The purpose of this study was to identify predictors of friendship quality in adolescents with and without ADHD. The participants were 115 adolescents (61 ADHD, 54 non-ADHD), ages 13-18. The adolescents completed questionnaires assessing the quality of their relationships with their best friends, social perspective taking, anxiety and depression.…

The current research aims at constructing a developmentally sensitive mindreading scale (i.e., a battery of tasks measuring different aspects of mindreading ability in children from 1 to 3.5 years of age). Over 300 Polish children were tested at six-month intervals with 48 different tasks designed to measure mindreading ability (for a total of six…

A Friend is truly a treasure, in accordance with age and competence's qualitative changes. The aim of this study was to confirm the increase in friendship competence and its multifactorial nature in 3- up to 10-year-old children, and to verify gender differences, and parenting influences on the concept of friendship. A semi-structured interview…

This study provides qualitative and quantitative evidence of how an emotion explanation task can reflect African American preschoolers' pragmatic skills. We used an emotion explanation task to assess pragmatic skills among 19 children (aged 3-5 years) related to (1) engaging in conversational turn-taking, (2) answering "Wh-" questions,…

This study assessed social perspective taking in 57 children classified as educable mentally retarded divided into 3 age groups from 8-16 years. Significant differences in social perspective taking were obtained between the three groups in understanding individuals and between the older and two younger groups in understanding friendship.…

A developmental interactionist model for promoting social competence is proposed. It is argued that personal and social resources present in infancy are expanded, refined, and hierarchically reorganized continuously throughout the life-span as a function of development and experience. Social competence is seen as the result of integrating and…

Some older adults experience difficulty in decentering their own viewpoint on tasks requiring spatial and communicative role-taking. To examine the social perspective-taking skills of older adults and the kinds of strategies older people would suggest to solve social dilemmas, adults were interviewed about their typical interpersonal problems. A…

Evaluates fourth-to seventh-grade children on two aspects of social cognition: interpersonal understanding and means-ends problem-solving ability. Relates the two variables to sex, age, IQ, social class, and multiple dimensions of competence. Both variables significantly correlated with I.Q. while interpersonal understanding also correlated with…

This paper presents a developmental study of social competence in preschool children which examines the relationship of motor competence, egocentrism and demographic characteristics to the development of social competence. Tests of motor skills and role taking ability were administered individually to 54 preschool children ranging in age from 3…