Cognitive strategies and expectations as components of social competence in young adolescents

Social strategies and expectations as components of social competence were examined, with twenty-nine male adolescents participating in a conversation with an opposite-sex experimental confederate. Subjects were then shown a videotape recording of their interaction and asked to report their thoughts during the conversation. Afterwards, they were interviewed in order to ascertain their thoughts and strategies during the interaction. Global judgments of social competence were made from these videotapes, and adolescents receiving ten highest and lowest ratings were assigned to the high-competent and low-competent groups, respectively. Transcripts of the interviews of these twenty subjects were rated by three trained judges along several dimensions, including number of strategies mentioned, expectation about conversational pauses, and self, other, and mutual references to conversation. Results indicated that high-competent subjects reported more original (not prompted) positive strategies, and more cognitions in the last segment of the ten-minute interaction. Low-competent subjects made more negative statements when describing the dyad they had formed with the confederate, and were more unfavorable overall. The importance of examining additional populations to identify the specific cognitive components which consistently differentiate high- and low-component persons, and the subsequent role of new treatment modalities involving both behavioral training and cognitive restructuring are discussed in light of these findings.