The goal of this study was to apply aspects of the heuristic model advanced by Eisenberg, Cumberland, and Spinrad (1998) to the study of socialization that takes place in preschool and elementary school classrooms. Investigating socialization in this context is important given the number of hours students spend in school, the emotional nature of social interactions that take place involving teachers and students, and the emotions students often experience in the context of academic work. Guided by Eisenberg, Cumberland, et al.’s (1998) call to consider complex socialization pathways, we focus our discussion on ways teachers, peers, and the classroom context can shape students’ emotion-related outcomes (e.g., self-regulation, adjustment) and academic-related outcomes (e.g., school engagement, achievement) indirectly and differentially (e.g., as a function of student or classroom characteristics). Our illustrative review of the intervention literature demonstrates that the proposed classroom-based socialization processes have clear applied implications, and efforts to improve socialization in the classroom can promote students’ emotional and academic competence. We conclude our discussion by outlining areas that require additional study.

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Guided by social information processing and affective social competence models, the focal objective of this research was to examine the relations among anxious children's cognitive distortions, social skill competence, and reluctance to express emotion. In addition, we explored whether children's attention control played any meaningful role. Using a sample of 111 anxious children (M age = 9.63, SD = 0.73; 75.7% girls; 56% Hispanic/Latino), we found that cognitive distortions were negatively related to social competence. In addition, tests of moderated mediation showed that the negative association between cognitive distortions and social skill competence was indirect via reluctance to express emotion, but this only was the case for anxious children with high attention control and for distortions in the academic domain. The findings of this study may set the stage for new ways to conceptualize the role of higher attention control among anxious youth.

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