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.

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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.