Private Speech during Problem-Solving: Tool Innovation Challenges Both Preschoolers’ Cognitive and Emotion Regulation

Aim: The aim of this study was to compare the effectiveness of solutionfocused approach and compassion-focused therapy on emotional cognitive regulation and post-traumatic stress disorder in female-headed households.
 Methods: The research method was quasi-experimental having pre-test and posttest with a control group. The statistical population included female-headed households who referred to the Welfare Center of Tehran province in 2021. Thirty-six female-headed households were selected through simple random sampling and randomly assigned to three groups of 12 (two experimental groups and one control group). The research instruments were Mississippi (2006) Post Traumatic Stress Disorder Scale and Garnfsky, Grich & Spinhaven (2002) Cognitive Emotion Regulation Questionnaire. Participants in the experimental group received Grant’s (2011) Solution-focused counseling sessions and Gilbert’s (2010) Compassionate Therapy sessions, both for 8 sessions. In addition to descriptive statistics, analysis of covariance and Benferoni pair comparison were used to analyze the data
 Findings: The results of data analysis showed that the differences between the three groups in the variables of adaptive emotion regulation (F=30.61, P <0.001), uncompromising emotion regulation (F=22.73, P<0.001) and post-traumatic stress disorder (F=37.45, P <0.001), is significant. There is no significant difference between solution-focused therapy and compassion-focused therapy on the regulation of compromised emotion and post-traumatic stress disorder, but there is a significant difference in the noncompromised variable.
 Conclusion: The findings of this study shows that solution-focused therapy and compassion-focused therapy were both effective in improving cognitive emotion regulation and stress disorder (PTSD), and of the two approaches can be used to reduce emotional regulation and post-traumatic stress disorder in female-headed Households.

Social anxiety disorder is thought to involve emotional hyperreactivity, cognitive distortions, and ineffective emotion regulation. While the neural bases of emotional reactivity to social stimuli have been described, the neural bases of emotional reactivity and cognitive regulation during social and physical threat, and their relationship to social anxiety symptom severity, have yet to be investigated. To investigate behavioral and neural correlates of emotional reactivity and cognitive regulation in patients and controls during processing of social and physical threat stimuli. Participants were trained to implement cognitive-linguistic regulation of emotional reactivity induced by social (harsh facial expressions) and physical (violent scenes) threat while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging and providing behavioral ratings of negative emotion experience. Academic psychology department. Fifteen adults with social anxiety disorder and 17 demographically matched healthy controls. Blood oxygen level-dependent signal and negative emotion ratings. Behaviorally, patients reported greater negative emotion than controls during social and physical threat but showed equivalent reduction in negative emotion following cognitive regulation. Neurally, viewing social threat resulted in greater emotion-related neural responses in patients than controls, with social anxiety symptom severity related to activity in a network of emotion- and attention-processing regions in patients only. Viewing physical threat produced no between-group differences. Regulation during social threat resulted in greater cognitive and attention regulation-related brain activation in controls compared with patients. Regulation during physical threat produced greater cognitive control-related response (ie, right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex) in patients compared with controls. Compared with controls, patients demonstrated exaggerated negative emotion reactivity and reduced cognitive regulation-related neural activation, specifically for social threat stimuli. These findings help to elucidate potential neural mechanisms of emotion regulation that might serve as biomarkers for interventions for social anxiety disorder.

