Associations between Cognitive Outcomes and Emotion Recognition among Preschoolers

The present study intends to address associations between dialectical thinking of 6-7 years old children and their emotional and executive functioning development. Participants were 152 children. One method was used to assess their emotion recognition by facial expression. Executive functioning was assessed in accordance with the Miyake model, which distinguishes three components of that: working memory, cognitive flexibility, and inhibition control. Dialectical thinking was assessed using three techniques aimed at analyzing children's understanding of the principle of cyclicality, ability to identify contradictions and find opposites to phenomena. Also, a number of parents was interviewed using the questionnaire, which allowed for additional analysis of associations between dialectical thinking and demographic variables such as the number of children in families, the level of mother's education and family income level. The results showed that understanding of the cyclicality principle is related to executive functioning. In turn, all three indicators of dialectical thinking were significantly related to emotion recognition. Taken together, these results suggest that dialectical thinking is associated with emotional knowledge and executive functioning in 6-7 years aged children.