Children’s psychosocial functioning in is known to be influenced by parental emotion discussion in early childhood. However, the associations between parental emotion discussion and children’s...Show moreChildren’s psychosocial functioning in is known to be influenced by parental emotion discussion in early childhood. However, the associations between parental emotion discussion and children’s psychosocial functioning have mainly been studied in the typically hearing (TH) population of children. Little is known about this association in the deaf or hard-of-hearing (DHH) child population, who tend to be at risk of having lower psychosocial functioning. Our study investigated the impact of parental emotion discussion on three areas of DHH and TH children’s psychosocial functioning (externalizing behavior, peer problems, and prosocial behavior) with a cross-sectional study design using parent report data on 215 preschoolers aged 1–7.5 years (49.3% girls, 88 DHH). Contrary to what was previously reported in the literature, we found that DHH and TH children did not differ in psychosocial functioning, nor did their parents differ in their level of emotion discussion with their children. In line with previous research, our results indicated that more parental emotion discussion was related to less externalizing, and more prosocial behavior in their children, but no association was found between parental emotion discussion and peer problems in the children. Furthermore, the hearing status of the children did not affect the associations between parental emotion discussion and children’s psychosocial functioning in our study. Future studies should address the heterogeneity of the DHH population and their families, and clinical focus should be placed to optimize family based early intervention programs for DHH youth.Show less
This study examined whether highly intelligent children experience stronger peer attachment and if they show more prosocial giving behaviour when attending gifted education as opposed to regular...Show moreThis study examined whether highly intelligent children experience stronger peer attachment and if they show more prosocial giving behaviour when attending gifted education as opposed to regular primary education. To examine the relation between peer attachment, prosocial giving behaviour and education type 117 Dutch students between 9 and 12 years old have filled in the Raven Progressive Matrices, the IRI, the Prosocial Donation Task and the IPPA as part of the Brightwave study. The results show that there is no significant effect of education type on peer attachment in highly intelligent children (t(1) = .102, p = .751). Furthermore, no significant effect of education type was found on prosocial giving behaviour (t(44) = .562, p = .577). We did find a significant effect of peer attachment on the number of donated coins F(2,88) = 10.543, p = .002. However, this effect was not influenced by education type. The results from this study were unexpected because previous research has shown that highly intelligent children differ from their classmates in terms of emotional development and playstyle (Kroesbergen et al., 2016). This could make them feel less familiar towards their classmates which would cause them to show less prosocial giving behaviour (Amici, 2015). A possible explanation why highly intelligent children do not experience higher peer attachment or show more prosocial giving behaviour in gifted education is that they do not differ as much from their classmates in regular education as previously thought or despite this difference they may still befriend some classmates that share their interests and playstyle.Show less
