Social acceptance in educational contexts: the role of emotional and behavioral skills.

Developmental research suggests that emotion regulation plays a central role on children’s adaptive functioning during middle childhood. In this period, emotion regulation strategies become more complex and individual differences in this ability predict a variety of aspects of social competence, interpersonal relationships and problem behaviors (Patrick, 1997; Eisenberg, Fabes, Gunthrie, & Reiser, 2000; Spinrad et al., 2006). The aim of this study is to examine relations among social competence, intended as sociometric status and peers acceptance, emotion regulation abilities, and behavioral functioning in school-age children. Participants included 274 children (158 boys and 116 girls), ranged in age from 7 to 9 (M in months: 99.19; SD: 7.19) attending second and third grade of two different primary schools in northern Italy. Social competence has been assessed through the Peer Nomination technique in order to obtain, for each child, both categorical (sociometric status) and continuous measures (peer acceptance and peer rejection indices); moreover, teachers were asked to complete the Italian version of both the Emotion Regulation Checklist (Molina & Zappulla, 2014) and the Social Emotional Dimension Scale (Ianes, Mazzeo & Savelli, 1994) to evaluate, respectively, emotion regulation abilities and school behavior. The results show that, controlling for age, emotion regulation is positively associated with the degree of peer acceptance and, conversely, a greater emotional lability is related to rejection by classmates. A corresponding pattern of associations emerges when problem behaviors are taken into account. Moreover, the mediation analysis highlights that emotion regulation influences social acceptance both directly and indirectly, through the quality of behavior as mediating variable. As suggested by the literature, both emotion regulation and behavioral functioning are considered relevant to determine children’s social status; however, this study provides a contribution to clarify the potential mechanisms through which emotion regulation relates to children's peer acceptance in educational contexts