Socioemotional Development 

Aims: International research finds Twenty-first Century Skills (21 CS) important to human capital, health, and school success. Determining how 21 CS's (e.g., emotional regulation, communication, perspective taking, planning, and flexibility) develop within Singapore's unique linguistic and cultural milieu can inform science and policy to help Singaporean families.

Methodology: Recruitment of roughly 980 children from the Bedok and Punggol polyclinics will occur over 2 years. Children and their families will participate in a cross-sequential study, which is similar to a longitudinal study but with differing points of entry to minimize cohort effects. Recruitment will follow the health booklet schedule with children entering the study at one of four designated time points (4-5 months, 5-7 months, 16-19 months, or 34-38 months). Depending on the age of study entry children will take part in 2-8 clinic visits, with the last clinic visit occurring when children are 4 years of age. A combination of questionnaires, eye tracking, video recordings, and direct testing will be used to assess child development and environmental influences upon its growth. Importance of proposed research to science or medicine: By school entry children already display individual differences in 21 CS, and these early life differences may predict later mental health, educational success, well-being, and even physical health. Better understanding the development of individual differences within the local context will enable the creating of more targeted and cost-effective prevention and intervention programs at appropriate stages of early development.

Understanding one's own or other's emotions is a fundamental skill in children's life. Studies in Western cultures have shown that children's emotion understanding predicts their prosocial behaviors, social competence, academic achievement, and so forth (Denham, et al., 2003; Izard et al., 2001; Rhoades, Warren, Domitrovich, & Greenberg, 2011). However, little is known regarding the development of Singaporean children's emotion understanding or its relations to their developmental outcomes. This project aims to examine Singaporean children's emotion understanding from different approaches and its relations to anxiety and academic achievement. Understanding these relations could provide avenues for understanding the mechanisms and identifying individuals at risk for socioemotional and school difficulties. People from varied cultural backgrounds differ in their attention to particular aspects of emotional cues. Whereas semantic content explicitly expresses feelings, vocal tone and facial expression convey relatively implicit information regarding emotions. European Americans tend to communicate emotions more directly through verbal content, while Asians' emotion communication tend to be more indirect and implicit. European Americans paid more attention to emotional cues from verbal content, whereas Asians were better at understanding emotional cues from contextual information such as vocal tones (Ishii, Reyes, & Kitayama, 2003). Our own prior work indicated that school-aged children had learned to be sensitive to the culturally significant emotional cues. Chinese children recognized emotions from vocal tones more accurately and quickly than American children who performed better on recognizing emotions from verbal content (Yang, Wang, & Wang, under review). Are Singaporean children more sensitive to vocal tones and facial expression than verbal content? On the one hand, Singaporean cultures are influenced by Western cultures. On the other hand, Singaporeans remain their habits and traditions of their original cultures in their daily routine and hold traditional values to a great extent. We will examine their ability to detect emotional cues from both facial expressions and auditory stimuli using two computer tasks. Children's emotion understanding is a crucial core of social awareness within broader socioemotional competence (Denham et al., 2003). Particularly, children's anxiety level is negatively associated with their emotion understanding (Trentacosta & Fine, 2010). Understanding emotions can help children communicate their own feelings and predict others' feelings and behaviors. Therefore, emotion understanding plays an important role in relationship maintenance and emotion regulation. Poor emotion understanding in social situations may trigger inappropriate responses and in turn may lead to increased social difficulties and anxiety level (Fine, Izard, Mostow, Trentacosta, & Ackerman, 2003). On the other hand, attention bias to negative emotions is positively related to anxiety. Children with anxiety disorders were more sensitive to negative emotional cues (Manassis & Young, 2000). Additionally, emotion understanding predicts children's academic achievement. Children with greater emotion understanding were rated more prosocial by their teachers and more liked by their peers. Therefore, emotion understanding might facilitate effective learning interactions, thus promoted academic achievement (Rhoades et al., 2011). This study will inform us Singaporean children's emotion understanding, and whether it's related to anxiety and academic achievement. It is especially critical to identify the factors affecting child anxiety and academic achievement in Singapore, given the high level of anxiety and the emphasis on academic achievements. The findings of this project would shed light on intervention programs for improving children's emotional wellbeing and academic achievement in Singapore.

