Emotional understanding, aggression, and social functioning among preschoolers.

Evidence suggests that emotional understanding (EU) assists in the regulation of aggression, which in turn, predicts better social functioning. Although the links among EU, aggression, and social functioning have been preliminarily explored, significant gaps remain in our comprehension of the factors that could qualify these links (e.g., impact of developmental stage, type of aggression, type of social functioning, and different dimensions of EU). Here we conduct a multidimensional assessment of EU, aggression, and social functioning within a sample of aggressive preschoolers (n = 24) and a matched comparison group (n = 26; N = 50, 26 girls; Mage = 53.83 months, SDage = 3.73). We assessed EU using a behavioral assessment and social functioning via teacher-report. We conducted all analyses through the use of two measures of children's aggression-first, we compared children identified as aggressive by preschool teachers to those in the nonaggressive comparison group. Second, we used teacher-reported continuous measures of children's physical and relational aggression. Relative to the comparison group, the aggressive group demonstrated lower expressive EU, higher receptive EU, lower peer acceptance, and lower prosocial behavior. Analyses of continuous measures revealed a more complicated pattern of associations among aggression, EU, and social functioning. Higher physical aggression predicted greater peer victimization among females, and expressive EU was only associated with higher peer acceptance among the aggressive group. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).