Antisocial, Angry, and Unsympathetic: “Hard-to-manage” Preschoolers' Peer Problems and Possible Cognitive Influences

TLDR

The study provides the first direct observations of preschool‑aged disruptive children’s dyadic interactions with friends. Forty hard‑to‑manage preschoolers and forty matched controls were filmed for 20 minutes twice while playing with a best friend, and the videos were coded for antisocial behavior, negative emotion, and empathic responses, with analyses linking these behaviors to false‑belief, perspective‑taking, and executive‑function measures. Hard‑to‑manage preschoolers displayed more antisocial and negative emotions and fewer empathic responses than controls, and across all children angry and antisocial behaviors were linked to poorer executive control, indicating that behavioral regulation—not social cognition—underlies their interpersonal problems.

Abstract

This study is the first to provide direct observations of dyadic interactions with friends for preschool-aged disruptive children. Forty preschoolers (mean age 52 months) rated by parents as "hard to manage" on Goodman's (1997) Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ), as well as 40 control children (matched for age, gender, school, and ethnic background) were filmed for 20 minutes on two occasions playing with a teacher-nominated best friend. The videos were transcribed and coded for antisocial behaviour, displays of negative emotion, and empathic/prosocial responses to friend's distress. Individual differences in social behaviour were considered in relation to false-belief performance, affective perspective taking, and executive function skills (planning and inhibitory control). Compared with controls, the hard-to-manage group showed significantly higher rates of both antisocial behaviour and displays of negative emotion, as well as significantly lower rates of emphatic/prosocial responses. Across both groups combined, frequencies of angry and antisocial behaviours were related to poor executive control. Mental-state understanding was not significantly correlated with antisocial behaviour, emotion display, or empathy, suggesting that the interpersonal problems of young disruptive children owe more to failure of behavioural regulation than to problems in social understanding per se. However, given the relatively low power of the study, these findings require replication with a larger sample.