Developmental trends in emotion understanding among a diverse sample of African-American preschool children

Abstract

The contributions of age and cognitive-language skills to children's emotion understanding (e.g., recognition of facial expression and understanding of contextual cues for five basic emotions: happy, sad, mad, scared, and surprised; as well as children's application of their understanding of emotions to hypothetical situations requiring them to cope with maternal anger) were examined in a sample of 45 preschool-aged African-American children. These children came from diverse SES and parenting backgrounds, with a heavy concentration of the sample from disadvantaged homes. The results were similar to studies of Caucasian children. Specifically, the results indicated that both age and cognitive-language skills contribute to children's emotional understanding. However, the contribution of age to emotion understanding was more consistent than the contribution of cognitive-language skills. Judgments of anger showed an age-related increase in accuracy in the contextual cue condition but not in the facial cue condition. Compared to other samples, children in this study were fairly accurate at judging and identifying fear. The results are discussed in terms of parent emotion socialization practices and implications for children's emotional development.