The effect of emotional stimuli on flexibility during task switching in young children
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Most 3-year-olds have difficulty switching between tasks as examined with the Dimensional Change Card Sort (DCCS), a widely used task measuring flexibility and executive function in preschoolers. The current study investigated whether emotional stimuli can facilitate 3- to 4-year-olds' (n = 243) flexibility during the DCCS. Study 1 investigated whether affect conveyed through emotional faces influences flexibility in children. Facial stimuli with happy, sad, or neutral expression were used in the DCCS paradigm to create an Emotional Faces version, a Happy Faces version, a Sad Faces version, and a Neutral Faces version. In Experiment 1.1, children in Canada and China performed significantly better on the Emotional Faces version than on the Standard version of the DCCS. Experiment 1.2 showed facilitation in the Happy Faces version but not in the Sad Faces version or the Neutral Faces version. Study 2 investigated whether other positive non-facial stimuli can improve children's performance. Candies were used to induce positive mood and pictures of candy were used to maintain this mood state. A Mixed Candies version, a Clean Candies version, and a Dirty Candies version were designed. Experiment 2.1 showed that children performed better on the Mixed Candies version. Experiment 2.2 showed the facilitative effect of candies disappeared in the Clean Candies and Dirty Candies versions. Study 3 investigated whether the facilitative effect of positive affect conveyed through happy faces would disappear when happy faces were irrelevant to the ongoing task. A Happy Faces Flanker version was designed where happy faces were used as the flankers of neutral objects. There was no evidence of facilitation. Together, these findings suggest that when positive affect is relevant to the tasks on which children are working, positive emotional stimuli can increase flexibility during task switching in preschoolers. Results are consistent with the suggestion that positive affect promotes cognitive flexibility, perhaps by making children take a global perspective and increasing children's working memory efficiency, and perhaps by increasing dopamine levels in children's prefrontal cortex. Thus, the current study extends the literature on the interaction between affect and executive function.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".