Stressful life events and children’s socioemotional difficulties: Conditional indirect effects of resilience and executive function

•Life stressors are widely associated with children’s socioemotional outcomes.•Compromised resilience mediated the stress-maladaptation association.•Working memory mitigated the effect of stress on socioemotional difficulties.•Cognitive flexibility protected resilience and socioemotional behaviors from stress.•Inhibitory control was associated with resilience and socioemotional difficulties. Although the association between life stress and children’s socioemotional difficulties has been widely documented, few studies have adopted a cognitive-based resilience framework studying preadolescent psychosocial adjustment. This study examined whether the stress–difficulties associations are mediated by resilience and moderated by executive function (EF). A sample of 144 typically developing Chinese children (aged 10–12 years) completed measures assessing stressful life events, socioemotional difficulties, resilience, and computer-based EF (including working memory [WM] capacity and WM updating, inhibitory control, and cognitive flexibility). The results showed that stressful life events were positively associated with socioemotional difficulties through the mediating effect of diminished resilience. The direct and indirect effects of stressful life events on socioemotional difficulties varied across individual differences in EF. Specifically, compared with low to medium levels, high-level WM capacity and WM updating moderated the association between stressful life events and socioemotional difficulties. Cognitive flexibility moderated both direct and indirect effects, showing that for children with low to medium levels of cognitive flexibility, life stress was positively associated with socioemotional difficulties via the role of lower resilience; however, for those with high levels of cognitive flexibility, the direct and indirect effects were not significant. Inhibitory control showed significant direct associations with resilience and socioemotional difficulties but failed to be a moderator. The characteristics of the low-stress sample might limit the generalizability of this study. Nevertheless, our findings provide a rationale for integrating a cognitive-based resilience process and the multifaceted structure of EF to understand and promote preadolescents’ positive adaptation.