Early Intervention and Societally Productive Adults

Early Intervention and Societally Productive Adults

Literature Review

The emergence of social competence and the establishment of successful interpersonal relationships are among the most important aspects of child development. Evidence that early experiences provide a foundation for subsequent functioning has prompted efforts to understand mechanisms underlying social adjustment and resilience under conditions of risk (Cicchetti & Cohen, 1995). An emphasis has been placed upon social-cognitive processes, including skills related to emotion understanding, perspective taking, and social problem solving. The current study examined similarities and differences in dynamics related to the emergence of social cognition and competence in typically developing children and children with developmental delays, a group at substantially increased risk for persistent social difficulties.

Studies have linked children's emotion knowledge, affective perspective taking, and understanding of mental states to specific aspects of prosocial behavior (e.g., sharing, cooperation, and prosocial responses to others' emotions; Denham, 1986; Dunn & Cutting, 1999; Iannotti, 1985) as well as global dimensions of social competence and peer acceptance (e.g., Denham et al., 2003; Garner, 1996). Longitudinal studies provide support for a directional relationship, with more advanced social-cognitive skills predicting later adaptive outcomes (e.g., Denham et al., 2003). The significance of individual differences in social cognition is underscored by the relative stability of skill disparities (Brown & Dunn, 1996) and by striking associations between social-cognitive deficits and children's externalizing behaviors and problems with peers (Dekovic & Gerris, 1994; Denham et al., 2002).

Investigations of children's social cognition predominately rely on social information processing models as frameworks for understanding on-line processing presumed to underlie behavioral responses during social interaction. Utilizing Crick and Dodge's (1994) reformulated model, particular attention has been devoted to the study of early steps involving cue encoding and interpretation, and to the later step of response generation. This line of research has primarily adopted a deficit perspective, highlighting the role of hostile attributions of intent and limited or aggressive social problem solving in the emergence of children's aggressive behavior and poor peer status from preschool age through adolescence (Crick & Dodge, 1994; Lochman & Dodge, 1994). Intervention programs demonstrate the rewards of improving children's social information processing (e.g., Conduct Problems Prevention Research Group [CPPRG], 2002), but comparatively few studies document the benefits of adaptive processing directly (see Dodge, Pettit, McClaskey, & Brown, 1986, for an exception).

Although major strides have been made in conceptualizing the role of social cognition in predicting children's psychosocial outcomes, less is known about the development of these skills, especially in middle childhood. Theories of social information processing posit that children enter situations with a preexisting database of social knowledge that influences the way in which specific social-cognitive processes are enacted (Crick & Dodge, 1994; Lemerise & Arsenio, 2000). While children can acquire this social knowledge through a variety of accumulated experiences, Dodge (2006) proposed that parent-child socialization practices are fundamental to children's acquisition of adaptive social cognition.

The idea that social cognition is constructed through social interaction embraces a transactional view of development and builds upon Vygotsky's early theories ...