Children's peer relations represent a key aspect of school adjustment. However, little is known about their social-cognitive precursors. To address this gap, the authors followed 70 children across the transition to primary school. At Time 1 (age 5), Time 2 (age 6), and Time 3 (age 7), children were assessed on their theory of mind, prosocial behavior, and verbal ability. In addition, at Time 2 and at Time 3, the authors gathered peer nominations. Results supported the authors' mediational hypothesis of indirect paths from early theory of mind to subsequently lower peer rejection and higher peer acceptance, via improvements in prosocial behavior. The authors discuss implications of these longitudinal effects for the understanding of the impact of social-cognitive achievements for children's developing social relations.

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.

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The present research addressed children's understanding of self-presentational display rules: putting on false facial expressions in order to manipulate others' evaluations of the self. A sample of 4-to 6-year-olds was used to test our hypothesis that selfpresentational display rules involve recursive cognition about others' mental states. Children completed a task measuring understanding of various display rules and additionally performed a second-order false-belief task. Results supported the hypothesis that an appreciation of second-order mental representation is associated with understanding self-presentational display rules but not with understanding prosocial display rules (designed to spare others' feelings). We discuss the likely interaction of social processes with the observed changes in mental-state understanding in relation to the development of self-presentation.

Previous research has shown that children's understanding of how others evaluate them improves during primary school. Modesty reflects a complex form of this understanding, since one must appreciate that a self‐deprecating presentation of the self can lead to enhanced social evaluation. The present research examines the understanding of modesty in children aged between 6 and 10 years. In Expt 1, 179 children were asked to choose between modest and immodest responses to praise in hypothetical situations, and then to justify their choices. Children from age 8 onwards not only showed a preference for the modest responses but also justified this preference in terms of the negative impact of immodesty on social evaluation. In Expt 2, 60 children judged modest and immodest responses, and also completed two social cognition tasks tapping second‐order mental‐state reasoning. A teacherassessed measure of self‐monitoring was also administered. As in the first experiment, children from age 8 viewed modest responses more positively than immodest responses. Furthermore, attitudes towards modesty were associated with individual differences in self‐monitoring and social cognition, such that children with greater sensitivity to the interpersonal dynamics of social situations were more likely than others to rate modest responses positively. Implications for understanding children's social behaviour are discussed.

The present study addresses the social cognition of socially anxious children, with particular emphasis on their ability to understand others' mental states in interpersonal situations. The heterogeneous sample used in this preliminary investigation consisted of 63 primary school children in England and the USA. The English children were from a mainstream classroom of 8-to 9-year-olds, while the children from the USA ranged in age from 6 to 11 years and had been selected by school district officials for a variety of social interaction difficulties. All children completed measures of social anxiety, shy negative affect, and various social-cognitive abilities, and teacher ratings of social skills were additionally available for the USA subgroup. Results showed that feelings of social anxiety are not associated with any basic deficit in the understanding of recursive mental states which concern facts about the physical world. However, there was evidence that socially anxious children-particularly those with high levels of shy negative affect-do experience specific social-cognitive difficulties in understanding the links between emotions, intentions, and beliefs in social situations. Providing further support for this link, socially anxious children were rated by their teachers as poorer than non-anxious children only on social skills that require insight into others' mental states. Directions for further examination of this complex interplay between cognitive and emotional factors in the development of social anxiety are discussed.

Controlling one's public image in front of different audiences is an important element of social behaviour, but little is known about the way in which primary school children develop this skill. In three experiments, children's judgements about appropriate self-descriptions in front of different audiences were examined. In Experiment 1, 74 children aged between 6 and 11 were given pairs of self-descriptive statements in the domains of academic skills, physical/athletic skills, and interpersonal skills. They were asked to decide which one of each pair would be better for a story character to say when getting acquainted with either an unfamiliar peer or an unfamiliar adult, assuming all self-descriptive options were true. Results showed clear differentiation between the two audiences only in the oldest children. In Experiment 2, 72 children from the same age range completed a similar task, but specific information was given in advance about the audiences' preferences (e.g., for clever people vs. sporty people). It was found that children from across the age range were able to regulate their choices of self-descriptions in accordance with the audience preferences. However, the extent of audience differentiation increased significantly with age. In Experiment 3, 68 children from the same age range completed the task from the previous experiment, but additionally provided sociometric nominations of classmates with whom they played. As hypothesised, correlational analysis showed that the variability in audience differentiation was associated significantly with the variability in the proportion of nominations that were reciprocated. Results are discussed in the light of theoretical connections between children's social experience and their developing appreciation of self-presentational concerns.

Associations between materialism and peer relations are likely to exist in elementary school children but have not been studied previously. The first two studies introduce a new Perceived Peer Group Pressures (PPGP) Scale suitable for this age group, demonstrating that perceived pressure regarding peer culture (norms for behavioral, attitudinal, and material characteristics) can be reliably measured and that it is connected to children's responses to hypothetical peer pressure vignettes. Studies 3 and 4 evaluate the main theoretical model of associations between peer relations and materialism. Study 3 supports the hypothesis that peer rejection is related to higher perceived peer culture pressure, which in turn is associated with greater materialism. Study 4 confirms that the endorsement of social motives for materialism mediates the relationship between perceived peer pressure and materialism.