Social reasoning abilities in preterm and full-term children aged 5-7years

Literature has evidenced behavioral and socio-emotional problems in preterm children, as well as long-term difficulties to establish and maintain social relationships in preterm population. Several studies have shown relations between behavior and social reasoning abilities in typically developing children and adults.

The present study aimed to investigate the social understanding and social reasoning abilities in preterm children aged between 5 and 7years in comparison to their full-term peers.

A social resolution task (SRT) was used to assess abilities to judge, identify and reason about others' behavior in relation to conventional and moral rules knowledge.

102 preterm children and 88 full-term children were included in the study.

Compared with their full-term peers, preterm children exhibited difficulties to understand and reason about inappropriate social behavior, particularly for situations related to the transgression of conventional rules. They used more irrelevant information and exhibited less social awareness when reasoning about the transgression of social rules. The only significant predictor for global SRT and social reasoning scores was the mental processing composite of the K-ABC, but the part of the variance of the SRT that could be explained by the general cognitive abilities was relatively small.

Preterm children demonstrated poorer social knowledge and social reasoning abilities compared with full-term children at early school age. Improving such abilities may reduce behavioral difficulties and peer relationship problems often described in the preterm population. These findings emphasize the need to early identify children at risk for impaired social development.