Emotion-specific vocabulary and its relation to emotion understanding in children and adolescents.

Among children and adolescents, emotion understanding relates to academic achievement and higher well-being. This study investigates the role of general and emotion-specific language skills in children's and adolescents' emotion understanding, building on previous research highlighting the significance of domain-specific language skills in conceptual development. We employ a novel inventory (CEVVT) to assess emotion-specific vocabulary. The study involved 10-11-year-old children (N = 29) and 16-17-year-old adolescents (N = 28), examining their emotion recognition and knowledge of emotion regulation strategies. Results highlight the ongoing development of emotion-specific vocabulary across these age groups. Emotion recognition correlated with general vocabulary in the younger group. In the older age group, emotion recognition was related to emotion-specific vocabulary size, but this effect only became apparent when controlling for the depth of emotion-specific vocabulary. Against expectation, there were no significant contributions of general or emotion-specific vocabulary to knowledge of emotion regulation strategies in either age group. These findings enhance our comprehension of the nuanced interplay between language and emotion across developmental stages.

Expecting the Unexpected: Infants Use Others' Surprise to Revise Their Own Expectations.

Human infants show systematic responses to events that violate their expectations. Can they also revise these expectations based on others' expressions of surprise? Here we ask whether infants (N = 156, mean = 15.2 months, range: 12.0-18.0 months) can use an experimenter's expression of surprise to revise their own expectations about statistically probable vs. improbable events. An experimenter sampled a ball from a box of red and white balls and briefly displayed either a surprised or an unsurprised expression at the outcome before revealing it to the infant. Following an unsurprised expression, the results were consistent with prior work; infants looked longer at a statistically improbable outcome than a probable outcome. Following a surprised expression, however, this standard pattern disappeared or was even reversed. These results suggest that even before infants can observe the unexpected events themselves, they can use others' surprise to expect the unexpected. Starting early in life, human learners can leverage social information that signals others' prediction error to update their own predictions.

Preschoolers' cognitive flexibility and emotion understanding: a developmental perspective.

Introduction: Cognitive flexibility is the ability to adapt to changing tasks or problems, while emotion understanding is the ability to interpret emotional cues and information in different contexts. Both abilities are crucial for preschoolers' socialization. Methods: This study selected 532 preschool children aged 3-6 years from two kindergartens in a central province of China. The Dimensional Change Card Sorting (DCCS) task and emotion understanding tasks were used to investigate the developmental characteristics of cognitive flexibility, emotion understanding abilities, and their relationship. Results: The results showed: (1) For cognitive flexibility, children older than 5 years scored significantly higher than younger children, and girls scored higher than boys. (2) For facial emotion recognition: (i) Children's recognition scores for happy, sad, and angry expressions were significantly higher than fear; children could accurately recognize happy, sad, and angry emotions by age 3, while fear recognition developed rapidly after age 5; (ii) Girls scored higher in recognizing fearful faces than boys. (3) For situational emotion understanding: (i) Children's development followed the hierarchical order of external, desire, clue, and belief-based understanding. Situational and desire-based understanding already reached high levels by age 3, while clue and belief-based understanding developed quickly after age 5; (ii) Girls scored higher than boys in belief-based emotion understanding. (4) Cognitive flexibility significantly predicted children's facial emotion recognition, external and desire-based emotion understanding. Discussion: Parents and teachers should cultivate children's cognitive flexibility and provide personalized support. They should also fully grasp the characteristics of children's emotion understanding development, systematically nurture their emotion understanding abilities, and leverage cognitive flexibility training to improve their emotion understanding.

Parasympathetic Nervous System Functioning Moderates the Associations between Callous-Unemotional Traits and Emotion Understanding Difficulties in Late Childhood.

