Carolien Rieffe

Leiden University | LEI · Institute of Psychology

Advanced real-time location systems (RTLS) allow for collecting spatio-temporal data from human movement behaviours. Tracking individuals in small areas such as schoolyards or nursing homes might impose difficulties for RTLS in terms of positioning accuracy. However, to date, few studies have investigated the performance of different localisation s...

The authors request the following corrections because the changes made according to the second round of the review process were not included in the original publication [...]

Drawing is first learned and practised in the home environment, and therefore parental influence should play a significant role in the development of drawing skill. However, both the content and extent of parental support for drawing have been understudied. Since drawing promotes children's cognitive, creative, and academic development, it seems va...

Moral emotions such as pride, guilt and shame play an important role in the social‐emotional development of preschool children. However, there are not many instruments available for measuring moral emotions in the preschool age. Moreover, relatively few research had examined cross‐cultural validity of measures for moral emotions. The present study...

Video games have been used as tools for non-entertainment purposes, including research contexts. This paper defines 'academic games' as games that are used and developed within academic institutions for the generation, evaluation, or dissemination of knowledge. Broad intentions related to this unique use of games are rarely explicitly discussed. Wh...

Lay abstract: Empathy is a highly valued human capacity. Yet, autistic people are often portrayed as lacking in empathy. Recent research, which views empathy as a complex construct emerging from multiple interrelated emotional and cognitive processes, argues that, although many autistic people do have difficulty understanding others' emotions, and...

Social participation at schoolyards is crucial for children’s development. Yet, schoolyard environments contain features that can hinder children’s social participation. In this paper, we empirically examine schoolyards to identify existing obstacles. Traditionally, this type of study requires huge amounts of detailed information about children in...

Naturalistic playground observations are a rich source of information when studying the social interactions of preschool children. On the playground, children can interact with their peers, explore different places and activities, and engage in different types of play. For deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) children, interactions at a playground can be...

Emotion awareness (EA) and regulation (ER) are each known to associate with mental health symptoms, yet there is a paucity of longitudinal studies examining them jointly during adolescence. Furthermore, little is known about these skills and their relations in deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) adolescents, who are at risk for reduced emotion socializa...

Moral emotions are experienced in daily life and are crucial for mediating appropriate social behaviors, as they prevent individuals from committing transgressions. In this study, caregivers of 377 children aged between 2.5 and 6.5 years old completed the Moral Emotions Questionnaire (MEQ), a parent report aimed to separately identify the presence...

Empathy is an important building block for social interactions, that not only allows individuals experience and understand others’ affective states, but also to helpfully respond to them. Although empathy can already be observed from infancy, only one questionnaire has been specifically developed to examine young children's empathy. This study tran...

This study examined how deaf or hard-of-hearing (DHH) and typically hearing (TH) children may differ in their family system and emotional functioning and examined the relations between family system and children’s emotional functioning. Parents of 106 DHH and 99 TH children (2–6 years) reported on family cohesion and adaptability, parental emotion...

Lay abstract: Autistic young people are often misunderstood by non-autistic young people, and this can lead to difficulties in their friendships. We know that friendship is very important for our mental health. For non-autistic young people, having good friendships is linked to better mental health and having problems in friendship can cause menta...

Play is an important context for children’s emotional and social development. Most play research has been focused on pretend play; however, observational studies have shown that children spend a considerable amount of time engaged in physical play. Although it is thought to be important, little is known about the role of physical play in children’s...

Hearing loss can have a significant impact on children’s development. It can diminish children’s ability to perceive and produce spoken language, which has been studied extensively. However, hearing loss can also negatively affect children’s socioemotional development because it limits access to the social environment. Interestingly, there is littl...

Video games frequently feature 'open world' environments, designed to motivate exploration. Level design patterns are implemented to invoke curiosity and to guide player behavior. However, evidence of the efficacy of such patterns has remained theoretical. This study presents an empirical study of how level design patterns impact curiosity-driven e...

Since the introduction of the Appropriate Education Act, attempts have been made to include pupils with special needs in mainstream secondary education, including pupils with autism. Statistics show that this was only partially successful. This may be partly explained by the fact that the main focus of the involved professionals (school principals,...

For deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) children living in an environment where their access to linguistic input and social interactions is compromised, learning emotions could be difficult, which may further affect social functioning. To understand the role of emotion in DHH children’s social life, this study investigated emotional functioning (i.e., e...

