Relationship of Early Emotional Understanding and Social Competence With Later School Performance and Attentional Processes

This paper addresses a contemporary approach, where children's social competence and understanding of emotion are not only considered protective factors in the resiliency literature, but also have been to found to predict academic achievement. Methodological questions are postulated to address the underlying challenges in measuring social competence and emotional understanding in children (i.e. performance-based assessments versus adults' ratings of children's behavior). Despite the vast research assessing children's understanding of emotions, there have been few studies utilizing performance-based measures, especially within an attachment framework. A performance-based assessment developed using an attachment theory framework is presented here as a pioneering measure aimed at capturing the complex construct of understanding of emotions in children aged from 6 to 11 years old. This measure is used in conjunction with a questionnaire of social and emotional competence (Strengths & Difficulties Questionnaire). Additionally, contemporary research and theory on neurocognitive and emotion is presented in order to support the idea of a developmental progression of higher specialization of complex social-emotional scenarios by the age of 11 years old. Finally, the role of attention in learning and school performance is discussed, and the Conners Continuous Performance Test–II is presented, which leads to an introduction to the research study inspired by the previously mentioned literature review