Emotion Knowledge Skills in Low‐income Elementary School Children: Associations with Social Status and Peer Experiences

Abstract This short-term longitudinal study examined relations between emotion knowledgeand social functioning in a sample of low-income kindergarten and 1st graders. Indi-vidual differences in spontaneous emotion naming and emotion recognition skills wereused to predict children’s social functioning at school, including peer-nominated socio-metric status, and child self-reports of negative experiences with peers in school (peervictimization and rejection). Children who had greater emotional vocabulary andrecognized emotions more accurately had better outcomes in all areas, and many ofthe associations between fall emotion knowledge skills and spring social functioningoutcomes held after covarying grade and children’s previous status with regard to theseoutcomes. Results are discussed with regard to implications for prevention and intervention programs (e.g., the PATHS curriculum) that focus on teaching emotionknowledge skills in order to foster high-risk children’s social competence.Keywords