Research connecting children's understanding of mental states to their peer relations at school remains scarce. Previous work by the authors demonstrated that children's understanding of mental states in the context of a faux pas--a social blunder involving unintentional insult--is associated with concurrent peer rejection. The present report describes a longitudinal follow-up investigation of 210 children from the original sample, aged 5-6 or 8-9 years at Time 1. The results support a bidirectional model suggesting that peer rejection may impair the acquisition of faux pas understanding, and also that, among older children, difficulties in understanding faux pas predict increased peer rejection. These findings highlight the important and complex associations between social understanding and peer relations during childhood.

Previous research has suggested that the understanding of modesty—downplaying one's achievements to evoke a positive social evaluation—develops in the primary school years. However, very little is known about how children's understanding of modesty is associated with social contextual factors, such as audience type. A sample of 92 children aged 8–11 years responded to hypothetical vignettes where the protagonist responded either modestly or immodestly to praise. The findings supported earlier indications of an increase with age in the understanding of modesty, and further found that modesty was judged as more appropriate for peer audiences than for adult audiences. No interactions between age group and audience type were observed. Children's increasing approval of modesty was associated with a tendency to justify their judgements by referring to concerns about social evaluation. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Previous research has demonstrated that 10-year-olds can provide interpersonal explanations for certain self-presentational tactics, but detailed information about the development of their understanding of these tactics is lacking. This research investigated children's understanding of the processes involved in ingratiation (used to indicate likeability) and self-promotion (used to indicate competence). In the first study, with a sample of 60 children aged six to 11 years, children saw ingratiation as leading to more positive social evaluation than self-promotion, which was seen as having a more concrete, instrumental function. Additionally, children's differentiation between ingratiation and self-promotion was correlated with their level of peer preference, as determined through sociometric nominations, particularly for boys. In a second study, with a sample of 63 children aged six to 11 years, it was found that audience type (peer vs. adult) was related to children's understanding of the self-presentational tactics: children offered more social evaluation justifications for a self-promotion tactic when the audience was a peer rather than an adult. Results are discussed with reference to emerging insights into the links between peer relations and social cognition.

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The present study assessed if children would present different information in their drawings of emotion eliciting stimuli when they believed that an adult or a child audience would view their drawings. Seventy-five 6-year-olds (44 boys and 31 girls) were allocated to three groups: the reference group, the child audience group and the adult audience group. All children completed a drawing session where they first drew a neutral uncharacterised figure, followed by drawings of a sad and a happy figure in counterbalanced order. Findings demonstrated that children did consider who would be viewing their drawings when communicating emotional affect and included different features within their drawings. In particular, almost all happy drawings included a smile, but only those drawings where an audience was specified included a wave, and only the adult drawings included flower giving. Within the sad drawings tears and frowns were drawn regardless of audience type, whereas stomping was more likely to be portrayed in drawings with a child audience and thumbs down were more likely to be portrayed in drawings with adult audiences. The findings are discussed in terms of the need to further examine communicative aspects of children's drawings.