BACKGROUND: Callous-unemotional (CU) traits are characterized by low empathy, guilt, and prosociality, putting children at risk for lifespan antisocial behavior. Elevated CU traits have been linked separately to difficulties with emotion understanding (i.e., identifying emotional states of others) and disrupted parasympathetic nervous system (PNS) functioning. However, no study has investigated how PNS functioning and emotion understanding are jointly related to CU traits. METHOD: We explored associations between CU traits, emotion understanding, and PNS functioning (indexed via respiratory sinus arrhythmia [RSA]) among children aged 7-10 years old (n = 55). We also tested whether deficits in emotion understanding differ across specific emotions (i.e., fear, pain, happiness, anger). Each child's RSA was continuously recorded while they watched a film that included emotionally evocative social interactions. To assess emotion understanding, children identified emotions replayed in 1s animations of scenes from the film. Parents reported on child CU traits, conduct problems, and demographic information. RESULTS: Higher CU traits were related to lower emotion understanding (ß = -0.43, p = 0.03). PNS activity during the film moderated this association (ß = -0.47, p < 0.001), such that CU traits were associated with lower emotion understanding among children with mean (B = -0.01, t = -2.46, p = 0.02) or high (i.e., 1 SD > M; B = -0.02, t = -3.00, p < 0.001) RSA levels during the film, but not among children with low RSA levels (i.e., 1 SD < M; B = 0.00, t = -0.53, p = 0.60). Moreover, we found that the observed moderated associations are driven by deficits in fear, specifically. CONCLUSIONS: The link between poorer emotion understanding, fear understanding in particular, and CU traits was attenuated for children who demonstrated patterns of PNS functioning consistent with attentional engagement while viewing the emotion stimuli.

Embracing the Emotion in Emotional Intelligence Measurement: Insights from Emotion Theory and Research.

Emotional intelligence (EI) has gained significant popularity as a scientific construct over the past three decades, yet its conceptualization and measurement still face limitations. Applied EI research often overlooks its components, treating it as a global characteristic, and there are few widely used performance-based tests for assessing ability EI. The present paper proposes avenues for advancing ability EI measurement by connecting the main EI components to models and theories from the emotion science literature and related fields. For emotion understanding and emotion recognition, we discuss the implications of basic emotion theory, dimensional models, and appraisal models of emotion for creating stimuli, scenarios, and response options. For the regulation and management of one's own and others' emotions, we discuss how the process model of emotion regulation and its extensions to interpersonal processes can inform the creation of situational judgment items. In addition, we emphasize the importance of incorporating context, cross-cultural variability, and attentional and motivational factors into future models and measures of ability EI. We hope this article will foster exchange among scholars in the fields of ability EI, basic emotion science, social cognition, and emotion regulation, leading to an enhanced understanding of the individual differences in successful emotional functioning and communication.

Development and Validation of an Ability Measure of Emotion Understanding: The Core Relational Themes of Emotion (CORE) Test.

Emotion understanding (EU) ability is associated with healthy social functioning and psychological well-being. Across three studies, we develop and present validity evidence for the Core Relational Themes of Emotions (CORE) Test. The test measures people's ability to identify relational themes underlying 19 positive and negative emotions. Relational themes are consistencies in the meaning people assign to emotional experiences. In Study 1, we developed and refined the test items employing a literature review, expert panel, and confusion matrix with a demographically diverse sample. Correctness criteria were determined using theory and prior research, and a progressive (degrees of correctness) paradigm was utilized to score the test. In Study 2, the CORE demonstrated high internal consistency and a confirmatory factor analysis supported the unidimensional factor structure. The CORE showed evidence of convergence with established EU ability measures and divergent relationships with verbal intelligence and demographic characteristics, supporting its construct validity. Also, the CORE was associated with less relational conflict. In Study 3, the CORE was associated with more adaptive and less maladaptive coping and higher well-being on multiple indicators. A set of effects remained, accounting for variance from a widely used EU test, supporting the CORE's incremental validity. Theoretical and methodological contributions are discussed.

Unlocking the Emotional World of Visual Media: An Overview of the Science, Research, and Impact of Understanding Emotion: Drawing Insights From Psychology, Engineering, and the Arts, This Article Provides a Comprehensive Overview of the Field of Emotion Analysis in Visual Media and Discusses the Latest Research, Systems, Challenges, Ethical Implications, and Potential Impact of Artificial Emotional Intelligence on Society.

