Shared Environment Effects on Children's Emotion Recognition.

Rotem Schapira,Meirav Amichay-Setter,Ariel Knafo-Noam,Carolyn Zahn-Waxler,Hillary Anger Elfenbein

doi:10.3389/fpsyt.2019.00215

Abstract

Empathy is relevant to many psychiatric conditions. Empathy involves the natural ability to perceive and be sensitive to the emotional states of others. Thus, emotion recognition (ER) abilities are key to understanding empathy. Despite the importance of ER to normal and abnormal social interactions, little is known about how it develops throughout childhood. We examined genetic and environmental influences on children’s ER via facial and vocal cues in 344 7-year-old twin children [59 monozygotic (MZ) and 113 same-sex dizygotic (DZ) pairs], who were part of the Longitudinal Israeli Study of Twins. ER was assessed with the child version of the Diagnostic Assessment of Nonverbal Accuracy. For both facial and vocal cues of emotion, twin correlations were not higher for MZ twins than for DZ twins, suggesting no heritability for ER in this population. In contrast, correlations were positive for both types of twins, indicating a shared environmental effect. This was supported by a bivariate genetic analysis. This pattern was robust to controlling for twins being of the same sex and age. Effects remained after controlling for background variables such as family income and number of additional siblings. The analysis found a shared environmental correlation between facial and vocal ER (r c = .63), indicating that the shared environmental factors contributed to the overlap between vocal and facial ER. The study highlights the importance of the shared environment to children’s ER.

Highlights

Empathy, the ability to perceive and be sensitive to others’ emotional states [1], is relevant to many psychiatric conditions [2]
Correlations were not higher for MZ twins, indicating no heritability for emotion recognition (ER) in this population. Positive correlations for both DZ and MZ twins indicate that at least part of the individual differences in these measures is associated with shared environmental factors
These model fit indices reflected the pattern in which similarity between the DZ twins is greater than the MZ twins, which is not expected in the CE model given that the shared environment is estimated as affecting siblings growing up together regardless of genetic similarity

Summary

INTRODUCTION

The ability to perceive and be sensitive to others’ emotional states [1], is relevant to many psychiatric conditions [2]. We investigated genetic and environmental effects on children’s recognition of emotion from facial and vocal cues using data from seven-year-old twins. Studying 10-year-old twins (N = 250 pairs), Lau and colleagues [24] found modest and largely nonsignificant genetic effects on recognition of specific emotions from facial expressions, and a strong (75% of the variance) genetic effect on a global factor estimated across emotions. The second study [25] examined facial emotion recognition in a larger sample of twins (N = 957 individuals) in a wide range of ages, 9 to 17. Past work has shown that the relative importance of genetic and environmental effects changes with age [for a metaanalysis on empathy, see Ref. We expected to find a genetic effect and nonshared environmental influence on children’s ER in our 7-year-old sample. Overlapping environmental effects will indicate that similar environmental forces promote (or hinder) development of ER across modalities

Participants

RESULTS

DISCUSSION

ETHICS STATEMENT