What can the Test of Emotion Comprehension (TEC) tell us about children’s social competence?

Despite sustained investigation, we still have a relatively incomplete picture of the ways in which children´s social competence is influenced by the sophistication of their socio-cognitive understanding; for example, their emotion understanding. In addressing this issue, researchers have naturally gravitated to the study of individual differences and asked whether tasks assessing socio-cognitive understanding correlate with global indices of social competence, such as peer acceptance. These investigations have been informative but they have not yet revealed how developmental changes in socio-cognitive understanding transform children´s social competencies. The Test of Emotion Comprehension is the first instrument to provide a broad picture of children´s developmental sophistication in emotion understanding relative to peers. As such, it provides a developmentally sensitive hierarchical framework that can be used to explore the nature of the relationship between children´s emotion understanding and their social competence. In the first part of this paper, we present evidence from new and existing studies suggesting that children´s level of emotion understanding has a direct impact on their social competence. Though there are simultaneous developments in other aspects of children´s functioning that undoubtedly influence social interactions (e.g., linguistic ability), children’s level of emotion understanding appears to have particular salience for successful social functioning. Despite the intuitive appeal of this conclusion, however, there is currently insufficient evidence to determine whether it is correct. Therefore, in the second part of this paper, we outline a research program to establish whether conceptual milestones in understanding emotion lead to qualitative changes in children´s social interactions.