Category: Journal Article

Long-term follow-up of a randomised controlled trial of a brief home-based parenting intervention to reduce behavioural problems in young children
8 October 2025
The long-term findings of our Healthy Start, Happy Start study have been published in a paper for the Journal Of Child Psychology And Psychiatry.

A scoping review of teacher training programs to promote learning through play in pre- and primary schools
1 October 2025
This paper was published by the Journal of Early Childhood Teacher Education in September 2025.

Understanding how certain personality traits impact children’s enjoyment of school and teachers’ perceptions of children’s behaviour
25 September 2025
Read a summary of this recent paper published by Emotional and Behavioural Difficulties which used data from the Healthy Start, Happy Start study.

Trusting play to be meaningful data: using sand tray as a play-based research method with an adapted interpretative phenomenological analysis
27 March 2025
PEDAL PhD student Sydney Conroy explores using play itself as data for the purpose of research.

Fostering the psychological wellbeing of children diagnosed with cancer: Multidisciplinary insights in paediatric oncology
18 February 2025
PEDAL PhD student Paulina Perez-Duarte Mendiola contributed to this paper which was published last month in the Psycho-oncology section of Frontiers in Psychology.

It’s a Pandemic in the Playborhood: An International Perspective of Play Therapists on the COVID-19 Pandemic
7 January 2025
The COVID-19 pandemic, lockdowns and beyond, impacted many professions and workplaces, including therapists and their therapy rooms.

Learning through play in Global Majority countries: Reflections from the PEDAL Centre on understanding and adapting the concept in four different contexts
9 September 2024
This paper in the International Journal of Play interrogates the concept of learning through play in different global contexts.

Staying self-regulated in the classroom: The role of children’s executive functions and situational factors
24 July 2024
We wanted to explore how an individual child's self-regulation might vary between different activities.

Centring children’s lived experiences in understanding the importance of play in hospitals
8 July 2024
We wanted to understand what playing in hospital is like from the perspectives and experiences of young children themselves.

Creating Classrooms for Change: Developing cognitive flexibility in schools in Rwanda
1 March 2024
This research looked at how schools in Rwanda foster students’ skills for adaptability - their capacity to create, innovate and adjust to shifting circumstances. It uses the psychological lens of cognitive flexibility.