The Study Of Self-regulation’s Influence On3-and4-year-old Children’s Social Competence

Self-regulation is the process to flexibly activate, monitor, inhibit, persevere and/or adapt one’s cognition, eomtions and behavior in response to internal cues, environmental sitmuli and feedback from others, in an attempt to attain personally-relevant goals. Schoolars at home and abroad have undertaken many researches on the function of children’s self-regulation and they find that self-regulation has a significant influence on children’s social and academic development. Among the studies of the influence on children’s social development exerted by self-regulation, foreign schoolers find that self-regulation has an effect on children’s social competence. Social competence refers to behaviors that indicate a well-adjusted, flexible, emotionally mature, and generally prosocial pattern of social adaptation and it can be well represented by good peer and teacher-student relationships. However there is few relevant researches at home. And the existing relevant studies at home just investigate the relationship between one aspect of self-regulation and social competence, but not the relationship between all aspects of self-regulation and social competence. Thus, the goal of this study is to approach the self-regulation’s influence on3-and4-year-old children’s social competence baseed on the foreign study in an attempt to make the study of the function of children’s regulation in our country richer and provide the theoretic instruction for parents and teachers to develop children’s self-regulation which will in turn benefit the development of their social competence.This study randomly selects seventy3-and4-year-old children from a preschool in Dalian and get the condition of their self-regulation through the experiment and their social competence from the scale filled in by their teachers. Based the datas from the experiment and measurement, this study explore the self-regulation’s influence on social competence through analysis of correlation and regression and whether there are age and gender differences in the development of self-regulation and social competence of3-and4-year-old children with different gender through Independent-Samples T Test.The results of this study show that:(1)3-and4-year-old children’s overall self-regulation is significantly positively related to their social competence;(2)3-and4-year-old children’s three dimensions (hot executive control, cool executive control and compliance) of self-regulation are all significantly positively related to their social competence;(3)3-and4-year-old children’s self-regulation can predict their social competence;(4) there is significant age difference in the developemnt of3-and4-year-old children’s self-regulation but its gender difference is not significant;(5) there are both age difference and gender difference in the development of3-and4-year-old children’s social competence.