed that 3-year-olds performed slightly better in the belief-based emotion understanding task when familiar materials were replaced by unfamiliar materials. A possible reason for the diminished level of the lag effect was discussed in light of children's emotional arousal. The findings have practical implications for implementing social and emotional learning programmes that foster young children's theory of mind understanding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]