The emergence of artificial emotional intelligence technology is revolutionizing the fields of computers and robotics, allowing for a new level of communication and understanding of human behavior that was once thought impossible. While recent advancements in deep learning have transformed the field of computer vision, automated understanding of evoked or expressed emotions in visual media remains in its infancy. This foundering stems from the absence of a universally accepted definition of "emotion," coupled with the inherently subjective nature of emotions and their intricate nuances. In this article, we provide a comprehensive, multidisciplinary overview of the field of emotion analysis in visual media, drawing on insights from psychology, engineering, and the arts. We begin by exploring the psychological foundations of emotion and the computational principles that underpin the understanding of emotions from images and videos. We then review the latest research and systems within the field, accentuating the most promising approaches. We also discuss the current technological challenges and limitations of emotion analysis, underscoring the necessity for continued investigation and innovation. We contend that this represents a "Holy Grail" research problem in computing and delineate pivotal directions for future inquiry. Finally, we examine the ethical ramifications of emotion-understanding technologies and contemplate their potential societal impacts. Overall, this article endeavors to equip readers with a deeper understanding of the domain of emotion analysis in visual media and to inspire further research and development in this captivating and rapidly evolving field.

Toy Preferences among 3-to-4-Year-Old Children: The Impact of Socio-Demographic Factors and Developmental Characteristics.

Background: Today's common typologies and categories of children's toys are mainly decided by the manufacturers and retailers of children's products. Such categorizations are not based on a theoretical understanding of child development and therefore cannot provide information about the opportunities that toys provide for the young. Objective: This study proposed three criteria for categorizing toys based on the cultural-historical approach: their degree of realism; their degree of anthropomorphism; and their degree of detail. These criteria were chosen as a result of an analysis of theoretical works carried out in the framework of cultural-historical approach. Design: The proposed criteria were tested through an experiment measuring children's toy preferences. The participants were 129 children of ages 3-4 years. Experimental data confirmed that most children do prefer realistic and detailed toys rather than those with fewer of these properties. The contribution of socio-demographic factors and the children's individual developmental indicators to their toy preference was also analyzed. Results: The study revealed that among various socio-demographic factors, only the child's gender and the number of siblings in the family acted as significant predictors for the toy preferences. None of child's developmental characteristics (nonverbal intelligence, executive functions, and emotional understanding) were found to be significant predictors of preference for particular toys. Conclusions: The assumption that toys can be assessed in terms of their realism and degree of detail found empirical support. The results of this study may be useful in designing further research and in the practical issue of toy selection for children age 3-4 years.

Valence in the eyes: An emotion decoding profile of adults with major depressive disorder and a history of childhood maltreatment.

BACKGROUND: Individuals with major depressive disorder (MDD) and childhood maltreatment have been proposed to constitute a subgroup with worse illness course and outcomes. To elucidate a potential social cognitive vulnerability in this subgroup, this study compared the emotion decoding abilities of MDD patients with and without a history of childhood maltreatment. METHODS: Participants with a diagnosis of MDD were recruited from nationwide mental health organizations. Emotion decoding abilities were assessed using the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test, while childhood maltreatment was measured with the Adverse Childhood Experiences Questionnaire. RESULTS: The MDD patients with a history of childhood maltreatment exhibited poorer emotion decoding abilities than MDD patients without such past. This difference applied specifically to the decoding of positive and negative emotions, while no group differences emerged for the decoding of neutral emotions. When specific maltreatment types were considered as predictors only emotional neglect was associated with lower emotion decoding abilities. These associations remained when adjusting for demographic and clinical covariates. CONCLUSIONS: By indicating that emotion decoding difficulties characterize the MDD subgroup with childhood maltreatment, the findings highlight a potential vulnerability that merits further examination in terms of its developmental antecedents and prognostic relevance.

Labeling and Describing Discrete Emotions in Early Childhood: A Relational Approach.

Emotion understanding involves appreciating the significance of the relational context; the "aboutness" of the emotion. This study examined how children labeled emotions and described relational elements of discrete emotion contexts. Preschool children (3.5-year-olds, n = 22; 4.5-year-olds, n = 23) described images of 5 emotion contexts (anger, sadness, disgust, fear, and joy). Researchers assessed children's (1) correct labeling of discrete emotions, and (2) differential mentioning of the emoter (person displaying the emotion) and the referent (the elicitor of the emotion) across discrete emotions. Children's pattern of accurately labeling discrete emotions was similar to prior research, with both age groups correctly labeled anger, sadness, and joy more often than disgust or fear. Novel to the present study, we found that older children differentially highlighted emotional elements (i.e., the emoter, the referent) when describing discrete emotion contexts. Specifically, 4.5-year-olds emphasized the emoter more when describing anger, sadness, and joy than fear and disgust contexts, and mentioned the referent more in disgust, fear, and joy than anger and sadness contexts. Differential emphasis of relational elements was not observed for 3.5-year-olds. These findings highlight the importance of examining children's appreciation of relational contexts and indicate important differences in how children differentially emphasize relational elements when viewing discrete emotion contexts. Potential developmental mechanisms, opportunities for further empirical research, and implications for emotion theory are discussed. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s42761-022-00170-1.

