Children's Emotion Understanding Research Articles

Felt or false smiles? Volitional regulation of emotional expression in 4-, 6-, and 8-year-old children.

The development of volitional emotion regulation of expression was examined with a modified disappointing gift paradigm and strategy for coding children's expressions. Forty-nine boys and 49 girls aged 4, 6, and 8 were motivated to volitionally deceive an observer by false smiling, regardless of whether they received an attractive, unattractive, or no gift. Ten naïve observers watched children's videotaped behavior in random order and judged the quality of emotion and type of gift. This impression analysis indicated that children's competence to volitionally regulate their expressions increased with age. In addition, this ability was positively associated with children's emotion understanding of how to differentiate between emotion and expression. Unexpectedly, girls did not display a superior volitional regulation of expression than boys.

Learning Emotional Understanding and Emotion Regulation Through Sibling Interaction

Research Findings: Young children's relationships with their sisters and brothers offer unique and important opportunities for learning about emotions and developing emotional understanding. Through a critical analysis, this article examines sibling interaction in 3 different but normative contexts (conflict/conflict management, play, and sibling–parent interaction) in order to elucidate the processes by which emotional understanding and emotion regulation develop. The results of recent research and theoretical frameworks are used to explore the ways in which sibling relationships are effective contexts for the development of children's emotional understanding, including identifying emotions, decoding the emotions of others, and anticipating the emotional responses of others in particular situations; emotion regulation; and the use of emotional understanding to build (or impede) relationships and affect the behaviors of others. Practice or Policy: Implications from the current analysis include methods for harnessing the potential of children's growth in emotional understanding through their encounters with siblings to affect positive outcomes for child development.

Facial expression recognition and emotion understanding in children after neonatal open‐heart surgery for transposition of the great arteries

Theory of mind impairments are part of the cognitive morbidities associated with transposition of the great arteries (TGA). We sought to assess core components of social cognition in school-aged children with TGA. Thirty-eight children with neonatal corrected TGA (27 males, 11 females; mean age 7y 3mo, SD 1y 2mo) and a comparison group (n=31; 24 males, 7 females; mean age 7y 4mo, SD 1y 1mo) participated in this study. All children completed measures of facial expression recognition, emotion comprehension, and second-order cognitive and affective false-belief tasks. The association of medical pre-, intra-, and postoperative variables with cognitive outcomes was explored. After controlling for potential covariates, children with TGA performed significantly less accurately in the mental category of the emotion comprehension battery (p=0.002) and on second-order affective false-belief tasks (p<0.05). Preoperative variables including an associated ventricular septal defect (p=0.02), a younger age at open-heart surgery (p=0.03), and a prenatal diagnosis of TGA (p=0.02) were significantly associated with better outcomes. School-aged children with TGA display significant impairment on complex affective mental state understanding even though facial expression recognition was generally preserved. Preoperative factors may be important determinants for long-term outcomes after cyanotic congenital heart disease.

Effects of verbal ability and fluid intelligence on children's emotion understanding

This study investigated the role of verbal ability and fluid intelligence on children's emotion understanding, testing the hypothesis that fluid intelligence predicts the development of emotion comprehension over and above age and verbal ability. One hundred and two children (48 girls) aged 3.6-6 years completed the Test of Emotion Comprehension (TEC) that comprised external and mental components, the Coloured Progressive Matrices and the Test for Reception of Grammar. Regression analysis showed that fluid intelligence was not equally related to the external and mental components of the TEC (Pons & Harris, 2000). Specifically, the results indicated that the external component was related to age and verbal ability only, whereas recognition of mental emotional patterns required abstract reasoning skills more than age and verbal ability. It is concluded that the development of fluid intelligence has a significant role in the development of mental component of emotion comprehension.