Background Schizophrenia is a serious mental disorder characterized by impaired cognitive function and emotional regulation, which has a significant impact on the patient’s life and social functioning. In recent years, non pharmacological therapy, especially creative psychological interventions such as art and painting, has received attention because it can help patients express emotions, explore their inner world, and improve cognitive function. Although the positive effects of art intervention on cognition and emotion have been confirmed, there is still limited quantitative research on its specific impact on patients with schizophrenia. The aim of this study is to explore how art and painting teaching can enhance the cognitive and emotional regulation abilities of patients with schizophrenia, and to validate its effectiveness using quantitative data. Methods The study selected 100 patients diagnosed with schizophrenia, all of whom were treated in college art and painting courses. The study used a double-blind randomized controlled trial to divided patients into two groups: the experimental group (receiving art painting teaching) and the control group (not receiving art painting teaching). Patients in the experimental group expressed their feelings and ideas by drawing during a twice-weekly, two-hour art painting course, while the control group did not receive any form of art treatment. The study lasted for 6 months, during which cognitive function and emotional regulation were assessed in both groups. The assessment tools included the Cognitive Function Assessment Scale (CFAS) and the Emotional Adjustment Scale (ERS), measured before and after treatment. In addition, blood samples from patients were collected to assess the effect of painting treatment by changes in neurotransmitter levels. Results The CFAS scores of the experimental group before and after treatment were 55.2 and 68.4, and the ERS scores were 37.6 and 49.2, respectively. The serum dopamine level increased by 21.3%, and the changes in CFAS and ERS scores were statistically significant (P values of 0.03 and 0.04, respectively), with a P value of 0.02 for dopamine level changes. The CFAS and ERS scores of the control group showed little change, and there was no significant change in serum dopamine levels, as shown in Table 1. Discussion The results of the study show that the teaching of art and painting in universities has a significant positive impact on the cognitive function and emotional regulation ability of schizophrenia patients. After 6 months of art and painting teaching, the experimental group of patients’ cognitive function and emotional regulation ability were significantly higher than that of the control group, which may be related to the emotional expression and cognitive reconstruction during painting. Moreover, the increased serum dopamine level in the experimental group also supported the positive effect of painting treatment on emotional regulation, helping patients to improve cognitive and emotional regulation. Future studies could further explore the mechanisms and best practices of teaching art painting in the treatment of schizophrenia.

Musical auditory experience from different cultural backgrounds affects individual emotional stability and cognitive regulation function. Through experimental research, three representative cultural background music- -Chinese classical music, Western classical music and modern pop music were selected, and participants were tested for emotional stability and cognitive regulation function. The results show that the emotional stability and cognitive regulation function of music with different cultural backgrounds are the main characteristics of people, which provide a theoretical basis for the application of psychotherapy and education of music.

This research was conducted to explain the cause of emotional divorce of married women based on the cognitive regulation strategies of emotions and marital burnout. The present study was descriptive-correlation of exploratory type-sequential and guided. The statistical population was 1854 married women who were referred to health homes in Tehran in 2019, and 375 women were selected by multi-stage random sampling method based on sample power software. The research tools were Gutman's emotional divorce questionnaire (2008), Garnefski et al.'s cognitive emotion regulation strategies (2001), and Pines' marital burnout (1966), which were implemented on the target sample. In order to analyze the data, in addition to descriptive statistics, the statistical method of structural equations of smartpls was used. The standard coefficients of direct path analysis results have shown a significant relationship between cognitive emotion regulation strategies (β=0.694) and emotional divorce. Also, the results of the standard coefficients of the indirect path have shown a positive relationship between marital burnout (β=0.694) with the mediation of cognitive emotion regulation strategies and the emotional divorce of married women. Based on the research findings, it can be concluded that the cognitive regulation of emotion is mediating in the relationship between marital burnout and emotional divorce.

