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A novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, has spread widely throughout the world. To reduce the spread of infection, children are prevented from going to school and have fewer opportunities for in-person communication. Such changes in the everyday lives of children might influence their socio-emotional behaviors; however, the whole picture of the possible impact was not well known. This study examined socio-emotional behaviors of Japanese children (aged 4–9) during the pandemic and compared the data to the data before the pandemic. Children’s socio-emotional behaviors in an everyday context was assessed using the parent-reported Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire. The results indicated that during the pandemic, children were more prosocial and experienced more problems in their peer relationships, but no differences were found in emotional symptoms, conduct problems, hyperactivity between before and during the pandemic. The findings suggest that the COVID-19 pandemic has mixed impacts on children’s socio-emotional behaviors, implying that this topic should be considered in broader and fuller perspectives.

Abstract The COVID-19 pandemic has led children to experience school closures. Although increasing evidence suggests that such intense social quarantine influences children’s social relationships with others, longitudinal studies are limited. Using longitudinal data collected during (T1) and after (T2) intensive school closure and home confinement, this study investigated the impacts of social quarantine on children’s social relationships. Japanese parents of children aged 0–9 years (n = 425) completed an online questionnaire that examined children’s socio-emotional behavior and perceived proximity to parents or others. The results demonstrated that social quarantine was not significantly related to children’s socio-emotional behavior across all age groups. However, changes in children’s perceived proximity varied depending on certain age-related factors: elementary schoolers’ perceived closeness to parents significantly decreased after the reopening of schools, whereas that to others, such as peers, increased. Such effects were not observed in infants and preschoolers. The follow-up survey 9-month after the reopening of schools (T3; n = 130) did not detect significant differences in both children’s socio-emotional behavior and perceived proximity from that after the intense quarantine. These findings suggest that school closure and home confinement may have influenced children’s social development differently across their age, and its effects were larger in perceived closeness rather than social behavior.

Shame can be defined as the emotional response to one's violations of rules being exposed to others. However, it is difficult to objectively measure this concept. This study examined the psychophysiological indicators of shame in young children using behavioral methods and thermography, which measures facial temperatures that reflect blood flow changes related to emotions. Four- to six-year-old children participated in an "animal guessing game," in which they lied about having violated a rule. They were assigned to either the exposure or the non-exposure group. In the exposure group, participants' lies were exposed by the experimenter, whereas in the non-exposure group, their lies were not. Results showed that at the behavioral level, participants in the exposure group expressed characteristic behaviors of shame (e.g., embarrassed smiles) more often than those in the non-exposure group. Moreover, the nasal temperatures of participants in the exposure group were higher than those of participants in the other group after the lie was exposed. These results suggest that participants' lies being exposed induced psychophysiological responses and consequently raised their nasal temperature. This finding indicates that psychophysiological responses can enable us to objectively measure higher-order emotions in young children.

Regarding the effects of joint action on visual memory, previous research has focused on the memory of a single object that a participant and their co-actor attended together (i.e., a shared situation), while the literature on memory has demonstrated that spatial regularity composed of multiple objects can also be learned. We aimed to examine whether the visuospatial regularity of the co-actor's attended objects could be strongly encoded. We repeatedly presented the same configuration of two targets and two sets of distractors in different colors (i.e., blue and red) to participants. In Experiment 1, pairs of participants simultaneously searched for the same target in the joint group while individual participants searched for the target alone in the single group. As a result, greater facilitation in reaction time was observed in earlier epochs in the joint group, reinforced by the learning of visuospatial regularity, compared to the single group. Experiment 2 examined whether the co-actor's attended context could be strongly encoded although two persons simultaneously searched for different targets (i.e., parallel situation) such that one searched for the blue target and the other for the red target. The results showed no evidence regarding participants' learning visuospatial regularity of the co-actor's attended objects, indicating that co-actor's learning information cannot be shared in this situation. This study revealed that facilitation of visuospatial learning in joint action would require two individuals to attend to the same objects when they perform the task.

Exposure to the same information improves auditory/verbal short-term memory performance, but such improvement is not always observed in visual short-term memory. In this study, we demonstrate that sequential processing makes visuospatial repetition learning efficient in a paradigm that employs a similar design previously used for an auditory/verbal domain. When we presented sets of color patches simultaneously in Experiments 1-4, recall accuracy did not increase with repetition; however, once color patches were presented sequentially in Experiment 5, accuracy did increase rapidly with repetition, even when participants engaged in articulatory suppression. Moreover, these learning dynamics matched those in Experiment 6, which used verbal materials. These findings suggest that (a) sequential focus on each item facilitates a repetition learning effect, indicating a temporal bottleneck is involved early in this process and (b) repetition learning is mechanistically similar across sensory modalities even though these modalities differently specialize in processing spatial or temporal information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]