The purported benefits of mindfulness, particularly in enhancing cognitive, social-emotional, and behavioural self-regulation, has prompted the application of mindfulness-based interventions to many populations and settings around the world, including in children and adolescents, and in school-based, clinical, or community settings. Mindfulness in education in particular has garnered global interest and momentum in the past decade or so. With increasing recognition of the self-regulatory benefits of mindfulness, a growing number of schools worldwide are incorporating mindfulness to support the development of socio-emotional competencies (e.g., self and social awareness; resilience), emotional and behavioral self-regulation (e.g., stress, anxiety, and anger management), and cognitive ability and academic achievement in students. Research with at-risk youths and youths with disorders such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and/or learning disabilities also suggests that mindfulness-based interventions may help to improve outcomes for certain groups of low progress learners. Although the adoption of mindfulness-based programs/practices in Singapore schools has been slower and less widespread than in some other countries, there is rising interest from stakeholders in understanding how mindfulness can be applied to help with the holistic development of and to improve outcomes in children. A current hurdle pertains to the accessibility of knowledge and resources. Many different mindfulness-based programs are now available, including numerous standardized school-based curricula, non-standardized practices, and online and mobile applications. Questions arise, such as regarding the type of program or practices to implement, conditions for implementation, effective dosage, caveats or contraindications, and target groups and outcomes. Although considerable research had been conducted on mindfulness programs for children, existing research syntheses tend to be summed over variables that may obscure important considerations for educational applications. Furthermore, the influence of mindfulness on a child's developmental outcomes also comes from mindfulness and mindfulness training in their caregivers, such as parents and teachers. Research has demonstrated positive effects of teaching mindfulness to teachers, not just in enhancing teachers' self-care and protecting against burnout, but also their cascading effects on teacher-student interactions and student outcomes from as early as preschool. Though relatively less examined, the field is also starting to pay attention to the role of school leaders and parents in the success of mindfulness-based interventions on child outcomes. Although there has been considerable research in the past several decades evaluating aspects of this broad area of research, the wealth of research can be overwhelming, with findings from each sub area too dispersed from one another. A comprehensive and integrated research synthesis and perspective on the impact of mindfulness on child development that includes both direct and indirect influences is timely and necessary to bring together research in these areas, so as to best inform practice and policy on whether and how mindfulness can be harnessed to enhance child outcomes.

Self-regulation skills enable children to effectively engage in formal learning in structured classroom settings. Children with good self-regulation skills are better equipped to acquire knowledge as they are able to remember instructions, attend to lessons and stay on task. They also display appropriate classroom behaviors which support the development of positive relationships with teachers and peers. Self-regulation skills are also negatively associated with socio-emotional problems, which in turn are linked to poorer academic outcomes. Taken together, children with poor self-regulation skills are likely to face adjustment difficulties during the transition to primary school. To the extent that these difficulties persist beyond the first year of school, these children are at higher risk for future academic failure. Thus, there is a pressing need to examine the outcomes of children with self-regulation difficulties and to identify protective factors that mitigate the deleterious effects of poor self-regulation skills. The proposed study examines the relation between self-regulation (executive functioning and effortful control) skills, socio-emotional competence and academic outcomes during the early years of primary school. This study will tap on the Singapore Kindergarten Impact Project (SKIP) database (which provides a rich source of data on 1200 children from ages 5 to 7) to identify a subsample of children with poor self-regulation skills at Primary 1 (age 7). The first aim of this study is to examine the influence of early self-regulation difficulties (at Primary 1) on children's self-regulatory, academic and socio-emotional outcomes at Primary 3 (age 9). The second aim is to examine whether specific individual and contextual factors moderate the relationship of poor self-regulation skills with child outcomes at Primary 3. Our findings will contribute to a better understanding of the developmental outcomes of a relatively understudied group of children and shed some light on the role of children's and their parents' mindsets, as well as the learning context in helping children optimize their development.