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The successful management of emotions, defined as 'emotion regulation' is a fundamental skill that has an impact on multiple outcomes later in life from social skills to academic success. The development of emotion regulation is influenced by a range of environmental factors such as maternal health, caregiving practices and also individual differences such as resiliency and temperament. Recent evidence suggests that emotional self-efficacy (the belief in one's ability to manage emotions) plays a role in developing successful emotion regulation skills. This study aims to investigate the relationship between children's emotion regulation skills (as rated by themselves, teachers and others) and their emotional self-efficacy beliefs. Exploring children's own understanding of their emotion regulation skills has been championed by some as a much needed area for further research. This study explored the views of children towards their emotion regulation skills and the extent to which these related to teacher and parent perceptions. The findings indicate that children have a good awareness of their emotions, which corresponded to teacher and parent perspectives in unique ways suggesting that context plays and important role in the children's levels of emotional awareness. Differences were found in coping strategies and skills when comparing children with behaviour and emotional difficulties to the main sample of children. In general, children tended to use distraction and avoidance techniques in order to help them cope with their feelings of anger and sadness and within this age group parents and caregivers are still perceived by the children as their main provider of emotional support. The implications for further actions to elicit and engage the child in emotional dialogue alongside the formation of effective classroom interventions and strategies for the successful development of emotion regulation are also discussed.

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This thesis investigates the conceptual foundations and educational implications of Piaget's theory. Its main argument is that Piaget's theory can be seen as an attempt to provide a scientific grounding for a basically Bergsonian position. In Creative Evolution Bergson advances a theory which is at the same time a theory of evolution and a theory of knowledge. Piaget's theory is analogous (the 'genetic' strand in his epistemology is Bergsonian.) However, Bergson claims that there are two distinct kinds of knowledge, intellect and intuition; and that intellect (science) cannot understand evolution. Piaget rejects these further claims (the 'scientific' strand in his epistemology is anti-Bergsonian.) From a Bergsonian point of view, Piaget's project is bound to fail. It is shown that Bergson's theory supports the ideals of 'childcentred education'; and both Sir Percy Nunn's and Piaget's theories are ambivalent about those ideals. The reason for this is that both Nunn and Piaget accept Bergson's view that knowledge is to be conceived of in an evolutionary framework, but both reject Bergson's view that there are two distinct kinds of knowledge. Neither Nunn's or Piaget's theories can provide a satisfactory account of invention, and both undermine the ethical foundations of 'child-centred education'. A consideration of Piaget's theory from a Bergsonian point of view illuminates some of its central obscurities, and reveals some of its main problems. It transpires that Piaget's theory solves these problems in a strikingly Bergsonian fashion, and, thus, is much closer to a Bergsonian position than may at first appear. An investigation of Piaget's theory as scientific epistemology casts doubt on its status as epistemology. An investigation of Piaget's theory as genetic epistemology shows it to be flawed by its assumption of the epistemological primacy of the individual. Bergson's theory is flawed in the same way.

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The development of cognitive and academic abilities can be understood as part of a larger ecological system. One mechanism said to promote the development of these abilities is scaffolding, a process characterised by contingent response, and cognitive and emotional support, aimed at promoting autonomy. In a diverse sub-sample of 400 mother-child dyads from the Families, Children and Child Care study, maternal scaffolding-related behaviours were recorded during semi-structured play interactions when children were 10 months. Employing the Process-Person-Context-Time model (Bronfenbrenner & Morris, 2006), the study aims were threefold: (1) to test whether mothers’ show behaviours akin to the central dimensions of scaffolding during play interactions with infants, (2) to address individual differences in maternal scaffolding behaviours, and (3) to explore the relevance of these behaviours for child cognitive abilities in the preschool years, and academic attainment at age 11 years. Maternal behaviours reflecting the main dimensions of scaffolding were explained by an overarching construct labelled ‘scaffolding-like behaviours’. Child (play maturity at 10 months), mother (age, personality, ethnicity, first language and education) and context (family size and neighbourhood adversity) characteristics, explained unique variations in these behaviours. After taking person and context characteristics into consideration, these behaviours predicted children’s non-verbal ability but not verbal ability at 51 months, an association moderated by maternal levels of education. Non-verbal ability mediated the effects of maternal scaffolding-like behaviours on child English and maths academic attainment at age 11 years. 4 Studying a large and diverse English sample, the current study made the following contributions: it elucidated some of the mechanisms by which individual differences in scaffolding occur, and illustrated that alongside proximal and distal contextual factors, maternal behaviours in the first year continue to be relevant to child intellectual development.

Actions are the translation of internal states such as intentions into overt gestures and goals. Actions are communicative, because by observing another’s overt behaviour we can infer that person’s internal states. Infants’ abilities to execute actions are limited by developing motor processes. Their capacity to make inferences from others’ behaviour is hindered by their inability to engage in perspective-taking and other advanced social cognitive processes. Nonetheless, extensive evidence shows that infants perceive actions as goal-directed sequences that are meaningful, and that they respond to observed actions with motor resonance. The aims of this thesis were to determine how semantic and motor processing of observed action develop in infancy, whether these processes develop separately or in conjunction with one another, and how infants’ abilities to execute and plan actions affects ability to detect semantic and motor differences between actions. These aims were achieved by studying how infants processed grasping actions that varied on different dimensions. In Chapter 1, the literature on infant action perception from social, motor and semantic perspectives is reviewed and the objectives of the thesis are described. In Chapter 2, the ability of 16-month-olds to discriminate between the uses of a novel tool when motor simulation processes are uninformative was investigated. In Chapter 3, the attentional and semantic neural correlates of processing of observed grasps were measured in 9-month-olds, 11.5-month-olds, and adults. In Chapter 4, motor activation in 10-month-old infants in response to motorically similar but semantically distinct grasping actions was related to infants’ action planning skills. The results of these experiments show that there is a complex interplay between motor and semantic constituents of the action processing system, and that this interplay is developmentally dynamic. The implications of the results for understanding action processing in development are considered in Chapter 5.

This thesis investigates how 3- to 8-year-old children construct a theory of pictures with a particular focus on how children prioritise appearance and intentional cues when decoding the picture-referent relationship, and whether picture modality mediates children’s understanding of how pictures relate to the world and their creators. Experiments 1, 2 and 3 explore whether appearance or intentional cues dominate 3- to 6-year-old children and adults picture interpretation when the two cues conflict. Experiment 4 investigates how 4- and 6-year-old children and adults use artists and photographers’ intentions to name and judge the value of photographs and drawings. Experiment 5 addresses children’s knowledge of the divergent roles played by artists and photographers in creating pictures. Experiment 6 examines children’s understanding of how a picture creator’s visual access to, and knowledge of, their intended referent affects their ability to depict it. Finally, Experiments 7 and 8 assess children’s ability to consider the interaction between picture modality and referential content to identify whether a confederate is more likely to have created a fantasy drawing or a fantasy photograph (e.g. a unicorn). Collectively, the findings from these experiments reveal that children’s early understanding of the referential nature of pictures is supplemented by modality-specific knowledge about drawing and photography. More specifically, between the ages of 3 and 8 children display a growing understanding that while drawings rely to a large extent on the minds of their artists, in particular their intentions and imagination, photographs depend on their real world referents more so than their photographer’s intentions or referent knowledge. Theoretically, confirmation that children’s pictorial development entails an understanding of different modalities warranted the inclusion of two modality-specific streams, one for photography and one for drawing, into existing frameworks of pictorial understanding.