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...with peers. addition, the amount of children's pretend and physical play during same-sex dyadic play with a friend from their preschool classroom was assessed. Findings suggest that emotion regulation and emotion understanding make unique contributions to teacher ratings of children's emotional competence with peers; however, different patterns of associations were found for boys and girls. In addition, high levels of pretend play were associated with high emotion understanding scores for both boys and girls, and with high emotion regulation and emotional competence with peers for girls only. Physical play was associated with boys', but not girls', emotional competence with peers. The findings suggest that children's emotional competence with peers may account for associations between children's play and the quality of peer relationships.
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In recent years, children's emotional competence has emerged as a major focus of study in the literature on early childhood development, particularly as it relates to the quality of children's peer relationships. Although there is some debate as to what skills make up emotional competence, Parke and his colleagues (Parke, Cassidy, Burks, Carson, & Boyum, 1992) propose that the ability to regulate emotional arousal during social interaction and the ability to identify emotional expressions, as well as discern the causes of emotions are part of a set of general "affect management skills." Consistent with this perspective, empirical evidence suggests that children's ability to regulate their own emotional state (Eisenberg et al., 1993; Fabes et al., 1999) and the ability to correctly identify the emotional states of others (Cassidy, Parke, Butkovsky, & Braungart, 1992; Denham, McKinley, Couchoud, & Holt, 1990) are particularly important for the formation of positive peer relationships. To date, however, most research has examined these skills separately. Thus, it is not clear to what extent emotion understanding and emotion regulation are related components of children's emotional competence. Moreover, investigators have focused primarily on the consequences of variations in children's emotional understanding and emotion regulation skills, so that little is known about factors that account for individual differences in these areas of emotional competence (Hubbard & Coie, 1994). The present study is designed to extend existing literature on children's emotional competence by examining the relative contribution of emotion understanding and emotion regulation to preschooler's emotional competence with peers. In addition, preschool children's pretend and physical play with a peer was examined as contributors to individual differences in emotional competence.
Theoretical evidence suggests that children's play experiences may have important implications for their acquisition of emotional competence skills. One form of play that has received considerable theoretical attention is pretend play. Both Piaget ([1945], 1962) and Vygotsky ([1933], 1978) argued that children's participation in pretend play provides them with opportunities to practice their developing perspective taking abilities. Other theorists (Bretherton, 1989; Fein, 1989; Howes & Matheson, 1992) have argued that pretend play provides children with emotion regulatory skills by giving them the opportunity to symbolically create and subsequently modify highly arousing emotional events, and negotiate rules and agree on the direction of play with a social partner. Consistent with these theoretical proposals early experiences of pretend play with older siblings has been found to be associated with children's understanding of other people's emotions (Howe, Petrakos, & Rinaldi, 1998; Youngblade & Dunn, 1995). In addition, the frequency of adult-child pretend play has been linked to children's emotion regulation ability (Galyer & Evans, 2001). Together, this evidence suggests that pretend play with family members and adults may contribute to children's understanding of emotions and to children's emotion regulation. However, it is not clear that these connections will hold true for pretend play that occurs with peers.
A second form of play that has been hypothesized to have importance to children's emotional competence is physical play, and more specifically, rough-and-tumble play. Parke and his colleagues (MacDonald & Parke, 1984; Parke et al., 1992) suggest that the emotionally charged context of parent-child rough-and-tumble play provides children with the opportunity to learn affect recognition and regulation skills. Other researchers have proposed that rough-and-tumble play with peers provides children with opportunities to practice perspective taking ability (Corsano, 1985), to learn about the expressions of emotion, particularly how to distinguish between real and play-related emotions of others (Pellegrini & Perlmutter, 1988; Pellegrini & Smith, 1998), and to engage in emotion regulation (Pellegrini & Smith, 1998). Despite such proposals, however, empirical investigation has failed to verify a connection between parent-child physical play and children's emotion understanding or emotion regulation skills (Cassidy et al., 1992). Moreover, to date, no study has directly tested connections between child-peer physical play and children's emotion understanding or emotion regulation skills.
Together, this theoretical and empirical evidence suggests that both pretend and physical play may be related to children's emotional competence. However, there has yet to be an investigation of the relative contribution of pretend and physical play to children's emotion understanding and emotion regulation skills. Thus, it is not clear to what extent pretend and physical play may make unique, as opposed to overlapping, contributions to children's emotional competence. Studies examining children's peer play behavior indicate that rough-and-tumble forms of play are more characteristic of boys than of girls (DiPietro, 1981; Maccoby, 1990), whereas pretend play is more characteristic of girls than of boys (Howes, Unger, & Matheson, 1991). Thus, physical play may be more closely associated with boys' than with girls' emotional competence, whereas pretend play may be linked to girls' rather than boys' emotional competence. In order to explore the role of pretend and physical play in children's development of emotional competence skills, studies are needed which assess both forms of play as they relate to children's understanding of emotion and emotion regulation abilities.
The goal of the present study...
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