Social-Emotional Learning Skill, Self-Regulation, and Social Competence in Typically Developing and Clinic-Referred Children

Abstract

Social-emotional learning (SEL) skill includes the ability to encode, interpret, and reason about social and emotional information. In two related studies, we examined the relationship between children's SEL skill, their ability to regulate their own behavior, and the competence of their social interactions. Study 1 included 158 typically developing children ages 4 to 14 years. Study 2 included 126 clinic-referred children ages 5 to 17 years. Findings from both studies supported the conclusion that SEL skill includes three broad factors: awareness of nonverbal cues; the ability to interpret social meaning through theory of mind, empathy, and pragmatic language; and the ability to reason about social problems. Furthermore, the better children perform on measures of SEL skill and the more their parents and teachers report that children can regulate their behavior, the more competent their social interactions.

This study was made possible through the generous support of the Dean and Rosemarie Buntrock Foundation and the William T. Grant Foundation. Portions of this work were presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association in New York in March 2008 and the International Meeting for Autism Research in London in May 2008.

We thank Louis Fogg, Randi Hagerman, Steve Nowicki, Roger Weissberg, and Jenny Wojcik for their encouragement and helpful advice along the way. We thank Daniel Alderson, Bradley Bergey, Jason Johnson, Melissa Lee, Jonathan Levine, Mara Stankiewicz, Michael Strambler, Gregory Stasi, and Adelaide Walker for their assistance with all phases of this project. Finally, we are grateful to the educators, families, and children who agreed to participate in these studies.

For simplicity of presentation, not all covariances and associated inferential statistics are presented in this article. The authors would be happy to provide this information to interested colleagues.