Maternal Attachment Status, Mother-Child Emotion Talk, Emotion Understanding, and Child Conduct Problems

Conduct problems that emerge in childhood often persist into adolescence and are associated with a range of negative outcomes. It is therefore important to identify the factors that predict conduct problems in early childhood. The present study investigated the relations among maternal attachment status, mother-child emotion talk, child emotion understanding, and conduct problems in a sample of 92 (46 males) typically developing children (M age = 61.3 months, SD = 8.3 months). The results support a model in which maternal attachment status predicts the level of appropriate/responsive mother-child emotion talk, which predicts child emotion understanding, which in turn negatively predicts child conduct problems. These findings further underline the developmental role of mother-child emotion talk as well as the importance of involving parents in programs designed to increase children’s emotion understanding and/or decrease the incidence of conduct problems.

Emotion understanding and cognitive abilities in young children

In order to assess the unique contributions of non-verbal cognitive abilities and attention to young children's emotion understanding, a total of N=274 four-to-six-year-old children were tested individually. Hierarchical regression results suggest that the children's non-verbal reasoning abilities, their attention performance test scores, and their kindergarten teachers' attention ratings all predict their emotion understanding above and beyond their age and their receptive language skills. When the children's non-verbal cognitive ability was included as a predictor in the model, attention (in either performance or teacher rating) did not explain any additional variance in their emotion understanding. The discussion centers on relations between non-verbal cognitive abilities and emotion understanding.

Preschoolers’ Perception of Vocal Emotion

Perception of a speaker's emotional state is based upon auditory as well as visual cues.Researchers mainly focused on studying emotions that conveyed by visual cues,such as facial expressions recognition research;however,the developmental trend of preschoolers' emotion understanding based on auditory cues was not very clear.Emotions of a speaker are carried in two vocal channels:prosody and semantic.To explore preschoolers' perceptive characteristics of vocal emotions,two experiments were conducted in view of prosody and semantic.In Experiment 1,124 participants aged from 3 to 5 years old(61 boys and 63 girls) were asked to judge five emotions(happiness,fear,anger,sadness and neutral) of a man and a woman from cues that conveyed by expressing neutrally semantic sentences in different prosody.Results indicated that the ability of identifying vocal emotions of anger,fear,and neutrality developed with age in preschool period.Happiness was the easiest emotion to be identified,while fear was the most difficult one.All participants scored higher in perceiving a woman's vocal cues than those of a man's.Experiment 2 was aimed at further examining which cue children would rely on to identify the emotion of the speaker if the prosody and semantic cues were contradictory(e.g.a happy event was expressed with sad prosody cue).Participants consisted of 129 children aged from 3 to 5 years old(66 boys and 63 girls).Results showed that all the participants were more inclined to focus on the prosody.It is important to understand the developmental trajectory of understanding vocal emotions in preschoolers.Finding out more about typical patterns of children's early emotion understanding abilities is beneficial for child education,especially for designing early interventions for atypical children,such as children with cochlear implants or hearing aids and with autism.

Constructing Emotional and Relational Understanding: The Role of Mother–Child Reminiscing about Negatively Valenced Events

AbstractAlthough there is some evidence from cross‐sectional studies that reminiscing is an important context in which children construct socioemotional understanding, longitudinal evidence is lacking. The goal of this study was to examine longitudinally the links between the quality of reminiscing at 42 months and children's subsequent socioemotional development at 48 months. At 42 months, mothers and children reminisced about a past negatively‐valenced emotional event. These conversations were coded for maternal elaboration, the children's contribution and engagement, and the degree to which meaning was co‐constructed by the dyad. At 42 and 48 months, children took part in laboratory measures of socioemotional development. Whereas there were few links between concurrent reminiscing quality and sociomoral development, aspects of reminiscing quality at 42 months (including children's engagement and the dyad's co‐construction of meaning) were related to children's emotional understanding, empathy, representations of relationships, and moral‐self at 48 months. This study provides some of the first longitudinal evidence that reminiscing conversations are linked with children's subsequent sociomoral understanding.

