Investigating socio-emotional cognition in late preterm children: a case-control study

This study aimed to investigate socio-emotional cognitive competence in late preterm and term born children. Late preterm children (n = 53; 5–10 years) and full-term control children (n = 53; 5–10 years) were evaluated on the four socio-emotional cognitive tests of the Intelligence and Development Scales (IDS): emotion recognition, emotion regulation, social understanding, and social behavioural competence. Compared to full-term children, late preterm children (LPT) performed significantly worse on the emotion recognition and social behavioural competence tasks, but otherwise, no significant differences were found in emotion regulation and social understanding tasks. These findings support the conclusion that late-preterm birth may be associated with negative, but selective, socio-emotional cognitive difficulties. Targeted interventions aimed to limit the incidence of these dysfunctions during childhood could be quite important for LPT children.