The link between emotion comprehension and cognitive perspective taking in theory of mind (ToM): a study of preschool children.

The study examined the relation between perspective taking embedded in theory of mind (ToM) and emotion comprehension (EC) in young children. Our study involved children from Poland aged 3-6 (N = 99; 54% boys) from public and private kindergartens residing mainly in urban areas, whose parents could mostly be classified as middle class. The children were examined with the Test of Emotion Comprehension (TEC) and three tasks targeting three aspects of ToM: a first-order false belief task, an appearance-reality test, and a mental states opacity task. The results showed similarities in performances between these different measures. However, only the opacity task predicted the emotion comprehension test results (η2 = 0.13). The results indicate that the key element of ToM that explains individual differences in children's emotion comprehension is the full-blown understanding of perspective taking, namely that having access to an object under one description does not ensure access to that object under all descriptions. In the research, we took also into account the linguistic side of such specific competences as ToM and EC, which allowed us to see the role of language in scaffolding the development of children's ability to handle such socially fundamental tasks as understanding emotions and epistemic states.

Maternal reminiscing as critical to emotion socialization.

Background: In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the central importance of socioemotional skills in positive child development has become even more apparent. Prevalent models of emotion socialization emphasize the importance of parent-child talk as a critical socialization context. Purpose: Autobiographical reminiscing about the child's lived experience may be a particularly effective form of parent-child conversation that facilitates emotion understanding. Method: The authors provide a theoretical and empirical review of how maternal reminiscing style impacts specifically on emotion socialization in both typically and atypically developing children. Results: Individual differences in maternal reminiscing indicate that highly elaborative reminiscing is related to both better narrative skills and higher levels of emotion understanding and regulation both concurrently and longitudinally. Intervention studies indicate that mothers can be coached to be more elaborative during reminiscing and coaching leads to higher levels of emotion understating and regulation. Conclusions: Reminiscing about lived experience allows mothers and children to explore and examine emotions in personally meaningful situations that have real world implications for children's evolving emotion understanding.

Short report: Longitudinal study on emotion understanding in children with and without developmental language disorder.

BACKGROUND: Children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) have difficult access to social interactions, which could in turn limit their opportunities to learn about others' emotions. AIMS: This study aimed to investigate the developmental trajectories of emotion understanding in young children with and without DLD. METHODS AND PROCEDURES: 95 DLD children and 149 non-DLD children were tested twice, with an approximately two-year interval (Mage = 3.58 years at Time 1), on three indices for emotion understanding (discrimination, identification, and attribution in emotion-evoking situations). OUTCOMES AND RESULTS: At Time 2, DLD children fell behind their non-DLD peers on the non-verbal task for emotion discrimination, while catching up on the verbal tasks for emotion identification and attribution. The two groups developed most of these skills with a similar improvement over time, but DLD children showed a greater increase in positive emotion identification and attribution with age than non-DLD children. CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS: The findings showed the potential of DLD children to understand others' emotions in verbal tasks to a similar extent as their non-DLD peers. However, DLD children may still face difficulties understanding more implicit emotional messages in real-life situations, and longitudinal follow-ups are required to reveal these challenges.

The Development of Emotion Understanding among Five- and Six-Year-Old Left-Behind Children in Rural China.

The left-behind children (LBC), separated from their mother/father or parents for a long period of time, have long been discussed as a subject of concern in China. Existing research has concluded that rural children who did not migrate with parents are subject to emotional risks. In the present study, the purpose is to study the impact of parental migration on early emotional understanding. Purposeful sampling was used to recruit 180 children aged five to six years in rural areas of Guangdong province, including LBC and non-left-behind children (NLBC). Their level of emotional understanding (EU) was assessed by the emotional comprehension test (TEC) adapted to the Chinese context. The results showed that, on the three levels (External, Internal, Reflective) of emotional understanding, LBC aged five- to six- years old scored significantly lower than NLBC as counterparts. On the whole, the emotional comprehension ability of preschool LBC was significantly lower than that of NLBC. However, there were no significant differences within LBC nurtured by single parents, grandparents, and other relatives. This study confirmed that parental migration in early childhood considerably impacted rural LBC's emotional understanding and affectional adjustment, which provided a significant basis for increasing parental care and early childhood companionship in rural areas.