Spanish parents' emotion talk and their children's understanding of emotion

Relations between parent-child emotion talk and children's emotion understanding were examined in 63 Spanish mothers and fathers and their 4- (M = 53.35 months, SD = 3.86) and 6-year-old (M = 76.62 months, SD = 3.91) children. Parent-child emotion talk was analyzed during two storytelling tasks: a play-related storytelling task and a reminiscence task (conversation about past experiences). Children's emotion understanding was assessed twice through a standardized test of emotion comprehension (TEC; Pons et al., 2004), once before one of the two parent-child storytelling sessions and again 6 months later. Mothers' use of emotion labels during the play-related storytelling task predicted children's emotion understanding after controlling for children's previous emotion understanding. Whereas fathers' use of emotion labels during the play-related storytelling task was correlated with children's emotion understanding, it did not predict children's emotion understanding after controlling for previous emotion understanding. Implications of these findings for future research on children's socioemotional development are discussed.

Are Emotion and Mind Understanding Differently Linked to Young Children's Social Adjustment? Relationships Between Behavioral Consequences of Emotions, False Belief, and SCBE

ABSTRACT According to empirical findings, emotional knowledge and false belief understanding seem to be differently linked to social adjustment. However, whereas false belief is assessed through the capacity to identify its behavioral consequences, emotion tasks usually rely on the comprehension of facial expressions and of the situational causes of emotions. The authors examined if the documented relationship between social adjustment and emotion knowledge in children extends to the understanding of behavioral consequences of emotions. Eighty French-speaking preschoolers undertook false belief and consequence-of-emotion tasks. Their social adjustment was measured by the Social Competence and Behavior Evaluation. Children's language ability, their parent's level of education, and the familial socioeconomic score were taken into account. Results showed that children's social adjustment was significantly predicted by their knowledge of emotion, but not by their understanding of false belief. The findings confirm the special status of emotion among mental states for social adaptation and specify which dimensions of adaptation to peers and adults are predicted by the child's emotion understanding. They also suggest that the distinction between mind and emotion understanding may be conceptual rather than methodological.

The relationship between emotional-state language and emotion understanding: A study with school-age children

We carried out an investigation with primary-school children on the relationship between both use and comprehension of emotional-state language and emotion understanding. Participants were 100 students between 7 and 10 years old (mean age=8 years and 10 months; SD=15.3 months), equally divided by gender. They completed four tests evaluating their language ability, use of emotional-state language, comprehension of emotional-state language and emotion understanding (EU) respectively. Significant correlations were found between both use and comprehension of emotional-state talk and children's EU. In addition, regression analyses showed that comprehension of emotional-state language, rather than its use, plays a significant role in explaining children's emotion understanding.

Maternal Expressive Style and Children's Emotional Development

Maternal expressive styles, based on a combination of positive and negative expressive patterns, were identified at two points in time and related to multiple aspects of preschool children's emotional development. Mother-child pairs from 260 families participated when the children were 3 years old, and 240 participated again at aged 4 years. Expressive styles were identified at age 3 using cluster analysis, replicated at age 4 and examined in relation to children's emotional understanding, expressiveness and regulation. Three expressive styles were identified: high positive/low negative, very low positive/average negative and average positive/very high negative. Cluster membership was stable in 63% of families from age 3 to 4 years; no systematic patterns of change were evident in the remaining families. Expressive style was related to aspects of children's emotional expression at 3 years and to emotion expression and regulation at 4 years. Children's expressiveness and regulation at age 3 were also related to changes in mothers' expressive styles over 1 year. Identifying mothers' expressive styles provides a unique way to understand the potential role of the emotional climates in which preschool-aged children learn to express and regulate their own emotions.

Mothers' Acculturation and Beliefs About Emotions, Mother–Child Emotion Discourse, and Children's Emotion Understanding in Latino Families

