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McQuade, Julia D.

Psychology

2012

PhD

This study had three main aims designed to address current limitations in research regarding the implications of executive functioning (EF) deficits for poor social competence in children. The first aim was to examine if verbal and spatial working memory, specific components of EF, were related to concurrent social functioning in a school sample of 116 fourth and fifth grade students. Multiple measures of poor social functioning were considered including teacher-rated peer rejection, forms and functions of aggression, and prosocial behavior. The second aim was to examine social information processing (SIP) abilities of encoding, interpretation, response generation, and response evaluation as mechanisms that may mediate the relation between poor working memory and poor social competence. The third aim was to examine whether poor working memory and SIP deficits explained greater social impairments for children with elevated Attention-Deficit/ Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) symptoms. In line with a developmental psychopathology approach, ADHD symptoms were considered dimensionally and follow-up analyses examined if implications differed based on ADHD symptom level.
Results indicated that verbal and spatial working memory represented related, yet unique, cognitive processes. Verbal working memory ability was particularly important to social functioning and predicted less peer rejection, reactive relational aggression, and overall, proactive, and reactive physical aggression, spatial working memory ability was marginally related to greater prosocial behavior, reactive relational aggression and proactive physical aggression. Contrary to hypotheses, SIP stages did not mediate the relation between working memory and social functioning and participants demonstrated an inconsistent pattern of SIP. Poor working memory and SIP also did not mediate the association of ADHD symptoms with poor social functioning; however, poor spatial working memory partially mediated the association between elevated ADHD symptoms and less competent SIP response generation. Follow-up analyses also indicated that ADHD symptoms moderated the association of verbal working memory with peer rejection and proactive physical aggression such that better verbal working memory ability was protective against peer rejection and proactive physical aggression specifically for children with elevated ADHD symptoms. Implications of results and directions for future research are discussed.