Research on early child development in Romania

The fall of the communist regime has marked a renewed interest in Romanian universities to support the development of research laboratories in the field of Psychology. More than 20 years after beginning the implementation of this research agenda, many Romanian researchers have begun publishing in peer-reviewed, high-impact journals. Given this trend, the current special issue was aimed at showcasing the work of Romanian researchers from the fields of developmental and educational psychology.

This special Issue covers several ‘hot topics’ in research with preschoolers, ranging from investigating cognitive development, learning, and communication, to uncovering individual or environmental factors influencing children’s cognitive and socio-emotional development. For instance, the work of Ionescu and Ilie aims to investigate an embodied cognition approach to facilitating preschoolers’ ability to learn. Embodied cognition perspectives on learning emphasize the importance of integrating acting, feeling, and thinking in order to understand and to acquire knowledge (Johnson, 2015; Stolz, 2015). This is of particular importance for devising instructional methods for children that foster the development of abstract thinking by grounding it in interactions between the body and the environment. The authors’ results suggesting that preschoolers, who interacted with the storyline by executing actions rather than passively listening to the teacher telling the story, were more accurate in their ability to retell the story and explain newly acquired words might have important practical implications for teachers. Such results highlight the relevance of devising learning contexts in which preschoolers are stimulated to become engaged in actions could be an important strategy to facilitate language development.

An interesting perspective on children’s communication skills development is offered by the work of Vasc and Miclea, which aimed to investigate preschoolers’ pantomime development. The study provides an insight into age-related changes in children’s ability to produce pantomime suggesting that 3-year-olds produce pantomime gestures more frequently by accompanying them with speech, whereas older preschoolers tend to use pantomime more consistently, with less co-speech and with less adult support. These findings refine knowledge about gestural communication development in preschoolers as many of the previous studies have focused on age-related differences in the quality of pantomime gestures from childhood to adulthood (Colletta et al., 2015; Nicoladis, Marentette, & Navarro, 2014). Moreover, this study extends previous research, indicating that children are not only able to spontaneously produce singular, adult prompted pantomime gestures (Clay, Pople, Hood, & Kita, 2014), but rather they are able to express sequences of actions, with less adult prompting towards the end of this developmental stage.

Another important topic addressed in this special issue is related to the role of both individual and environmental factors affecting preschool children’s cognitive, social-emotional functioning, as well as risk for maladjustment. The research conducted by Visu-Petra and colleagues investigates the relevance of individual differences in preschoolers’ cognitive functioning. More precisely, their research showed that children higher on effortful control and lower on impulsivity might benefit from certain advantages in terms of executive function related memory processes such as short-term and working memory. Therefore, the development of effortful control, and implicitly, lower levels of impulsivity might prove important in supporting children’s learning, but as extant research shows they could also prove important predictors of children’s social-emotional adjustment (Eisenberg, Smith, & Spinrad, 2011; Rueda, Posner, & Rothbart, 2011).

On a related note, Fechete and colleagues placed particular emphasis on investigating the interplay between child and adult temperament in predicting risk for internalizing-type problems. The findings suggest that child temperamental characteristics such as negative affectivity and effortful control, as well as the same temperamental characteristics in mothers are associated with children’s internalizing problem scores; besides the contribution of temperament, an equally interesting finding is related to the fact that the strength of the relationship between children’s effortful control and internalizing problems is strongest when mothers exhibit high levels of negative affect. Such results stress the importance of the interactions between children’s and their parents’ temperamental patterns in increasing risk for emotional difficulties, and suggest that particularly mother’s negativity could be an important risk factor for mental health issues. Furthermore, they are in line with current research emphasizing the particular importance of mother’s emotion regulatory skills for supporting children’s adaptive functioning (Crawford, Schrock, & Woodruff-Borden, 2011; Marakovitz, Wagmiller, Mian, Briggs-Gowan, & Carter, 2011).

The relationship between parental practices and children’s emotional development was investigated in the work of Ștefan and Avram. In this study, emphasis was placed on the relevance of parent–child attachment security for preschooler’s emotional development, namely emotion regulation and empathy. The results add to previous findings by suggesting that attachment does not only have an indirect effect on children’s empathic perspective taking through emotion regulation (Panfile & Laible, 2012), but it also moderates its indirect effect on empathy. These results suggest that children low on emotion regulation abilities benefit the most from a more secure parent–child relationship, which would indicate that attachment might act as a protective factor against difficulties concerning empathic perspective taking. Therefore, it is possible that particularly young children who have difficulties in effectively regulating emotions could benefit from interventions aimed at enhancing the quality of their attachment status (Roque, Verissimo, Fernandes, & Rebelo, 2013).

In sum, it can be concluded that findings reported in this special issue addressed up to date research issues in the field of early education, and contribute by either confirming data reported in the literature, or by suggesting new directions of research. It is also noteworthy that although these contributions stem from research conducted in Romanian preschoolers, these might have potential theoretical, as well as practical implications for children in this age category, irrespective of their cultural background.