The purpose of this project is to determine whether and how emotional competence predicts the relative success of children's adjustments to a new academic and social environment. The transition to be examined is from preschool t first grade, a period typically accompanied by a rise in the rate at which children are referred to manifesting significant behavior problems. This transition also requires children to apply and adapt their previously developed competencies in their adjustment to a new social and academic environment. The project is based on previous findings concerning skills of emotion expression, emotion appraisal, and emotion regulation that differentiate normal children from those manifesting certain psychiatric disorders. Eighty children will be selected for assessment of their motion competencies in the summer before they enter first grade. Following entrance to first grade, the development of subjects' social relations and cognitive performance will be measured at 2 and 8 months into their first school year. Assessments prior to entering school will include laboratory measures of emotion expression, emotion appraisal, and regulation of emotion in social contexts; a measure of cognitive ability; parental reports of child behavior problems, social competence, temperament, prior experience with schooling, and family characteristics including psychopathology, socioeconomic status, and style of emotion expressivity. During the school year, measures will include observations of social behavior, parent and teacher assessments of behavior problems and social competence, objective measures of academic achievement, and self-report measures of social competence. Children's initial emotional competence will be examined for its relations to their intellectual functioning, temperament, and familial/parental measures. Then, children's emotional competence will be analyzed for its ability to predict their social and academia success at two points in first grade, over and above other characteristics such as intellectual functioning and socioeconomic status. Children who are initially more competent in their use of emotion expression, appraisal, and regulation are predicted to demonstrate better social and academic adjustment than children who are less competent. If this expected relationship is obtained, results from this project will be used to plan a longitudinal study examining relations between emotional competence, risk for psychopathology, and adjustment to the transition to first grade.
