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The development of children's cognitive and social skills is a topic of considerable importance and interest in education and educational psychology. The current study examines whether emotion knowledge and self-regulation predict cognitive competence, social competence, and classroom behavior problems among a sample of 74 preschoolers (40 boys). A hierarchical regression was used to control for age, child gender, and family income level before predicting cognitive competence, social competence, and classroom behavior problems from emotion knowledge and self-regulation. Emotion knowledge incrementally predicted both cognitive competence (ΔR 2 = .06) and social competence (ΔR 2 = .08) but not classroom behavior problems. Conversely, self-regulation predicted classroom behavior problems (ΔR 2 = .07) but not cognitive or social competence. In addition, results demonstrated that the situation knowledge (not the expression knowledge) component of emotion knowledge was the active ingredient for both cognitive and social competence. However, different aspects of self-regulation were relevant for different outcomes: The attentional control element was important for cognitive competence, whereas the positive emotionality element was important for social competence and behavior problems. The study demonstrates that emotion-related competencies are important prerequisites for valued educational and social outcomes in preschoolers.

This research examined whether prospective teachers' emotion regulation styles, dispositional empathy, and conceptions of competent student emotion and behavior were predictive of their attitudes about bullying and proposed responses to peer conflict. Overall, participants perceived physical bullying as more serious than verbal and relational bullying. Prospective teachers also expressed higher levels of sympathy for victims and a greater likelihood of intervention in response to physical bullying. Regression analyses demonstrated that valuing emotional competence and the role of teachers in supporting its development were meaningfully associated with expressed support for victims and with proposed responses to the perpetrators of this type of classroom aggression. Interestingly, those respondents who reported higher levels of situationally specific sympathy for victims (and not dispositional empathy) also reported that they would be more likely than their counterparts to intervene on their behalf. The emotional reactivity component of dispositional empathy was, however, positively associated with regulated responses to peer conflict involving a difficult child. The emotion regulation variables, although associated with the outcome measures in correlational analyses, were not unique predictors of prospective teachers' bullying attitudes. C 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

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