Emotionswissen, exekutive Funktionen und Veränderungen bei Aufmerksamkeitsproblemen von Vorschulkindern

The aim of this study was to examine the relationships between the rapidly growing abilities of preschool children to self-regulate by means of executive functions (EF) and emotion knowledge, on one hand, and changes in attention problems, on the other hand. For this, 261 3- to 6-year-olds were tested on these constructs and their preschool and kindergarten teachers were asked to rate their attention problems at two time points that were about 14 months apart. Hierarchical regressions indicate that emotion knowledge and both measures of working memory and inhibition as parts of EF individually contributed to the prediction of change in attention problems, after known predictors such as the children’s sex, their family’s socioeconomic status, and their receptive language skills were controlled for. When emotion knowledge and EF were included in a joint model, emotion knowledge explained the additional variance of the changes in attention problems above and beyond both measures of EF. Here, we discuss ways in which emotion knowledge influences attention control.