Cognitive representations of peer relationships: linkages with discrete social cognition and social behavior

Two aspects of young children’s cognitive representations of peer relationships–peer affiliative motivation and feelings and beliefs about the self and peers–were assessed among a sample of 75 children (37 girls), who ranged in age from 32 to 76 months (M = 58.2 months). Measures of three aspects of discrete social cognition, encoding of social cues, hostile attributions and social strategy generation were also obtained and the children’s teachers provided ratings of the children’s behavior with peers. Both measures of cognitive representations were significantly associated with the quality of social strategy generation, but not the other measures of discrete social cognition. Measures of cognitive representations were also associated with ratings of competent, prosocial, withdrawn and aggressive behavior. Findings support the hypothesis that social strategy generation mediates associations between both measures of cognitive representations and ratings of children’s withdrawn behavior, but mediational models predicting other aspects of behavior were not supported.