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The present study investigates how the components of social competence relate to the core components of empathy. It offers a systematic analysis of the effects of the independent variables – emotion recognition accuracy, emotional perspective taking and affective responsiveness – on the dependent variables – action evaluation, consequence anticipation, goal attainment and competence expectations. The study´s population, which was subjected to cross-sectional analysis, constisted of 130 mainstream school leavers. Structural Equation Modelling yielded a specified model which showed that the factors of evaluation of actions and anticipation of consequences were most strongly impacted by the level of emotional perspective taking. In addition, the empathy components were found to be positively correlated variables. The findings are discussed in the light of current work on social information processing, and their relevance to educational practice is explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Working memory, the ability to store and manipulate information is of great importance for scholastic achievement in children. In this study, we report four studies in which preschoolers were trained on a visual-spatial working memory span task, namely the Corsi Block Task. Across all four studies, we found significant training effects for the intervention groups compared to active control groups. Confirming recent research, no transfer effects to other working memory tasks were found. Most importantly, our training effects were mainly brought about by children performing below the median in the pretest and those showing median performance, thereby closing the gap to children performing above the median (compensation effect). We consider this finding of great interest to ensure comparable starting conditions when entering school with a relatively short intervention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]