Models of Emotion Skills and Social Competence in the Head Start Classroom

Cumulative Risk, Negative Emotionality, and Emotion Regulation as Predictors of Social Competence in Transition to School: A Mediated Moderation Model

“…Children with high negative emotionality may react to stressful situations in intense, negative ways that may interfere with their engagement in successful social interactions. For example, emotion lability, a measure of negative reactivity, mood swings, and the intensity of emotions, has shown to be negatively associated with teacher ratings of children's social skills and peer ratings of child likeability (Spritz, Sandberg, Maher, & Zajdel, 2010).…”

“…Finally, a large body of research supports the role of emotion regulation in predicting children's social competence (Lengua et al., 2007; Spritz et al., 2010). For example, boys who showed sustained focus on the delayed reward during a delay of gratification task at the age of 3.5 were more likely to be rated as uncooperative by their first‐grade teachers (Gilliom et al., 2002) and be rejected by peers at the ages of nine and 10 (Trentacosta & Shaw, 2009).…”

Arts enrichment and preschool emotions for low-income children at risk

“…The Emotion Regulation Checklist (ERC; Shields & Cicchetti, 1997) measured child positive and negative emotion regulation. This measure was developed to foster the study of emotion regulation beyond infancy and toddlerhood (Shields & Cicchetti, 1997) and has been used in multiple studies with Head Start populations (see Berhenke et al, 2011;Miller, Gouley, Seifer, Dickstein, & Sheilds, 2004;Miller et al, 2003;Shields et al, 2001;Spritz, Sandberg, Maher, & Zajdel, 2010). The measure has 24 items rated on a 4-point Likert scale indicating frequency of various behaviors (1 = rarely/never to 4 = almost always).…”

Improving low-income preschoolers’ theory of mind: A training study

“…Teachers were asked to rate children’s social competence at the pretest and two posttests for each participating child in their classroom, limiting the participating children to no more than six per teacher. This particular assessment of social competence was used because it has been used successfully with Head Start teachers (e.g., Miller, Gouley, Seifer, Dickstein, & Shields, 2004; Spritz, Sandberg, Maher, & Zajdel, 2010), has well-established internal consistency and test-retest reliability (Spritz et al, 2010), and because it is related to preschoolers’ false belief and emotion understanding (e.g., Cassidy et al, 2003). …”