Despite strong popular conceptions of gender differences in emotionality and striking gender differences in the prevalence of disorders thought to involve emotion dysregulation, the literature on the neural bases of emotion regulation is nearly silent regarding gender differences (Gross, 2007; Ochsner & Gross, in press). The purpose of the present study was to address this gap in the literature. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we asked male and female participants to use a cognitive emotion regulation strategy (reappraisal) to down-regulate their emotional responses to negatively valenced pictures. Behaviorally, men and women evidenced comparable decreases in negative emotion experience. Neurally, however, gender differences emerged. Compared with women, men showed (a) lesser increases in prefrontal regions that are associated with reappraisal, (b) greater decreases in the amygdala, which is associated with emotional responding, and (c) lesser engagement of ventral striatal regions, which are associated with reward processing. We consider two non-competing explanations for these differences. First, men may expend less effort when using cognitive regulation, perhaps due to greater use of automatic emotion regulation. Second, women may use positive emotions in the service of reappraising negative emotions to a greater degree. We then consider the implications of gender differences in emotion regulation for understanding gender differences in emotional processing in general, and gender differences in affective disorders.

This work presents an experimental study to contrast the Vygotskian hypothesis on the influence of private speech on task performance, modulated by task difficulty, and its development between 3 and 7 years of age. We employed a method to manipulate private speech, an individual calibration method for establishing task difficulty, and a comparison between different age groups (5, 7 and 9 years). Our results show a significant interaction between use of private speech and task difficulty on the number of self-addressed utterances: only in the free speech condition does the number of utterances adopt an inverted U distribution as a function of task difficulty. When utterance content is considered, the relationship appears only for utterances classified as “task relevant”. Another significant interaction effect appears on task performance. In the free speech condition with medium and high levels of difficulty, private speech makes a significant contribution to task performance. No significant age effects were found either on the number of utterances or on task performance.

Undoubtedly, women are one of the important elements of the stability of relationships and married life, and it is necessary to pay attention to the matters related to them. The present study aimed to investigate the effectiveness of schema therapy (ST) on the feelings of loneliness, cognitive emotion regulation, and distress tolerance among the women injured by marital infidelity in Lahijan, Iran. The population consisted of all women injured by marital infidelity living in Lahijan, Iran. Then, 500 participants were selected using the convenience sampling technique and were randomly assigned to an experimental and a control group. Participants in both groups were provided with several questionnaires to evaluate their loneliness (Russell et al., 1980), cognitive emotion regulation (Gransefaki and Karaij, 2006), and distress tolerance (Simmons and Gaher, 2005) as the pretest procedure. Later, the experimental group was provided with 8 sessions of schema therapy (taken from Jeffrey Young's book in 1998 and translated by Qadri et al. in 2015), while the control group did not receive any intervention. Then, the above questionnaires were distributed once again among the participants in both groups, and the data were analyzed using the covariance procedure. The results showed that schema therapy had significant effects on the investigated women’s loneliness, cognitive emotion regulation, and distress tolerance (p<0.01). According to the obtained results, researchers and psychologists can use the schema therapy approach to reduce the feeling of loneliness, cognitive regulation of emotion, and increase distress tolerance in women who have faced betrayal.

