Preschoolers' social information processing and early school success: The challenging situations task

As part of a larger longitudinal project on the assessment of preschoolers' social‐emotional development, children's social information processing (SIP) responses to unambiguous hypothetical situations of peer provocation were assessed for 298 four‐year‐olds from Head Start and private childcare settings. Measurement focused on emotions children would feel during these situations, and their behaviour response decisions. Participants most often chose sad and angry emotions, and socially competent and passive behaviours. Relations were found between sad emotion and socially competent behaviour choices, as well as between angry emotion and aggressive behaviour choices. Sad emotion and socially competent behaviour responses contributed to variance in contemporaneous and later school adjustment and kindergarten academic readiness. There was evidence that the contributions of sad emotion responses were mediated by those of socially competent behaviour choices. Results bolstered calls to include emotion in SIP measures, supported predictive validity for this SIP measure in a large representative sample of preschoolers, and pointed to fruitful pathways for future research.     

Cognition and Emotion,Volume 24, 2010, List of Contents

Effective emotion regulation is important for high-quality social functioning. Recent laboratory-based evidence suggests that mindfulness may enhance emotion regulation in socioemotional contexts; however, little is known about mindful emotion regulation during in vivo social interactions. In a study of romantic couples, we assessed each partner's mindfulness and top-down attentional efficiency (with an Emotional Go/No-Go task) prior to sampling emotions and perceived connection with others during day-to-day social interactions. Analyses revealed that mindfulness-related differences in top-down attentional efficiency on the Emotional Go/No-Go predicted positive emotion during daily social interactions. In turn, positive emotion and two additional indices of social emotion regulation each mediated the relation between actor mindfulness and perceived social connection. In corresponding analyses, neither trait reappraisal nor suppression use predicted the outcomes, and all mindfulness relations held controlling for these strategies. Findings support a framework for investigating mindfulness and higher-quality social functioning, for which mindful emotion regulation may be key.     

Five Components of a Basic Suicide Syndrome*

ABSTRACT: To the question “Why suicide?” a tentative framework is proposed, taking the form of a syndrome of five components: (a) commitment; (b) rigidity; (c) failure; (d) shame; and (e) isolation. These are quite similar to the conclusions of a study by Dorothy Miller. The syndrome is psychological as well as sociological, deals with the response of the suicider to crisis, and suggests mechanisms lacking in other theoretical frameworks. Quantitative and qualitative data taken from interviews with survivors of well over 100 suiciders support the framework. Also discussed are possible further refinements of the syndrome, its adequacy, and its applications to intervention with suicidal persons.