Abstract
Children’s understanding of the nature, origins and consequences of emotions has been intensively investigated over the last 30–40 years. However, few empirical studies have looked at the relation between emotion understanding and anxiety in children and their results are mixed. The aim of the present study was to perform a preliminary investigation of the relationships between emotion understanding, anxiety, emotion dysregulation, and attachment security in clinically anxious children. A sample of 16 clinically anxious children (age 8–12, eight girls/boys) was assessed for emotion understanding (Test of Emotion Comprehension), anxiety (Screening for Child Anxiety Related Emotional Disorders-Revised and Anxiety Disorder Interview Schedule), emotion dysregulation (Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale) and attachment security (Security Scale). Children who reported more overall anxiety also reported greater difficulties in regulating their emotions, and were less securely attached to their parents. The results also showed that more specific symptoms of anxiety (i.e., OCD and PTSD) correlated not only with emotion dysregulation and attachment insecurity but also with emotion understanding. Finally, there were interrelations among emotion understanding, attachment security, and emotion dysregulation. The present results provide the first comprehensive evidence for a socio-emotional framework and its relevance to childhood anxiety.
Highlights
Emotion understanding can be considered as the affective side of Theory-of-Mind (Wellman, 2014) and can be defined as the understanding of the nature, origins, consequences and regulation of emotion in the self and others (Harris et al, in press)
In order to see whether the current sample of clinically anxious children differed from other samples of both non-clinical, as well as clinically anxious children, we first compared the mean scores obtained in this study to mean scores obtained from the literature
We examined the relations among the overall measures of anxiety, emotion understanding, emotion regulation, and attachment security, to see whether we would find the associations that have been found in various, separate lines of research in this sample of clinically anxious children
Summary
Emotion understanding can be considered as the affective side of Theory-of-Mind (Wellman, 2014) and can be defined as the understanding of the nature, origins, consequences and regulation of emotion in the self and others (Harris et al, in press). Many interrelated social, cognitive and emotional factors such as children’s language, intelligence, executive functions, and maternal attachment relationships (including maternal sensitivity, as well as emotional responsiveness and communication) contribute to these developmental changes and individual differences. It is possible to help typical and challenged children to improve their emotion understanding via, for example, cognitive-behavioral programs, language-based interventions or philosophically based programs both in an experimental setting and at school (e.g., Marchetti et al, 2006; Gavazzi and Ornaghi, 2011; Nunez, 2011; Daniel and GimenezDasi, 2012; Albanese and Molina, 2013; Andrés-Roqueta et al, 2013; Baron-Cohen et al, 2013; Molina et al, 2014; Harris et al, in press; Viana et al, submitted, for reviews and illustrations)
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