Summary Young children who enter school without sufficient social and emotional learning (SEL) skills may have a hard time learning. Yet early childhood educators say they don't get enough training to effectively help children develop such skills. In this article, Megan McClelland, Shauna Tominey, Sara Schmitt, and Robert Duncan examine the theory and science behind early childhood SEL interventions. Reviewing evaluation results, they find that several interventions are promising, though we need to know more about how and why their results vary for different groups of children. Three strategies appear to make interventions more successful, the authors write. First, many effective SEL interventions include training or professional development for early childhood teachers; some also emphasize building teachers' own SEL skills. Second, effective interventions embed direct instruction and practice of targeted skills into daily activities, giving children repeated opportunities to practice SEL skills in different contexts; it's best if these activities grow more complex over time. Third, effective interventions engage children's families, so that kids have a chance to work on their SEL skills both at school and at home. Family components may include teaching adults how to help children build SEL skills or teaching adults themselves how to practice and model such skills. Are early childhood SEL interventions cost-effective? The short answer is that it's too soon to be sure. We won't know how the costs and benefits stack up without further research that follows participants into later childhood and adulthood. In this context, we particularly need to understand how the long-term benefits of shorter, less intensive, and less costly programs compare to the benefits of more intensive and costlier ones. www. futureofchildren. org To be ready to enter school, young children need social and emotional learning (SEL) skills such as getting along with others, paying attention, following directions, and managing emotions. Yet teachers report that many children enter school without these skills, which can make it challenging for them to learn. (1) And early childhood educators often feel that they don't receive enough training to effectively help children develop SEL skills. (2) In response, policymakers and practitioners have focused on SEL, and interventions that promote SEL skills for young children have proliferated. SEL interventions take many approaches, and their very diversity makes it challenging to determine which components and approaches are most effective. To ensure that all children have the skills to thrive, we need to pinpoint what works under what conditions and with what populations. In this article, we examine the science behind SEL interventions. We start by clarifying key terms related to SEL skills and reviewing the approaches used in current early childhood SEL interventions. We discuss the theories that guide these interventions, as well as results from intervention studies, including a look at how results vary for different groups of children. Next we examine intervention characteristics that relate to SEL growth and review the potential financial and societal benefit of SEL interventions. We conclude by discussing the limitations of current SEL interventions and making recommendations for research and policy. Social and Emotional Learning: Key Terms Social and emotional learning (SEL) refers to a broad range of social, emotional, and behavioral skills for children. We highlight three main components of SEL skills: emotional processes, social/interpersonal skills, and cognitive regulation. (3) The first component, emotional processes, encompasses the skills children need to manage their emotions effectively and recognize the emotions of others. Emotional processes include skills such as emotion knowledge (the ability to recognize and label emotions accurately), emotion regulation (managing emotions and controlling how and when we express them), perspective taking, and empathy. …

Background: According to Vygotsky's sociocultural theory, private speech functions both as a tool for thought regulation and as a transitional form between outer and inner speech. However, its role in adult second language (L2) learning-and the neural mechanisms supporting it-remains insufficiently understood. This study thus examined whether private speech facilitates L2 oral production and investigated its underlying neural mechanisms, including the extent to which private speech resembles inner speech in its regulatory function and the transitional nature of private speech. Methods: In Experiment 1, to identify natural users of private speech, 64 Chinese-speaking L2 English learners with varying proficiency levels were invited to complete a picture-description task. In Experiment 2, functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) was used to examine the neural mechanisms of private speech in 32 private speech users identified in Experiment 1. Results: Experiment 1 showed that private speech facilitates L2 oral production. Experiment 2 revealed that private and inner speech elicited highly similar patterns of functional connectivity. Among high-proficiency learners, private speech exhibited enhanced connectivity between the language network and the thought-regulation network, indicating involvement of higher-order cognitive processes. In contrast, among low-proficiency learners, connectivity was primarily restricted to language-related regions, suggesting that private speech supports basic linguistic processing at early stages. Furthermore, both private and outer speech showed stronger connectivity in speech-related brain regions. Conclusions: This is the first study to examine the neural mechanisms of private speech in L2 learners by using fNIRS. The findings provide novel neural evidence that private speech serves as both a regulatory scaffold and a transitional form bridging outer and inner speech. Its cognitive function appears to evolve with increasing L2 proficiency.

