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On the importance of being flexible: early interrelations between affective flexibility, executive functions and anxiety symptoms in preschoolers
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When children are confronted with an emotional problem, affective flexibility mobilizes their cognitive and emotional resources to optimally address it. We investigated the contribution of executive functions to
cognitive and affective flexibility in preschoolers. We assessed affective flexibility in 67 preschoolers (30 girls; Mmonths = 61.77, SD = 11.08 months) using an innovative measure – the Emotional Flexible Item Selection
Task (EM-FIST), plus cool measures of executive functions (working memory, inhibition and cognitive flexibility), anxiety symptoms and intelligence. Findings revealed that affective flexibility improves during
the preschool years. While individual differences in age and proactive inhibition predicted cognitive flexibility, a different constellation of predictors (maternal education, proactive inhibition, working memory and age) were significant for affective flexibility. Cognitive flexibility didn’t contribute to affective flexibility beyond the predictors
mentioned above. Anxiety exerted a negative effect on affective flexibility in a high anxious subgroup of preschoolers, but only when processing negative, relative to happy faces, supporting the Attentional
Control Theory which predicts valence-related executive impairments
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Affective flexibility Cool executive functions