Advanced social cognition in the preschool years: A mixed blessing for social-emotional well-being in early childhood and adolescence

The purpose of this study was to examine links between children's social cognition at age four and their social-emotional outcomes in early childhood and adolescence. Data were gathered from 85 middle-class children and their families living in the San Francisco Bay Area who participated in a longitudinal study on children's transition to school. Preschool-aged children's social cognition was examined as a predictor of parents' and teachers' ratings of children's social-competence, internalizing symptoms, and externalizing behaviors in early childhood and adolescence, and gender and family distress were examined as potential moderators of the relation between early social cognition and later outcomes. Children's social cognitive skills were assessed in the preschool period using laboratory-based measures of emotional understanding and theory of mind and parents and teachers rated children's social-emotional outcomes on behavior inventories in Kindergarten, 1st grade, and 9 th grade. Family distress was assessed using observers' ratings of conflict and negative emotion displayed between parents during interactions with children in the preschool period.;After controlling for early verbal abilities, hierarchical multiple regressions revealed that gender moderated many of the associations between preschool-aged children's social cognition and later social-emotional outcomes. Overall, for girls, advanced social cognition at age four was largely a boon---often predicting outcomes such as greater social competence and fewer externalizing behaviors in early childhood and even, according to parents, ten years later in adolescence. However, girls' advanced early emotional understanding was associated with an increased risk of internalizing symptoms (as reported by parents) in the early school years. For boys, on the other hand, the links between early social cognition and later social-emotional outcomes were generally weaker and often in the opposite direction from those for girls. Exploratory partial correlations provided preliminary evidence that the amount of co-parenting conflict to which children were exposed early in life often altered the relation between early social cognition and later outcomes differently for girls and boys. Precociously socially perceptive boys in distressed families appeared to be at particular risk for negative outcomes (lower social competence, greater externalizing) during the school years.