The Impact of Gross Motor Skills on the Development of Emotion Understanding in Children Aged 3-6 Years: The Mediation Role of Executive Functions.

This study investigates the impact of gross motor skills on the development of emotion understanding and the role of executive function in the relation between gross motor skills and emotion understanding. A total of 662 children were tested for gross motor skills, emotion understanding, and executive function. Regression analysis showed that gross motor skills were significantly related to executive function. Multiple regression analyses showed that gross motor skills and executive function were significant predictors for emotion understanding. Furthermore, mediation analysis showed that executive function mediated the impact of gross motor skills on emotion understanding. Gross motor skills contributed to emotion understanding by improving children's executive function. The findings imply that a pathway from gross motor skills to emotion understanding is mediated by executive function, which offers a novel perspective on the developmental mechanisms of children's emotion understanding.

Visuospatial perspective-taking in social-emotional development: enhancing young children's mind and emotion understanding via block building training.

BACKGROUND: Theory of Mind (ToM) refers to the ability to represent one's own and others' mental states, and emotion understanding involves appropriately comprehending and responding to others' emotional cues in social interactions. Individual differences in mind and emotion understanding have been associated strongly with verbal ability and interaction and, as such, existing training for children's ToM and emotion understanding is mostly language-based. Building on the literature on embodied cognition, this study proposes that mind and emotion understanding could be facilitated by one's visuospatial experience in simulating other's frames of reference. METHODS: This protocol consists of two training studies. Study 1 will examine if visuospatial perspective-taking training promotes ToM and emotion understanding. Participants will consist of 96 4.5-year-olds and will be randomly assigned to one of two training groups: the altercentric block building group (trained to be visuospatial perspective-takers), or the egocentric block building group (no visuospatial perspective-taking is involved). Study 2 will compare the engagement of visuospatial perspective-taking and verbal interaction in the development of mind and emotion understanding. Participants will consist of 120 4.5-year-olds. They will be randomly assigned to one of three training groups: the socialized altercentric block building (both visuospatial perspective-taking and verbal interaction), the parallel altercentric block building (visuospatial perspective-taking only), or the paired dialogic reading (verbal interaction only). CONCLUSIONS: In terms of theoretical implications, the potential causal relationship between visuospatial perspective-taking and ToM and emotion understanding may shed new insights on what underlies the development of mental state understanding. The findings of this study also have practical implications: researchers and educators may popularize visuospatial perspective-taking training in the form of block-building games if it is found to be effective in complementing conventional language-based theory-of-mind training.

The Adaptive Test of Emotion Knowledge for 3-to 9-Year-Olds: Psychometric Properties and Validity.

Children with an advanced knowledge of emotions are generally more socially competent, less likely to suffer from psychopathology, and more likely to succeed in school, both socially and academically. The assessment of children's emotion knowledge has thus gained importance in recent decades - both in psychiatric practice and in developmental and educational psychology. However, there is still a lack of appropriate instruments for assessing children's emotion knowledge in a performance test reliably, and for a broad age range. The Adaptive Test of Emotion Knowledge (ATEM 3-9) is a newly developed measure which encompasses seven components of emotion knowledge in 3-9-year-olds. The ATEM 3-9 is an adaptive test which uses skip and dropout rules to adjust for children's varying levels of knowledge. In addition to German, the ATEM has been translated into English and Hebrew. The German norming sample of the ATEM 3-9 comprises N = 882 (54% female, 21% bilingual) children between the ages of 3 and 9 years, who were divided into seven age groups. Test items, which are ordered according to the item response theory, showed a good fit to a seven-dimensional model reflecting the seven components. The internal consistencies of the dimensions are acceptable to good. Construct validity was examined by means of correlations with other measures of emotion knowledge, as well as measures on language skills and executive functions in a subsample. This resulted in medium size correlations in the expected directions. In addition, children with externalizing and internalizing disorders who were recruited in psychiatric in- and outpatient clinics showed deficits in various components of emotion knowledge when compared to their agemates in the norming sample. Overall, the ATEM 3-9 is well suited to measure individual components of emotion knowledge in children and to obtain a differentiated picture of the various aspects of emotion knowledge. The ATEM 3-9 thus supports the investigation of the development of social-emotional competencies in normative development (e.g., school readiness) and in social-emotional-learning interventions. Furthermore, it is suitable as an instrument for the differentiated assessment of (progress of) children's emotion knowledge in clinical child psychology and psychiatry.

