childhood

Friends of the Nonverbal Communication Blog, this week we present the paper “Effects of Body-Oriented Interventions on Preschoolers’ Social-emotional Competence: A systematic review” by Dias Rodrigues, A.; Cruz-Ferreira, A.; Marmeleira, J. and Veiga, G. (2022), in which authors carry out a revision of previous literature about body-oriented interventions with kids in kindergarten, to know if these interventions improve their socio-emotional skills.

Early childhood is a fundamental period of life. In it there is a very significant development of socio-emotional skills, which are a very important basis for the health, well-being and success of children. These competencies are also crucial for children to deal with current and future stressors and challenges.

When we talk about socioemotional competencies, we refer to social (ability to solve problems, adjust behavior according to the social situation, etc.) and emotional competencies (understanding, regulation, and expression of emotions) that work together towards adaptive development.

These socio-emotional competencies are developed from very early ages through the process of socialization of emotions, that is, through the modeling, observation, and communication of emotions.

In the past few decades, several intervention programs have been implemented in educational contexts with the aim of promoting the development of socio-emotional skills in children.

One of these types of interventions are those oriented to the body, which are of particular interest to us, because it is assumed that bodily and emotional experiences are associated with each other and related to psychomotricity, play, dance, physical activity or relaxation. That is: nonverbal elements.

All this would serve to be aware of the body, of the body in relation to others and the connection between it and emotions.

A strong body of evidence supports the effectiveness of these interventions in the educational context. That is why the research investigates this specific context.

The objective is to know if there is, indeed, an improvement in socio-emotional skills with these interventions focused on the body that use non-verbal elements of communication.

The process was as follows: a series of articles were chosen, compiled from various databases, published between 2000 and 2020. The study participants had to be children between 3 and 7 years old and they had to attend preschool education. In addition, the study had to use body-oriented interventions for at least one week and necessarily in the context of school.

To date, this is the first systematic review to learn about the effects of body-oriented exposures in educational contexts on the socioemotional competencies of preschool children.

Despite the difficulty in identifying the ideal intervention “dose,” the emerging consensus among researchers is that children who received more sessions demonstrated greater outcomes. However, according to the analysis carried out, there is not enough evidence to support this idea.

Some of the assessment instruments used in the included studies were self-reports by parents and teachers. The use of parent reports is based on the idea of the children that parents see, and their knowledge of the child in various contexts, therefore they can observe them in very different situations. However, they may be carried away by the urge to create a positive image of their children and thus their opinion may be biased.

There was limited evidence of the positive effects of this type of interventions on emotion recognition, emotional regulation strategies, and social cooperation and independence. However, authors do consider that the bodily and emotional experiences displayed by them possibly facilitate the recognition and regulation of emotions.

These skills are essential for social interactions and are predictors of cooperative social behaviors.

There was also evidence, although limited, that these interruptions improved game interaction and skill, behavior problems, and hyperactivity.

Future research should not omit important data, as occurred in some of those analyzed, on, for example, eligibility criteria.

Authors point out the need to know exactly what type of body-oriented intervention is most useful for the development of socio-emotional skills in children of these ages and mark it as one of the main objectives of future studies.

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Friends of the Nonverbal Communication Blog, this week we present the paper “Gesture and Language Trajectories in Early Development: an Overview from the Autism Spectrum Disorder Perspective” by Ramos-Cabo, S.; Vulchanov, V. and Vulchanova, M. (2019), in which authors carry out a revision about the existent works about gestures, language, and how they are developed in children with autism spectrum disorders.

When we talk about autism spectrum disorders, we mean a very broad and extensive group of different neurodivergences. Although these are very complex, we know a few things about them.

For example, one of the first signs of the existence of autism spectrum disorders (ASD) is the absence or late appearance of communicative behaviors, both verbal and non-verbal.

In this article authors comment that there is a large body of research showing that the evolution of language in typically developing children (TD) is highly dependent on their ability to produce gestures. However, there still are many questions without answers for children with ASD on this precise topic.

Authors therefore wonder whether gestures also influence language development in children with ASD, and if there are differences between the gestures of children with ASD and children with TD.

Authors mention many studies in the article, from which we can extract two main ideas that we will be developing.

In the first place: the association between gestures and language exists in children with ASD; secondly, there are, indeed, differences in the development of verbal and non-verbal communication skills between children with ASD and children with TD.

Regarding the first idea, multiple studies have shown that gestures can predict the language skills of children with ASD and, in particular, deictic gestures, which would be relevant both for these children and for those with typical development. Deictic gestures are those that are used to guide someone’s attention to something located in the environment.

The fact that these gestures are related to social and interactive demands indicates that they could constitute a powerful and useful tool for early interventions in children with ASD, since these disorders are also related to social interaction.

Previous studies show that intervention in this area improves the vocabulary of children typically developed, which is why authors understand that it could be very beneficial for children with ASD, providing them with more nonverbal communication resources that could expand their verbal skills and, therefore, also improve social skills.

Regarding the second idea, there are numerous studies that indicate the presence of differences in the development of nonverbal communication skills in children with ASD when compared to the development of children with TD.

One of these differences is the lower rate of gestures in children with ASD compared to typically developing children. There would also be a progressive deterioration in the domain of deictic gestures in these children.

One idea raised by authors is that, due to the fact that no evidence of retardations in verbal and non-verbal communication appears until the first year of life, some previous studies have failed to find differences in early communication skills between groups of children with ASD and children with TD.

It should also be considered that babies with ASD can develop communication skills similar to those of children with TD, but the trajectory of this development changes from that first year that we have mentioned.

That is, at some point in the first two years of life there is a decline. This is not limited to the domain of communication skills, but also to social, cognitive and adaptive behaviors.

In any case, authors advise caution when interpreting these findings, as they consider that much more evidence is necessary, due to the complexity of autism spectrum disorders.

Authors mention the need for research that replicates this study and those mentioned in it. For some of the aforementioned investigations, methods such as the observation of unstructured interactions or analysis of home videos were used, so that, although they have some validity, their control is difficult. That is one point that can be improved.

They comment that gestural language elicitation methodologies are necessary, so that they can allow naturalistic interactions between the caregiver and the child in controlled environments. In that way, the children’s communication skills, as well as other cognitive and social skills, would improve substantially.

Body-oriented interventions in preschoolers: do they help improve their socio-emotional competencies? Nonverbal Communication Blog

Gesture expression in children with autism spectrum disorders: is it the same as gesture expression in children with a typical development? Nonverbal Communication Blog