On the importance of being flexible: early interrelations between affective flexibility, executive functions and anxiety symptoms in preschoolers

ABSTRACT

When children are confronted with an emotional problem, affective flexibility mobilizes their cognitive and emotional resources to optimally address it. We investigated the contribution of executive functions to cognitive and affective flexibility in preschoolers. We assessed affective flexibility in 67 preschoolers (30 girls; M_months = 61.77, SD = 11.08 months) using an innovative measure – the Emotional Flexible Item Selection Task (EM-FIST), plus cool measures of executive functions (working memory, inhibition and cognitive flexibility), anxiety symptoms and intelligence. Findings revealed that affective flexibility improves during the preschool years. While individual differences in age and proactive inhibition predicted cognitive flexibility, a different constellation of predictors (maternal education, proactive inhibition, working memory and age) were significant for affective flexibility. Cognitive flexibility didn't contribute to affective flexibility beyond the predictors mentioned above. Anxiety exerted a negative effect on affective flexibility in a high anxious subgroup of preschoolers, but only when processing negative, relative to happy faces, supporting the Attentional Control Theory which predicts valence-related executive impairments.

KEYWORDS:

• Affective flexibility
• cognitive flexibility
• cool executive functions
• anxiety
• preschoolers

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank the children and parents who agreed to take part in this research. We also greatly appreciate the help of master students who were involved in the data collection process. We would also like to thank the Sackler Institute for Developmental Psychobiology for allowing us access to their child friendly “Whack-a-mole” response inhibition task.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This project was financed from the “Lucian Blaga” University of Sibiu research grant LBUS-IRG-2018-04.

Notes on contributors

Oana Mărcuș

Oana Mărcuş is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology, “Lucian Blaga” University of Sibiu and researcher in the Research in Individual Differences and Legal Psychology Lab at Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca. Her research looks at the way in which individual differences in trait anxiety hinder cognitive and affective flexibility across development.

Eva Costa Martins

Eva Costa Martins is a Lecturer of Psychology, and Coordinator of the Undergraduate Degree in Psychology at Maia University Institute – ISMAI. She is also a full research member of the Center for Psychology at the University of Porto, Portugal. She conducts investigations on developmental psychopathology (emotion regulation, executive functions, positive emotion, parenting and social cognition), and on group prevention programs featuring preschoolers and adolescents. Finally, she is interested in the Research Domain Criteria Initiative and in the Open Science Movement (e.g. participating in replication studies).

Raluca Sassu

Raluca Sassu PhD. is a Professor in the Department of Psychology, the “Lucian Blaga” University of Sibiu and researcher at the Human Behaviour and Development Research Lab. Her research considers social and emotional factors in relation to behavioral self-regulation in children being in transition from preschool to primary school. She studies also the role of motor competencies in the multifaceted construct of school readiness.

Laura Visu-Petra

Laura Visu-Petra is Associate Professor at Babeș-Bolyai University. Her research investigates the typical and atypical development of executive functions, relevant for improving academic performance in young children. Current research projects target executive functioning and emotion–cognition interactions in high-anxious children, with a focus on cognitive and emotional precursors of math anxiety (https://www.minimanx.com/research-team/laura-visu-petra-phd/). Another current research interest is the emergence and development of deceptive behavior in relation to the child’s socio-cognitive (theory of mind, executive functions) and problematic behaviour (internalizing and externalizing symptoms). She received the Early Career Award from the Stress and Anxiety Research Society and constantly serves as a reviewer for several editorial boards and research funding agencies.