Children's understanding of counterfactual and temporal relief in others.

Developmentalists have investigated relief as a counterfactually mediated emotion, but not relief experienced when negative events end-so-called temporal relief. This study represents the first body of work to investigate the development of children's understanding of temporal relief and compare it with their understanding of counterfactual relief. Across four experiments (407 children aged 4-11 years and 60 adults; 52% female), we examined children's ability to attribute counterfactual and temporal relief to others. In Experiment 1, 7- to 10-year-olds typically judged that two characters would feel equally happy despite avoiding or enduring an event that was unpleasant for one character. Using forced-choice procedures, Experiments 2 to 4 showed that a fledgling ability to attribute relief to others emerges at 5 to 6 years of age and that the tendency to make these attributions increases with age. The experiments in this study provide the first positive evidence in the literature as to when children can begin to attribute both counterfactual and temporal instances of relief to others. Overall, there was little evidence for separate developmental trajectories for understanding counterfactual and temporal relief, although in Experiment 4 there was an indication that, under scaffolded contexts, some children find it easier to attribute counterfactual relief rather than temporal relief to others.

Emotion Understanding in Bilingual Preschoolers.

The effects of bilingualism on child development have been extensively examined in last decades. Research reveals that simultaneous use of two or more languages affects child's language development, cognitive and social skills. The current study focuses on the so-far understudied theory of emotion understanding in bilingual children. A cohort of 593 bilingual and monolingual 5-6-year-olds took the Russian version of the Test of Emotion Comprehension (TEC) that assesses three components of emotion understanding: emotion understanding of external causes of emotions, reflective causes of emotions; and mental causes of emotions. Our results revealed no group differences between overall emotion understanding and understanding of external and reflective causes of emotions. However, monolingual children had a slightly better understanding of mental causes of emotions compared to bilingual children, when controlling for age, gender, and non-verbal intelligence. These results suggest that children growing up in bilingual environments might require more time and/or language/culture exposure to master the ability to understand mental causes of emotions, taking into account cultural differences, as well as the semantic and lexical differences in emotion labelling and emotion expression in each language.

Early Preventive Intervention for Young Children With Sex Chromosome Trisomies (XXX, XXY, XYY): Supporting Social Cognitive Development Using a Neurocognitive Training Program Targeting Facial Emotion Understanding.

Background: Sex Chromosome Trisomies (SCTs; XXX, XXY, XYY) are genetic conditions that are associated with increased risk for neurodevelopmental problems and psychopathology. There is a great need for early preventive intervention programs to optimize outcome, especially considering the increase in prenatal diagnoses due to recent advances in non-invasive prenatal screening. This study is the first to evaluate efficacy of a neurocognitive training in children with SCT. As social behavioral problems have been identified as among the key areas of vulnerability, it was targeted at improving a core aspect of social cognition, the understanding of social cues from facial expressions. Methods: Participants were 24 children with SCT and 18 typically developing children, aged 4-8 years old. Children with SCT were assigned to a training (n = 13) or waiting list (no-training) group (n = 11). Children in the training group completed a neurocognitive training program (The Transporters), aimed to increase understanding of facial emotions. Participants were tested before and after the training on facial emotion recognition and Theory of Mind abilities (NEPSY-II), and on social orienting (eyetracking paradigm). The SCT no-training group and typically developing control group were also assessed twice with the same time interval without any training. Feasibility of the training was evaluated with the Social Validity Questionnaire filled out by the parents and by children's ratings on a Visual Analog Scale. Results: The SCT training group improved significantly more than the SCT no-training and TD no-training group on facial emotion recognition (large effect size; η p 2 = 0.28), performing comparable to typical controls after completing the training program. There were no training effects on ToM abilities and social orienting. Both children and parents expressed satisfaction with the feasibility of the training. Conclusions: The significant improvement in facial emotion recognition, with large effect sizes, suggests that there are opportunities for positively supporting the development of social cognition in children with an extra X- or Y-chromosome, already at a very young age. This evidence based support is of great importance given the need for preventive and early training programs in children with SCT, aimed to minimize neurodevelopmental impact.