Children with hearing loss (HL) are at risk for a lower educational achievement. This longitudinal study compared the school career of a nationwide Dutch cohort with and without HL based on descriptive data of the governmental authority Statistics Netherlands. From 2008 to 2018, 3,367,129 children, of whom 1,193 used cochlear implants (CIs) and 8,8...

Empathy enables people to share, understand, and show concern for others’ emotions. However, this capacity may be more difficult to acquire for children with hearing loss, due to limited social access, and the effect of hearing on empathic maturation has been unexplored. This four-wave longitudinal study investigated the development of empathy in c...

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0124102.].

This longitudinal study examined how shame and guilt contribute to the development of reactive and proactive aggression in adolescents with and without hearing loss. Adolescents between 9 and 16 years old (adolescents with hearing loss ( n = 80; M age = 11.91) and without hearing loss ( n = 227; M age = 11.63)) completed self-reports on three occas...

Reading emotions from other people's facial expressions is an important skill that guides social interactions. With limited auditory input and atypical emotion socialization, deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) children may develop atypical processing patterns when reading emotional faces. The current study aimed at understanding whether and how DHH and...

Objectives: For children to understand the emotional behavior of others, the first two steps involve emotion encoding and emotion interpreting, according to the Social Information Processing model. Access to daily social interactions is prerequisite to a child acquiring these skills, and barriers to communication such as hearing loss impede this a...

Learning to regulate aggressive impulses is a significant developmental milestone for preschoolers. To date, there is no consensus about whether rough-and-tumble play (RTP) is positively or negatively related to the regulation of aggression. This study examined the relation of RTP with children’s levels of emotion regulation and aggression. RTP of...

Lay abstract: Empathy is an important feature to feel for another person, evoking social support for the person in distress, and thus strengthening social cohesion. The question is to what extent empathic reactions can also be observed in autistic adolescents and autistic girls in particular, since their often mentioned good social skills might pr...

Language problems are a risk factor for externalizing problems, but the developmental path remains unclear. Emotional competence may mediate the relationship, especially when externalizing problems are reactive in nature, such as in Oppositional Deviant Disorder (ODD) and reactive aggression. We examined the development of reactive and proactive ex...

In order to better understand protective factors for internalizing problems, this longitudinal study examined positive emotions, emotion awareness and (non-)emotional communication skills in relation to somatic complaints and social anxiety in children with (N=104) and without (N=183) Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) using self-reported measur...

This study examined the quantity and quality of parental linguistic input to toddlers with moderate hearing loss (MHL) compared with toddlers with normal hearing (NH). The linguistic input to eighteen toddlers with MHL and twenty-four toddlers with NH was examined during a 10-minute free-play activity in their home environment. Results showed that...

Curiosity is a strong motivator for human action, but the circumstances under which one becomes curious are not clear. This paper builds on the assumption that video games can be used as a stimulus for the experimental study of curiosity, and forms a basis in examining the type of curiosity motivated by spatial exploration. A video game was created...

Objectives: To compare the quality of life (QoL) of children with hearing loss (HL) and children with normal hearing (NH) and to examine how the QoL of children with HL changes over time, considering language skills, type of hearing device, degree of HL, and type of education. Methods and materials: This longitudinal study included 62 children wit...

Although having universal aspects, development of a sense of fairness, a milestone in children's social development, is influenced by social and cultural forces. Yet, it scarcely has been studied in children who are at risk for their social development, let alone in deaf and hard‐of‐hearing (DHH) children, who have limited access to linguistic and...

Children with autism spectrum disorder are at risk of developing internalizing and externalizing problems. However, information on early development of behavior problems and the contributing role of emotional functioning in preschool children with autism spectrum disorder is scarce. This study collected data of boys with and without autism spectrum...

Young autistic people have a range of social difficulties, but it is not yet clear how these difficulties can be explained. In addition, emerging research is suggesting that autistic girls may differ from boys in terms of their social behaviors, but yet unknown is if they differ in terms of their pro‐social behavior, such as helping. The present st...

AUT787446_Lay_Abstract – Supplemental material for Bidirectional relationships between bullying, victimization and emotion experience in boys with and without autism

AUT787446_Supplementary_material – Supplemental material for Bidirectional relationships between bullying, victimization and emotion experience in boys with and without autism

Background Late language emergence is a risk indicator for developmental language disorder. Parent‐implemented early language intervention programmes (parent programmes) have been shown to have positive effects on children's receptive and expressive language skills. However, long‐term effectiveness has rarely been studied. Additionally, little is k...

