Examined relations among parent and child social information processing components and their links to children's social competence. Found some consistency between parents and kindergarten children in the types of goals and strategies provided in open-ended vignettes involving peer conflict. Fathers' and children's goals and strategies related to…

Examined social cognition of socially anxious 6- to 11-year-olds, focusing on ability to understand others' mental states in interpersonal situations. Found evidence that anxious children experienced specific social-cognitive difficulties in understanding links between emotions, intentions, and beliefs in social situations. Such children were…

Examined the relation between 3- to 5-year-olds' beliefs about the tendency for antisocial behavior to remain stable over time and their reasoning about peer interactions. Found that children who endorsed sociomoral stability beliefs were less likely than their peers to make prosocial inferences, were rated by their teachers as less likely to…

Highlights the strengths of the Halberstadt et al. contribution to the literature on social-emotional development. Discusses three issues relating to their model: (1) the inseparability of cognitive representation in both emotional and social functioning; (2) the role played by context; and (3) the significance of goals in any construct involving…

Investigated the relationship between psychological understanding and positive social behavior in preschool children. Found that both mental state understanding and emotion understanding were positively related to teacher ratings of social skills, behavioral observers' global ratings of social skills, and peer popularity. When language ability was…