A Review and Reformulation of Social Information-Processing Mechanisms in Children's Social Adjustment

Abstract

Research on the relation between social information processing and social adjustment in childhood is reviewed and interpreted within the framework of a reformulated model of human performance and social exchange. This reformulation proves to assimilate almost all previous studies and is a useful heuristic device for organizing the field. The review suggests that overwhelming evidence supports the empirical relation between characteristic processing styles and children's social adjustment, with some aspects of processing (e.g., hostile attributional biases, intention cue detection accuracy, response access patterns, and evaluation of response outcomes) likely to be causal of behaviors that lead to social status and other aspects (e.g., perceived self-competence) likely to be responsive to peer status. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)

Full text

Psychological
Bulletin
1994,
Vol.
115,
No.
1,74-101
Copyright
1994
by the
American
Psychological
Association,
Inc.
0033-2909/94/S3.00
A
Review
and
Reformulation
of
Social
Information-Processing
Mechanisms
in
Children's Social Adjustment
Nicki
R.
Crick
and
Kenneth
A.
Dodge
Research
on the
relation between social information processing
and
social adjustment
in
childhood
is
reviewed
and
interpreted
within
the
framework
of a
reformulated model
of
human performance
and
social
exchange.
This
reformulation proves
to
assimilate
almost
all
previous
studies
and is a
useful
heuristic device
for
organizing
the field. The
review suggests that overwhelming evidence
supports
the
empirical relation between characteristic processing styles
and
children's social adjust-
ment,
with
some aspects
of
processing (e.g., hostile attributional biases, intention
cue
detection
accuracy,
response access patterns,
and
evaluation
of
response outcomes)
likely
to be
causal
of be-
haviors
that
lead
to
social status
and
other
aspects
(e.g., perceived self-competence)
likely
to be
responsive
to
peer status.
Children's social adjustment
has
been
a
popular topic
of in-
vestigation
in
recent years. Concern about
the
quality
of
chil-
dren's social relationships
has
been motivated
in
large part
by
longitudinal evidence suggesting
a
link between social adjust-
ment
in
childhood
and
later
life
difficulties
(see Parker
&
Asher,
1987,
for a
review). Recent
efforts
to
understand children's
so-
cial
difficulties
have demonstrated
the
utility
of
social-cognitive
approaches
to
social adjustment. These investigations have typ-
ically
been based
on the
premise that social cognitions
are the
mechanisms
leading
to
social behaviors that,
in
turn,
are the
bases
of
social adjustment evaluations
by
others (e.g., Dodge,
1986; Ladd
&
Mize,
1983;
Rubin
&
Krasnor,
1986).
From this
perspective,
comparisons
of the
social
cognitions
of
socially
ad-
justed
and
maladjusted children
are
important because they
shed
light
on
particular cognitive styles
or
difficulties
that
may
contribute
to
maladjustment.
The
study
of
children's social cognition
has a
long history (for
reviews,
see
Shantz,
1975a;
1983)
and has
been conducted
by
researchers
working
within diverse
fields,
including develop-
mental psychology
(e.g.,
Berndt
&
Berndt,
1975;
Ladd,
1981),
educational psychology (e.g., Asher
&
Wheeler, 1985), clinical
psychology
(e.g., Coie,
1990;
Dodge,
1986;
Furman
&
Bierman,
1983;
Shantz, 1975b),
and
communication (e.g., Burleson,
1982).
Not
surprisingly, many
different
aspects
of
children's
so-
cial
cognition
have
been emphasized
by
various researchers
working
at
different
points
in
time. Initially,
the
methods
and
Nicki
R.
Crick, Human Development
and
Family Studies, University
of
Illinois
at
Urbana-Champaign;
Kenneth
A.
Dodge,
Department
of
Psychology
and
Human Development, Vanderbilt University.
Preparation
of
this article
was
supported
in
part
by a
Vanderbilt Uni-
versity
fellowship
to
Nicki
R.
Crick.
We
would
like
to
thank three anon-
ymous
reviewers
for
their comments
on a
draft
of
this article.
Correspondence concerning this article should
be
addressed
to
Nicki
R.
Crick, Human Development
and
Family Studies,
1105
West Nevada
Street,
University
of
Illinois,
Urbana,
Illinois,
61801,
or to
Kenneth
A.
Dodge, Department
of
Psychology
and
Human Development,
Box 86
GPC, Vanderbilt
University,
Nashville, Tennessee 37240.
theories used
in
studies
of
children's social-cognitive abilities
were
largely
adapted
from
those used
in
studies
of
nonsocial
cognitive
development. This application resulted
in
examina-
tion
of
global
cognitive constructs such
as
perspective taking,
role taking,
and
referential communication
(e.g.,
Flavell,
Bot-
kin,
Fry,
Wright,
&
Jarvis, 1968; Selman,
1971).
However,
the
mixed
findings
often
produced
by
studies
of
these global con-
structs (see Shantz, 1975a; 1983)
and the
introduction
and
growing
popularity
of
information-processing theories (e.g.,
Newell
&
Simon,
1972)
have
led to
major changes
in
empirical
and
theoretical approaches
to the
study
of
social cognition
in
children.
One
important change
has
been
a
focus
on
more spe-
cific
components
of
"on-line"
cognition
than
those examined
in
earlier
work
(Dodge
&
Feldman,
1990).
Consequently,
re-
searchers interested
in
children's social adjustment
have
begun
to
speculate about
the
individual cognitive tasks
that
might
be
involved
when
a
child
is
engaged
in
social
interaction.
In
recent years, social information-processing models
of
chil-
dren's social behavior have emerged that have provided
signifi-
cant
advances
in the
understanding
of
children's
social
adjust-
ment
(e.g., Dodge, 1985, 1986; Dodge
&
Crick, 1990; Dodge,
Pettit, McClaskey,
&
Brown, 1986;
Heusmann,
1988; Ladd
&
Crick, 1989; Rubin
&
Krasnor, 1986;
Slaby
&
Guerra, 1988;
Yeates
&
Selman,
1989).
In one
version
of
this model (Dodge,
1986),
it is
proposed that children, when
faced
with
a
social
situational
cue, engage
in
four
mental
steps
before enacting
competent social behaviors (see Figure
1):
(a)
encoding
of
situ-
ational
cues,
(b)
representation
and
interpretation
of
those cues,
(c)
mental search
for
possible responses
to the
situation,
and (d)
selection
of a
response. During Steps
1 and 2,
encoding
and
interpretation
of
social cues,
it is
hypothesized that children
fo-
cus on and
encode particular cues
in the
situation
and
then,
on
the
basis
of
those cues, construct
an
interpretation
of the
situa-
tion (e.g.,
an
inference
about
the
intent
of a
peer with whom
the
child
is
interacting). During
Steps
3 and 4, it is
proposed
that
children access possible responses
to the
situation
from
long-
term
memory, evaluate those responses,
and
then select
the
most favorable
one for
enactment.
74
This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.
This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.