The association between empathy and friendship quality in children and adolescents is well established, but longitudinal studies are lacking. Because social interactions typically involve language, these relations might be moderated by children's communication problems. The current study examined the interrelation of friendship quality (positive an...

Adolescents with autism are more often victims of bullying than peers without autism. Although prior work indicates that emotions play an important role, bidirectional relationships are yet unknown. This study examines the longitudinal associations of anger, fear, guilt and shame with being victimized and bullying others in adolescent boys with and...

Children and adolescents with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) often show comorbid emotional and behavior problems. The aim of this longitudinal study is to examine the relation between emotion control (i.e., negative emotionality, emotion awareness, and worry/rumination) and the development of internalizing and externalizing problems. Boys with and...

Background Depressive symptoms are common in children with developmental language disorder (DLD). However, risk and protective factors contributing to these problems are currently underspecified. Aims The current longitudinal study examined the role of emotion‐regulation (ER) strategies in the severity of depressive symptoms in children with and w...

Purpose: Victimization is a common problem for many children but is exacerbated for children with a developmental language disorder (DLD). However, the severity of communication problems does not explain their victimization rates. In children without DLD, difficulties with emotional competence are a risk factor for victimization and also increase...

Emotional functioning plays a crucial role in the social development of children and adolescents. We examined the extent to which emotion control was related to the quality of friendships in pre-adolescents with and without hearing loss. We tested 350 pre-adolescents (75 deaf/hard of hearing in mainstream education (DHHm), 48 deaf/hard of hearing i...

Objectives: This study examined joint engagement and emotional availability of parent-child interactions for toddlers with moderate hearing loss (MHL) compared with toddlers with normal hearing (NH) and in relation to children's language abilities. Design: The participants in this study were 25 children with MHL (40 to 60 dB hearing loss) and 26...

For parents, online platforms where their children interact with others often feel like a “black box” in terms of what exactly is happening. In this study, we developed an ecologically valid online computer game in which a (computer‐generated) peer teammate tried to provoke frustration, in order to examine (a) adolescents' responses and (b) how ind...

Objective: Cochlear implants (CIs) have dramatically improved the lives of children who are deaf or hard of hearing; however, little is known about its implications for preventing the development of psychiatric symptoms in this at-risk population. This is the first longitudinal study to examine the early manifestation of emotional and behavioral d...

In hearing adolescents, emotions play important roles in the development of bullying and victimization. Yet, it is unclear whether this also applies to adolescents who are deaf or hard of hearing (DHH). The present study examines the longitudinal associations of anger, fear, guilt, and shame with bullying/victimization in DHH adolescents. Overall,...

Motives for aggression can be reactive or proactive. While research on these motives for aggression exists in Western societies, little is known about their prevalence in a non-Western society such as Malaysia. The first step to narrow this gap is to validate an instrument, which measures levels of reactive and proactive aggression. In the present...

No assessment tools are available to measure shame and guilt in children who are deaf or hard of hearing (DHH), while these self-conscious emotions might play a role in the frequently noted social and behavioral problems in this group. Therefore, the aim of this study was to validate the Brief Shame and Guilt Questionnaire (BSGQ) in DHH children. I...

Peer influence has a profound impact on decision-making in typically developing adolescents. In this study, we examined to what extent adolescent males (age 11-17 years; N = 144) with and without autism (ASD) were influenced by peer feedback on prosocial behavior, and which factors were related to individual differences in peer feedback sensitivity...

Hearing loss may represent a risk for developing social skills difficulties; however, little is known about the potential risk resulting from unilateral or mild bilateral hearing loss (UMHL). We compared the social skills of 14 children with UMHL and 21 children with moderate to severe hearing loss (MSHL) with those of 123 children with typical hea...

This study examined the construct and concurrent validity of the Portuguese version of the Emotion Awareness Questionnaire (EAQ) in 302 children and adolescents (mean age 13 years old). The EAQ is a self-report questionnaire that allows for analysis of how youth experience and understand their own and others’ emotions. Participants completed the EA...

