Teaching Experience Correlates with Enhanced Social Cognition in Preschool Teachers

Preschool teaching is a highly demanding profession that requires constant socio-emotional attunement and the ability to engage in reflective reasoning. Despite the central role of these skills in effective early childhood education, little is known about whether preschool teachers' socio-affective and cognitive capacities vary as a function of accumulated professional experience. To address this knowledge gap, we compared the performance of 30 professional preschool teachers with a matched control group of 30 non-teachers on tests measuring emotion recognition, active-empathic listening, interpersonal reactivity, and abstract reasoning. We found that preschool teachers were significantly better on all dimensions of active-empathic listening (sensing, processing, and responding) and better in emotional self-regulation than controls. Moreover, years of preschool teaching experience were positively correlated with emotion recognition, improved listening skills, and more deliberate abstract reasoning strategies. Notably, socio-affective competencies were correlated with abstract reasoning performance within the preschool teacher group. According to these results, long-term professional involvement in preschool teaching enhances socio-affective skills and integrates them with higher-order cognitive processes, both of which are essential for responsive teaching, efficient classroom management, and the development of children's social and cognitive abilities.