| Social cognition and emotion regulation skills are considered key aspects of developing emotional competencies in children, but the relationship between these two central skill sets in child development is unclear. Two central theories of emotional development propose different roles for social cognition. Functionalist theories propose that social cognition is a key component of emotional appraisals, while differential emotions theory proposes that basic emotions develop along independent trajectories, and are only related to social cognition as a child grows. This study aims to explore the relationship of central components of preschoolers' developing emotional competencies: understanding of the causes of emotion, emotion recognition and perspective-taking, theory of mind, and emotion regulation skills and strategies during a frustrating task. It relates these child social-emotional competencies to parenting styles. Participants included 39 Head Start preschoolers and their mothers in an urban New England setting. Results show correlations between emotion understanding tasks and parent reports of emotion regulation, as well as some relationship between emotion understanding and emotion regulation strategies. Results also show discordance between preschoolers' performance on the social understanding tasks assessing theory of mind and emotion understanding. Finally, parenting styles were shown to be related to children's emotional competency, and greater concordance among developing emotional competencies may be found in preschoolers whose parents endorse supportive parenting styles. |