Empathy plays a crucial role in healthy social functioning and in maintaining positive social relationships. In this study, 1250 children and adolescents (10–15 year olds) completed the newly developed Empathy Questionnaire for Children and Adolescents (EmQue-CA) that was tested on reliability, construct validity, convergent validity, and concurren...

Objectives: The first aim of this study was to examine various aspects of Theory of Mind (ToM) development in young children with moderate hearing loss (MHL) compared with hearing peers. The second aim was to examine the relation between language abilities and ToM in both groups. The third aim was to compare the sequence of ToM development between...

Background: The capacity for emotion recognition and understanding is crucial for daily social functioning. We examined to what extent this capacity is impaired in young children with a Language Impairment (LI). In typical development, children learn to recognize emotions in faces and situations through social experiences and social learning. Chil...

Empathy, the ability to feel the emotions of others and respond affectively to these emotions, is an important factor in the development of social competence. The purpose of this study was to examine empathy levels in toddlers with moderate hearing loss (MHL) compared to toddlers with no hearing loss (nHL), and to explore the relation between langu...

Objectives: Parenting a child who has a severe or profound hearing loss can be challenging and at times stressful, and might cause parents to use more adverse parenting styles compared with parents of hearing children. Parenting styles are known to impact children's social-emotional development. Children with a severe to profound hearing loss may...

Deaf and hard of hearing school-aged children are at risk for delayed development of emotion understanding; however, little is known about this during the preschool years. We compared the level of emotion understanding in a group of 35 4-5-year-old children who use hearing aids to that of 130 children with typical hearing. Moreover, we investigated...

Background: The purpose of this study was to examine parental stress in parents of toddlers with moderate hearing loss compared to hearing controls. Furthermore, the associations between parental stress and child- and parent-related factors such as language, social-emotional functioning and social support were examined. Design: The study sample...

Objective: Clinical studies are often facing missing data. Data can be missing for various reasons, for example, patients moved, certain measurements are only administered in high-risk groups, and patients are unable to attend clinic because of their health status. There are various ways to handle these missing data (e.g., complete cases analyses,...

Play has an important role in various aspects of children’s development. However, time for free play has declined substantially over the last decades. To date, few studies have focused on the relationship between opportunities for free play and children’s social functioning. The aims of this study are to examine whether children´s free play is rela...

Children with hearing loss are at risk for developing psychosocial problems. Children with mild to severe hearing loss are less frequently subject to research, in particular in preschool, and we therefore know less about the risk in this particular group. To address this, we compared psychosocial functioning in thirty-five 4–5-year olds with hearin...

Starting pre-school is a major stepping stone for children’s peer relations. Yet, some children spend their recess time alone, albeit in the presence of playful peers. These solitary behaviours have been noted in the literature as an alarm signal for a maladaptive social development. In this study, we identified four kinds of non-social behaviours...

The distinction between proactive and reactive functions of aggression is one of the most common divisions when investigating aggression among children and adolescents. To date, self-report is the least used measurement, despite existing literature supporting the view that the best informant regarding internal processes and motives are children the...

Empathy is the basic ability to respond affectively to the emotions of others and is observed early in human development. This study (N = 304) tested the Italian version of the Empathy Questionnaire (EmQue) created by Rieffe, Ketelaar and Wiefferink (2010). The EmQue is a parent scale assessing empathy-related behaviors in toddlers. For this study,...

In this study, we aimed at gaining a better understanding of the individual differences contributing to feelings of empathy in adolescents. Therefore, we examined the extent to which emotion awareness (e.g., recognizing and appreciating one's own and the emotions of others) and a tendency for certain social roles (e.g., helping or teasing peers whe...

Social interactions at the playground have been represented as a rich learning opportunity to hone and master social skills at preschool years. Specifically, all forms of social play (fantasy, role, exercise or rough-and-tumble) have been related to children's social competence. The main goal of this study was to examine whether it is a certain kin...

Moral emotions such as shame, guilt and pride are the result of an evaluation of the own behavior as (morally) right or wrong. The capacity to experience moral emotions is thought to be an important driving force behind socially appropriate behavior. The relationship between moral emotions and social behavior in young children has not been studied...

While both shame and guilt are described as self-conscious emotions, they differ in many ways, including their contextual antecedents and their associations with mental health. A measure that distinguishes proneness to experience shame and guilt is crucial. In the present study we present a brief questionnaire to measure shame- and guilt-proneness...