Abstract
The influence of internalizing and externalizing problems on children’s understanding of others’ emotions has mainly been investigated on basic levels of emotion comprehension. So far, studies assessing more sophisticated levels of emotion comprehension reported deficits in the ability to understand others’ emotions in children with severe internalizing or externalizing symptoms. The aim of this study was to investigate the relation between emotion comprehension and interindividual differences, with a focus on internalizing and externalizing behavior in children aged 7–10 years from the general population. A sample of 135 children was tested for emotion understanding using the Test of Emotion Comprehension. Information on internalizing and externalizing behavior was assessed with the Child Behavior Checklist 4/18. Age, bilingual upbringing, and amount of paternal working hours were significant control variables for emotion comprehension. In contrast to prior research, overall level of emotion understanding was not related to externalizing symptoms and correlated positively with elevated levels of somatic complaints and anxious/depressed symptoms. In addition, and in line with previous work, higher levels of social withdrawal were associated with worse performance in understanding emotions elicited by reminders. The present results implicate not only an altered understanding of emotions among more specific internalizing symptoms, but also that these alterations occur already on a low symptom level in a community based sample.
Highlights
Emotion comprehension is defined as the knowledge to identify and understand others’ emotions by facial or bodily cues, and within specific social contexts (Harris et al, 2016)
Pons et al (2004) identified at least nine successive components of emotion comprehension, which children master until the age of 11 years and which can be assessed via the Test of Emotion
The proposed components can be categorized into three developmental phases: First, in the external phase, children between 3 and 5 years are able to recognize and label facial expressions of basic emotions (e.g., Bullock and Russell, 1985), infer a person’s emotion based on situational cues (e.g., Cutting and Dunn, 1999), and understand that an external reminder may reactivate a past emotional state (e.g., Lagattuta et al, 1997)
Summary
Emotion comprehension is defined as the knowledge to identify and understand others’ emotions by facial or bodily cues, and within specific social contexts (Harris et al, 2016). By the age of 7 years, children master the mental phase characterized by the improved ability of perspective taking Within this phase, children understand that two persons can experience different emotions regarding an object depending on how strong their desire to receive the object is (e.g., Harris et al, 1987). By around 9 years, children take different, divergent perspectives on the same scenario into account and by doing so, learn to understand the components of the reflective phase They understand that incorporating different perspectives on a given situation may result in conflicting, mixed emotions in the same person, that a transgression of moral rules to satisfy a desire leads to negative emotions (e.g., Lagattuta, 2005), and that cognitive strategies can effectively regulate emotions (e.g., Stegge and Terwogt, 2007)
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