We know that social competence contributes to young children's adaptation to, and cognitive learning within, classroom settings. Yet initial evidence is mixed on the social competencies that Latino children bring to kindergarten and the extent to which these skills advance cognitive growth. Building from ecocultural and developmental-risk theory, this paper shows children's social competence to...

Competence Management approaches suggest promising instruments for more effective resource allocation, knowledge management, learning support, and human resource development in general. However, especially on the level of individual employees, such approaches have so far not been able to show sustainable success on a larger scale. Piloting applications like expert finders have often failed in t...

Multiple aspects of humor were evaluated in children between the ages of 10 and 14 and related to several areas of competence manifested at school. Humor measures assessed appreciation (including mirth, subjective ratings, and response sets), comprehension, and production, while competence measures included teacher ratings of classroom behavior, peer reputation, and achievement. Humor was relat...

Despite the popular use of peer support interventions to improve the interpersonal functioning of patients with mental illness, research into the effectiveness of such programs has returned mixed results. In order to better understand potential moderators of these interventions’ effectiveness, the present study involved the random pairing of two same-sex strangers who took turns engaging in mut...

Relations among effortful control/low negative emotionality, immediate reactions in a situation that usually calls for the masking of disappointment (i.e., the use of display rules), and social competence/adjustment were investigated for 78 preschool children (mean age=4.87 years). Parents, teachers, and peers rated children on negative emotionality and/or effortful control as well as on social...

BACKGROUND Ethnic diversity in schools increases due to globalization. Thus, the children's social-emotional competence development must be considered in the context of a multi-ethnic classroom. METHODS In this study, the social-emotional competence of 65 Asian-American and Latin-American children was observed at the beginning and the end of their kindergarten year. RESULTS Initially, signi...

This article reports the effectiveness of two universal prevention programs in reducing externalizing behavior in elementary school children. A sample of 1,675 first graders in 56 Swiss elementary schools was randomly assigned to a school-based social competence intervention, a parental training intervention, both, or control. Externalizing psychopathology and social competence ratings were pro...

This study examined the concurrent and longitudinal relations of mother-child relationship quality, self-esteem, social competence, and maladjustment among maltreated (n = 206) and nonmaltreated (n = 139) school-aged children from low-income families. Results of the path analysis using structural equation modeling revealed that maltreatment at Time 1 was related to internalizing and externalizi...

This paper reports the effectiveness of two universal prevention programs in reducing externalizing behavior in elementary school children. A sample of 1,675 first graders in 56 Swiss elementary schools was randomly assigned to a school-based social competence intervention, a parental training intervention, both, or control. Externalizing psychopathology and social competence ratings were provi...

The main purpose of the present study was to investigate self-criticism as a potential mediating factor in the link between mother-adolescent relationships with aggression and perceptions of social competence. The sample consisted of 888 older (M = 14.3 years) and younger (M = 11.6 years) adolescent children from the same family. Maternal self-criticism strongly corresponded to the quality of r...