Impact of the War in Ukraine on the Ability of Children to Recognize Basic Emotions.

Objectives: This study assessed emotion recognition skills in school-age children in wartime conditions in Ukraine. Methods: An online survey based on the concept of basic emotions was administrated to a sample of 419 schoolchildren from Ukraine and a control group of 310 schoolchildren from the Czech Republic, aged 8 to 12. Results: There is no difference in judging the intensity of anger and fear by Ukrainian children, compared with the control group. There is no evidence that the emotions of anger, fear, and sadness were better recognized in the Ukrainian group. Children from Ukraine were better at recognizing positive emotions than Czech children. Conclusion: Increased risks of threats and wartime experience do not impair the accuracy of identification of emotions like fear or the assessment of intensity of basic emotions by children who experience war in Ukraine. Still, it is important to continue studying the long-term consequences of military conflicts in order to deepen the understanding of their impact on human mental functioning.

Faster ≠ Smarter: Children with Higher Levels of Ability Take Longer to Give Incorrect Answers, Especially When the Task Matches Their Ability.

The stereotype that children who are more able solve tasks quicker than their less capable peers exists both in and outside education. The F > C phenomenon and the distance-difficulty hypothesis offer alternative explanations of the time needed to complete a task; the former by the response correctness and the latter by the relative difference between the difficulty of the task and the ability of the examinee. To test these alternative explanations, we extracted IRT-based ability estimates and task difficulties from a sample of 514 children, 53% girls, M(age) = 10.3 years; who answered 29 Piagetian balance beam tasks. We used the answer correctness and task difficulty as predictors in multilevel regression models when controlling for children's ability levels. Our results challenge the 'faster equals smarter' stereotype. We show that ability levels predict the time needed to solve a task when the task is solved incorrectly, though only with moderately and highly difficult items. Moreover, children with higher ability levels take longer to answer items incorrectly, and tasks equal to children's ability levels take more time than very easy or difficult tasks. We conclude that the relationship between ability, task difficulty, and answer correctness is complex, and warn education professionals against basing their professional judgment on students' quickness.

Metacognitive monitoring and metacognitive strategies of gifted and average children on dealing with deductive reasoning task.

In this paper, we inquire into possible differences between children with exceptionally high intellectual abilities and their average peers as regards metacognitive monitoring and related metacognitive strategies. The question whether gifted children surpass their typically developing peers not only in the intellectual abilities, but also in their level of metacognitive skills, has not been convincingly answered so far. We sought to examine the indicators of metacognitive behavior by means of eye-tracking technology and to compare these findings with the participants' subjective confidence ratings. Eye-movement data of gifted and average students attending final grades of primary school (4th and 5th grades) were recorded while they dealt with a deductive reasoning task, and four metrics supposed to bear on metacognitive skills, namely the overall trial duration, mean fixation duration, number of regressions and normalized gaze transition entropy, were analyzed. No significant differences between gifted and average children were found in the normalized gaze transition entropy, in mean fixation duration, nor - after controlling for the trial duration - in number of regressions. Both groups of children differed in the time devoted to solving the task. Both groups significantly differed in the association between time devoted to the task and the participants' subjective confidence rating, where only the gifted children tended to devote more time when they felt less confident. Several implications of these findings are discussed.