High Emotional Intelligence (EI) is associated with prosocial behavior. This claim is based on self-reports or reports of behaviour assessed by others: there is as yet no objective study that tells us what the interactions of low EI individuals are actually like. The absence of these kinds of data means that intervention strategies designed to help school children develop EI skills, may not target the development of context-appropriate skills. This project aims to address this gap. Put simply, we are asking, 'What might the social interactions of children with low EI look like?' We also ask whether there are group-size effects, where children scoring low on EI may experience more problems interacting in larger groups than same-age peers who score high on EI. This project has an additional focus on lonely children. Evidence suggests that although lonely children understand the implicit rules and routines that characterise social situations (high/average EI), they say they have problems during social interactions. But do their actual interaction patterns reveal underlying social dysfunction? Given earlier findings, we predict that, because lonely children expect to be rejected, they may become more vigilant to signs of potential rejection and therefore, focus on cues consistent with this expectation.

Self report questionnaires and EI tasks; observational data from playground observations and from eye-tracker coding.