The study determined the level of treatment adherence motivation in outpatients with diabetes mellitus and examine the relationship between cognitive emotion regulation skills and treatment adherence motivation. This descriptive, correlational study included 458 diabetes mellitus outpatients. Data were collected via an online survey comprising a Patient Information Form, the Turkish Modified Morisky Scale, which assesses treatment adherence through motivation and adherence related knowledge subscales, and the Cognitive Emotion Regulation Questionnaire, which measures adaptive and maladaptive emotion regulation strategies. Analyses included correlations and binary logistic regressions. Participants had a mean age of 51.02 years; 50.4% were women, and 58.7% had type 2 diabetes mellitus. Over half exhibited low motivation for treatment adherence. Motivation was negatively associated with maladaptive strategies such as other-blame (rho = −.181, p < .001) and catastrophizing (rho = −.101, p < .05). Positive reappraisal, an adaptive strategy, was positively associated with motivation. Logistic regression showed that motivation was significantly predicted by positive reappraisal ( B = 0.14), catastrophizing ( B = −0.12), planning ( B = −0.12), and education level ( B = −0.30; p < .05). Conversely, treatment knowledge was significantly predicted by age ( B = −0.025) and education ( B = −0.433), but not by emotion regulation strategies. Over half of the participants of diabetes mellitus exhibited low treatment adherence. Low treatment motivation is common among diabetes mellitus outpatients and is influenced by both emotion regulation and sociodemographic factors. While knowledge alone is insufficient, emotion regulation strategies—especially maladaptive ones—play a critical role. Interventions that combine psychoeducation with emotion-focused approaches may enhance adherence in chronic illness care.

IntroductionAdaptive and successful emotion regulation, the ability to flexibly exert voluntary control over emotional experience and the ensuing behavior, is vital for optimal daily functioning and good mental health. In clinical settings, pharmacological and psychological interventions are widely employed to modify pathological emotion processing and ameliorate its deleterious consequences.MethodsIn this study, we investigated the acute effects of single-dose escitalopram on the induction and regulation of fear and disgust in healthy subjects. Furthermore, we compared these pharmacological effects with psychological emotion regulation that utilized a cognitive strategy with reappraisal. Emotion induction and regulation tasks were performed before and 4 h after ingestion of placebo or 10 mg escitalopram in a randomized, double-blind design. The International Affective Picture System (IAPS) was used as a source of images, with threat-related pictures selected for fear and disease and contamination-related pictures for disgust. Behavioral data, electrodermal activity (EDA), and functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) recordings were collected.ResultsEscitalopram significantly reduced emotion intensity for both fear and disgust during emotion induction, albeit with differing electrodermal and hemodynamic activity patterns for the two negative emotions. At rest, i.e., in the absence of emotive stimuli, escitalopram increased sympathetic activity during the fear but not during the disgust experiments. For both fear and disgust, emotion regulation with reappraisal was more effective in reducing emotion intensity compared to pharmacological intervention with escitalopram or placebo.DiscussionWe concluded that emotion regulation with reappraisal and acute administration of escitalopram, but not placebo, reduce emotion intensity for both fear and disgust, with cognitive regulation being significantly more efficient compared to pharmacological regulation under the conditions of this study. Results from the fNIRS and EDA recordings support the concept of differential mechanisms of emotion regulation that could be emotion-specific.

Cognitive reward control recruits medial and lateral frontal cortices, which are also involved in cognitive emotion regulation: A coordinate-based meta-analysis of fMRI studies

Preschool children’s private speech content and performance on executive functioning and problem-solving tasks

We compared the development of spontaneous private speech and its relationship to self-controlled behavior in a sample of 6- to 12-year-olds with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and matched normal controls. Thirty-eight boys were observed in their classrooms while engaged in math seatwork. Results revealed that ADHD children were delayed in private speech development in that they engaged in more externalized, self-fuiding and less inaudible, internalized speech than normal youngsters. Several findings suggest that the developmental lag was a consequence of a highly unmanageable attentional system that prevents ADHD children's private speech from gaining efficient mastery over behavior. First, self-guiding speech was associated with greater attentional focus only among the least distractible ADHD boys. Second, the most mature, internalized speech forms were correlated with self-stimulating behavior for ADHD subjects but not for controls. Third, observations of ADHD children both on and off stimulant medication indicated that reducing their symptoms substantially increased the maturity of private speech and its association with motor quiescence and attention to task. Results suggest that the Vygotskian hypothesis of a unidirectional path of influence from private speech to self-controlled behavior should be expanded into a bidirectional model. These findings may also shed light on why treatment programs that train children with attentional deficits in speech-to-self have shown limited efficacy.