So far the attention deficit was related to problems at the level of executive functions in children, but a new study highlights the importance of knowledge of emotions in the development of attention in children.
According to a study by the Leuphana University of Lüneburg (Germany) and the George Mason University (Virginia, USA) published in the scientific journal Kindheit & Entwicklung (Childhood and Development), Children with greater emotional intelligence have less attention problems than their peers with a lower emotional understanding.
The researchers studied 261 children from 33 kindergartens in Lower Saxony (Germany) with an average age of five years who were tested for the ability to understand emotions, self-regulation of behavior, complex memory capacity, and Understanding receptive language. Surveys were also conducted separately from parents and educators with an interval of 14 months.
The objective was to know what factors facilitate or inhibit in children the learning of the domain of attention. And emotions have proven to have a very important role. Children who possessed a thorough knowledge of emotions at the time of the first survey, experienced less difficulty mastering their attention a year later, compared to those who initially had a low knowledge of emotions.
"Children with limited knowledge of emotions often seem distracted," says von Salisch, one of the study's authors. "His attention is focused on explaining his own confused emotional states, the negative emotions of other human beings and the regulation of his own resulting emotions."
The importance of emotional education
Good emotional intelligence in the child consists in being able to recognize one's own emotions and those of others and verbalize them, as well as control their own expression of emotional behavior.
I am increasingly convinced that basing children's education on emotions since they are babies is key to their future. In addition to doing it at home, just as in schools they learn language or mathematics, emotional knowledge should also be reinforced.
Via | Trends21
More information | Kindheit & Entwicklung
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