The study on emotional development in preschoolers and socialization was carried out to identify and establish emotional development variables on later adaptation into society by preschoolers. Alwaely et al. (2020) suggest that a child's environment grows in influences the nature of the child's interactions. Further, Hoemann & Barrett (2019) agree with Alwaely et al., citing that environmental influences determine the ability of the child to adapt to a schooling environment. Consequently, the arising interactions influence the emotional development of preschoolers aged between 4-5 and their social interactions. Ideally, the purpose of this study was to assess the role of emotional development as a guiding tool for children to enable them to adapt to new environments. (Alwaely et al., 2020). The researchers found a high correlation between emotional knowledge and social development, and self-regulating emotions. The researchers hypothesized that exposure to emotional knowledge triggers improves emotional awareness and adapts to a broader environment outside of the family structure. The study sought to disapprove the null hypothesis, which proposed zero correlation between emotional development and social experiences and the ability of preschoolers to adapt to a larger society. The study asserts that the accumulation of emotional experiences through physical interactions is the foundation for children's cognitive, emotional, and intellectual learning.
Sampling and Participants
Since the study was about the role of emotional development in children, the researchers used two children between 4-5 years old from two kindergartens. The researchers selected the two schools because they had enough population from which to derive a representative sample. The two schools minimized the elements of external variables to the research findings. Further, the researcher used convenient sampling to target specific characteristics such as mental acuity and speech coherence in children, which increases the ability of children to understand emotions. In total, the researchers obtained a functional sample of 300 children with 158 girls and 142 boys.
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Primary Argument and Conceptual Orientation
The authors of the article have presented the main argument as an array of variables whose dependence on each other creates a conceptual orientation of a cause-effect theorization. The variables of age and emotional knowledge acquired through social experiences and interventions enable preschoolers to adapt to new environments when they begin school (Hoemann & Barrett, 2019). However, it is prudent to highlight that those intervening variables that were not controlled in the study may have influenced the results depending on the participants' demographic, social, and economic factors. The primary arguments infer that the immersion of preschool kids into a social system influences how they obtain and retain emotional experiences that they rely upon to influence their corresponding behavior. Further, it purports that the ability of the children to realize that they can control emotions is the foundation of conduct and other forms of learning such as cognitive development and intelligence. The role of positive social and emotional development is instrumental for every child's wellbeing (Hoemann & Barrett, 2019). In this regard, preschoolers have been reported to start being independent of their families as a source of experiences by instigating friendships and developing new relationships. However, most of these relationships are formed by identifying socially acceptable modes of behavior and those that are not as the baseline. This means that children typically compare the nature of each relationship, such as making new friends and the interaction results with what parents and caregivers taught them. Children raised under environments of subtle care and intense empathic conditioning are more suited to identifying with unfamiliar emotions and acting accordingly to diffuse unfavorable situations.
On the other hand, children from challenging backgrounds are subjected to harsher lifestyles. The environment may teach these children more than they bargained for, which might interfere with their perception of right and wrong, which means that the environmental factors influence children's perception of what is socially acceptable and what is not. The accumulation of social experiences guides preschool children's adaptation and developmental phases by acting as a baseline for transition into the schooling phase. One factor that stood out in the research was that children with mental disorders experience difficulties registering behavioral changes and adapting to new environments due to anxiety, fear, and shame.
Methodology
Research into child cognitive and emotional development has been studied by many researchers, all of whom advance a particular ideology about emotional learning in children. In the study, the researcher used the available resources to correlate preschool children's emotional development and adaptability to different environments. The study derived samples of the children from the local community where the parents were willing to sign the consent form to allow their children to participate in the study. The sample size consisted of 300 children, with 158 being girls and 142 boys. The children were selected through convenience sampling techniques where the researcher used the entire preschool kindergarten population in two schools, which exposed the research findings to sampling bias. The researchers used some indicators such as the Emotion Match task to evaluate the level and effect of emotional knowledge on children's ability to display empathy and concern for others. According to Di Maggio et al. (2016), an effective EMT successfully measures the complex relationship between the kids' emotional knowledge with corresponding social cooperation and parental intervention. The EMT measured the ability of the children to distinguish between happiness, pain, anger, sadness, and anxiety using a scale of 0-12, with zero being the lowest and 12 the highest score under each category. There were four sections in the EMT test, namely, emotion expression matching, emotion situation knowledge, expressive emotion knowledge, and receptive emotional knowledge. Cumulatively, the four subsections scores totaled 48 as the highest score in that test. Further, to measure social competency, a set of 30-page questionnaire was developed and filled by teachers. The researchers analyzed the data using cross-sectional description and comparative statistical methods. Also, regression analysis was used to evaluate the link between the variables using linear correlation. The data analysis was systematic, and the analyzed results represented the relationship under study. Correlation indicated that the variables under study exhibited a perfect relationship. Moreover, the researchers could achieve internal validity for the results could be reproduced in a similar setting. However, the study lacked external validity because the sample was selected from the urban centers; hence, the rural population might exhibit different traits from the urban population.
Conclusions
The study was organized carefully, paying attention to the methodology's coherence and accuracy, and findings. There is a need to factor in how children with disabilities can be exposed to unique environments that will help them develop emotional and cognitive interpretation through gathering experiences and interacting with other children (Malik & Marwaha, 2018). The Preschool phase is the right time for parents and guardians to provide interventions to their children while also encouraging them to venture out of family comfort searching for friends. Relationships such as friendships are instrumental in developing children's emotional and cognitive skills (Malik & Marwaha, 2018). The parental understanding of the nature of emotions in children will help decide whether an action should be pursued or not. For instance, one of the benefits of teaching preschool kids how to control emotions is to ensure that they can survive in school with bullies. Girls have been reported to possess self-regulation and control of emotions. The study found out that, unlike boys, girls have a higher prevalence of retaining acquired emotional knowledge and are twice likely to remain calm in difficult situations than boys. Training boys to improve their emotional control skills will help them navigate through the education system. However, the researchers failed to suggest alternative measures to assist children with developing emotionally. Despite the few mentioned limitations, the study implications will guide future studies in what to include in research to get more generalizable results that can be applied to larger populations and influence policymaking.
References
Alwaely, S. A., Yousif, N. B. A., & Mikhaylov, A. (2020). Emotional development in preschoolers and socialization. Early Child Development and Care, 1-10.
Di Maggio, R., Zappulla, C., Pace, U., & Izard, C. E. (2017). Adopting the emotions course in the Italian context: A pilot study to test effects on social-emotional competence in preschool children . Child Indicators Research, 10(2), 571–590.
.Hoemann, K., Xu, F., & Barrett, L. F. (2019). Emotion words, emotion concepts, and emotional development in children: A constructionist hypothesis. Developmental Psychology, 55 (9), 1830.
Malik, F., & Marwaha, R. (2018). Developmental stages of social-emotional development in children.
