Social relationships in children: favorable influence of activities promoting self-awareness and empathic interaction

CARRO, NATALIA; KUPERMAN, MARCELO N.; PAOLA D´ADAMO; LOZADA, MARIANA

Journal of Complex Networks

Oxford University Press

Año: 2022

2051-1310

Embodied and intersubjective experience is crucial to the social cognition processes on which interpersonalrelationships are based. We assessed whether promoting these processes through participation inself-awareness and empathic interaction activities can influence social integration among peers in 7- to8-year-old children. The intervention, conducted in a school context, included mindfulness-based practices(favouring self-awareness), empathic collaboration activities and perspective-taking instances (promotingother-oriented awareness).To evaluate social integration levels, children were asked to complete a sociometricquestionnaire, each listing the peers they would choose to play with (positive ties) and those they wouldprefer not to play with (negative ties). Based on this relational data, two types of directed networks wereconstructed: positive networks (PN) and negative networks (NN), in two temporal instances (pre- and postintervention).In both the experimental and waitlist groups, pre–post intervention changes in the topologyof peer social networks were evaluated by analysing global network properties such as connectivity, degreedistribution, density, reciprocity, transitivity and modular structure. Our findings showed that after participatingin the intervention social integration was improved, reflected in increased general interconnection ofpositive ties: greater average connectivity and density in PN, more equitably distributed choices (no evidentleadership), greater cohesion and an increase in the number of reciprocal interactions. Additionally, wefound a lower level of social rejection; that is, lower average connectivity and density in NN, the persistenceof only mutual negative choices and negative ties confined to small groups. These findings were not observedin the waitlist group. This study demonstrates how participation in an intervention that promotes social cognition processes can influence the structure of peer social networks, favouring social integration. Thesocial network analysis provides quantitative evidence of the plasticity of social relationships in children,constituting a valuable tool for the assessment of this kind of intervention at a group level.