Social engagement, emotional intelligence and loneliness among school-children

High Emotional Intelligence (EI) is associated with prosocial behavior. This claim is based on self-reports or reports of behaviour assessed by others: there is as yet no objective study that tells us what the interactions of low EI individuals are actually like.
The absence of these kinds of data means that intervention strategies designed to help school children develop EI skills, may not target the development of context-appropriate skills. This project aims to address this gap. Put simply, we are asking, 'What might the social interactions of children with low EI look like?' We also ask whether there are group-size effects, where children scoring low on EI may experience more problems interacting in larger groups than same-age peers who score high on EI.
This project has an additional focus on lonely children. Evidence suggests that although lonely children understand the implicit rules and routines that characterise social situations (high/average EI), they say they have problems during social interactions. But do their actual interaction patterns reveal underlying social dysfunction? Given earlier findings, we predict that, because lonely children expect to be rejected, they may become more vigilant to signs of potential rejection and therefore, focus on cues consistent with this expectation.

高情商（Emotional Intelligence, EI）与亲社会行为存在关联。该结论多基于自我报告或他人行为评估报告，目前尚无客观研究能够阐明低情商个体的实际社交互动样貌。
此类数据的缺失，使得旨在帮助学龄儿童提升情商技能的干预策略，可能无法针对性培养适配具体社交场景的能力。本项目旨在填补这一研究空白。简言之，我们将探究："低情商儿童的社交互动可能呈现何种形态？"同时我们也将验证是否存在群体规模效应：即情商得分较低的儿童，相较于同龄情商得分较高的同伴，在更大规模的群体中是否会遭遇更多社交互动难题。
本项目还额外关注孤独儿童群体。已有研究表明，尽管孤独儿童能够理解社交场景的核心隐含规则与互动常规（情商水平处于较高或平均区间），但他们自述在社交互动中存在困难。然而，他们的实际互动模式是否真的反映了潜在的社交功能障碍？结合此前的研究结论，我们推测：由于孤独儿童预期自身会被排斥，他们可能会对潜在的排斥信号更为警觉，进而将注意力集中在符合这一预期的线索之上。