Literature on the contributions of social cognitive and emotion processes to children's social competence is reviewed and interpreted in the context of an integrated model of emotion processes and cognition in social information processing. Neurophysiological and functional evidence for the centrality of emotion processes in personal-social decision making is reviewed. Crick and Dodge's model is presented as a cognitive model of social decision making, and a revised model is proposed into which emotion processes are integrated. Hypotheses derived from the proposed model are described.

Social information processing and moral domain theories have developed in relative isolation from each other despite their common focus on intentional harm and victimization, and mutual emphasis on social cognitive processes in explaining aggressive, morally relevant behaviors. This article presents a selective summary of these literatures with the goal of showing how they can be integrated into a single, coherent model. An essential aspect of this integration is Crick and Dodge's (1994) distinction between latent mental structures and online processing. It is argued that moral domain theory is relevant for describing underlying mental structures regarding the nature and boundaries of what is moral, whereas the social information processing model describes the online information processing that affects application of moral structures during peer interactions.

Understanding the nature of bullies and bullying is of considerable theoretical and practical importance. We offer a commentary on a recent debate on this topic between Swettenham (1999a, 1999b) and Crick and Dodge (1999). In this commentary, we first summarize the main points of the debate, including alternative views of bullies as social inadequates versus Machiavellian schemers. Then we clarify some unresolved issues concerning the nature and limits of social competence and the roles of values in both social competence and in bullying. Finally, it is argued that variations in children's emotion processes, such as emotionality and emotion regulation, also may underlie some of the individual differences that have been found in empathy, social information processing, and in reactive ('hot-headed') and proactive ('cold-blooded') aggressive and bullying patterns.

No abstract

Connections between adolescents' social information processing (SIP), moral reasoning, and emotion attributions and their reactive and proactive aggressive tendencies were assessed. One hundred mostly African American and Latino 13- to 18-year-olds from a low-socioeconomic-status (SES) urban community and their high school teachers participated. Reactive aggression was uniquely related to expected ease in enacting aggression, lower verbal abilities, and hostile attributional biases, and most of these connections were mediated by adolescents' attention problems. In contrast, proactive aggression was uniquely related to higher verbal abilities and expectations of more positive emotional and material outcomes resulting from aggression. Discussion focused on the utility of assessing both moral and SIP-related cognitions, and on the potential influence of low-SES, high-risk environments on these findings.

Observational assessments were made of 51 preschoolers' (mean age = 53.25 months) peer aggression and emotional displays outside of (baseline) and during aggressive interactions, and their emotion knowledge and peer acceptance were also assessed. Results indicated that the connections between children's affective dispositions and their aggression and peer acceptance varied as a function of both the emotion context (baseline vs. aggression related) and the particular emotion involved (happiness vs. anger). Emotion knowledge and affective dispositions overlapped little with each other, and both made independent contributions to peer acceptance and aggression. Mediation analyses revealed, however, that the significant connections between children's emotional dispositions and knowledge and their peer acceptance were mostly mediated by aggression.

4-8-year-old children's conceptions of the emotional consequences of moral transgressions were assessed in 2 experiments. In Experiment 1, most children expected victimizers to feel positive emotions and victims to feel negative emotions, but 8-year-olds who assessed victims first subsequently attributed less positive emotions to victimizers. Despite efforts to manipulate the salience of victims' losses in Experiment 2, children had similar expectations about the emotional consequences of transgressions. However, a developmental shift emerged: 4-year-olds attributed extremely positive emotions to victimizers due to the material gains produced by victimization, whereas 8-year-olds attributed less positive emotions to victimizers, in part due to the unfairness and harm produced by victimization. Probe questions revealed that older children also attributed additional negative-valence emotions to victimizers, suggesting that victimizers are expected to feel conflicting rather than exclusively positive emotions. Discussion focused on potential cognitive constraints in children's conceptions of moral emotions.

This article reports longitudinal data on the link between the affective quality of the mother-child relationship and school-relevant cognitive performance. Sixty-seven mothers and their children participated in the first (preschool) phase of the study; 47 were included in a follow-up when the children were 12 years of age. The affective quality of the mother-child relationship when the child was 4 years of age was significantly correlated with mental ability at age 4, school readiness at ages 5-6, 1Q at age 6, and school achievement at age 12. These associations remained significant when the contributions of maternal IQ, socioeconomic status (SES), and children's mental ability at age 4 were taken into account. Our findings suggest that affective relationships may influence cognitive growth in three ways: (a) by affecting parent's tendency to engage and support children in solving problems; (b) by affecting children's social competence and, consequently, the flow of information between children and adults; and (c) by affecting children's exploratory tendencies, hence their willingness to approach and persist in tasks.