Abstract
The social competence of 55 preschoolers between the ages of 48-101 months was examined in relation to peer preference. Measurements included two decoding tasks, where children were asked to identify emotions in facial expressions and body movement, a measure of social problem solving, a sociometric measure, and a teacher rated measure of prosocial and antisocial behaviors. We found that children were similar to their preferred peers on several dimensions of social competence, but that social competence was not a good predictor of peer acceptance. The data presented here are a starting point for a future study in which we will test our hypotheses more rigorously. This proposal can be found in the present paper.