Temperament, Cognitive Ability, Emotion Knowledge, and Adaptive Social Behavior

Abstract

Few studies have related emotion knowledge to positive behavioral outcomes in middle childhood, and none of these included both temperament and cognitive ability in the analysis. In the present study of 166 seven-year-old children from economically disadvantaged families, we show that temperamental inhibition, cognitive ability, a traditionally studied index of emotion knowledge (emotion recognition), and emotion memories contribute to the concurrent prediction of adaptive social behavior. We also found that temperament and cognitive ability relate significantly to emotion recognition which, in turn, partially mediates the relations of inhibition and cognitive ability to adaptive social behavior. Emotion memories relate significantly to the behavioral outcome after removing the variance due to inhibition, cognitive ability, and emotion recognition. We argue that compared to memories tagged simply as good (pleasant) or bad (unpleasant) events, discrete emotion memories have greater adaptive value because they provide more useful information and have the capacity to facilitate the anticipation and management of emotion arousal.