Research Findings: We examined associations among Anglo acculturation, Latino enculturation, maternal beliefs, mother–child emotion talk, and emotion understanding in 40 Latino preschool-age children and their mothers. Mothers self-reported Anglo acculturation, Latino enculturation, and beliefs about the value/danger of children's emotions and parent/child roles in emotion socialization. Mother–child emotion talk was observed during a Lego storytelling task. Children's emotion understanding was measured using 2 age-appropriate tasks. Correlations showed that mothers' Latino enculturation was associated with mothers' stronger belief in guiding children's emotions and children's lower emotion understanding. Anglo acculturation was associated with mothers' lower belief that emotions can be dangerous and children's better emotion understanding. Mothers with a stronger belief in guiding children's emotions more frequently labeled emotions. Mothers with a stronger belief that emotions can be dangerous less frequently explained emotions. Regressions controlling for child age and maternal education demonstrated that mothers with a stronger belief that children can learn about emotions on their own and mothers with greater Latino enculturation had children with lower emotion understanding, whereas mothers with greater Anglo acculturation had children with better emotion understanding. Practice or Policy: Results suggest that understanding both family acculturation and family enculturation will be helpful for early childhood researchers and educators seeking to assess and promote children's socioemotional development.

Perspective taking in children's narratives about jealousy

This study explored relationships between perspective-taking, emotion understanding, and children's narrative abilities. Younger (23 5-/6-year-olds) and older (24 7-/8-year-olds) children generated fictional narratives, using a wordless picture book, about a frog experiencing jealousy. Children's emotion understanding was assessed through a standardized test of emotion comprehension and their ability to convey the jealousy theme of the story. Perspective-taking ability was assessed with respect to children's use of narrative evaluation (i.e., narrative coherence, mental state language, supplementary evaluative speech, use of subjective language, and placement of emotion expression). Older children scored higher than younger children on emotion comprehension and on understanding the story's complex emotional theme, including the ability to identify a rival. They were more advanced in perspective-taking abilities, and selectively used emotion expressions to highlight story episodes. Subjective perspective taking and narrative coherence were predictive of children's elaboration of the jealousy theme. Use of supplementary evaluative speech, in turn, was predictive of both subjective perspective taking and narrative coherence.

Emotion understanding, theory of mind, and prosocial orientation: Relations over time in early childhood

Data were collected when children were 42, 54, and 72 months of age (Ns = 210, 191, and 172 for T1, T2, and T3, respectively). Children's emotion understanding (EU) and theory of mind (ToM) were examined as predictors of children's prosocial orientation within and across time. EU positively related to children's sympathy across 2.5 years, and T1 EU positively related to parent-reported prosocial orientation concurrently and across 1 year (T2). T2 ToM positively related to parents’ reports of sympathy and prosocial orientation concurrently and 18 months later (T3); in contrast, T3 ToM did not relate to sympathy or prosocial orientation. T2 ToM accounted for marginally significant variance (p < 0.058) in T3 mother-reported prosocial orientation over and above that accounted for by T2 prosocial orientation. Fostering the development of EU and ToM may contribute to children's prosocial orientation.

Is understanding regret dependent on developments in counterfactual thinking?

Children's understanding of counterfactual emotions such as regret and relief develops relatively late compared to their ability to imagine counterfactual worlds. We tested whether a late development in counterfactual thinking: understanding counterfactuals as possibilities, underpinned children's understanding of regret. Thirty 5- and 6-year-olds completed tasks assessing counterfactual thinking and understanding regret. Performance on the counterfactual task was better than that on the regret task. We suggest that thinking about counterfactuals as possibilities is a necessary but not sufficient cognitive development in children's understanding of regret. We discuss how other developments in counterfactual thinking may underpin children's emotional understanding.

Emotion socialization, child emotion understanding and regulation, and adjustment in urban African American families: differential associations across child gender.

The prospective relation of maternal emotion philosophy to children's emotion understanding and regulation and positive and negative adjustment was investigated. Sixty-nine African American youth (50% male; M age = 11.29 years) and their maternal caregivers living in high violence areas of a midsized city participated in this interview study. Caregivers' meta-emotion philosophy predicted child emotion understanding and emotion regulation, which also were associated with Time 2 grades, internalizing behaviors, externalizing behaviors, and social skills after controlling for Time 1 adjustment. Emotional understanding mediated the relationship between caregivers' emotional socialization and boys' internalizing behaviors and between caregivers' emotional socialization and girls' social skills. In addition, emotion regulation mediated the relationships between emotional socialization and all four outcomes for boys. Implications for future work on emotion socialization and clinical intervention, particularly related to emotion regulation, are discussed.

Conversations about emotion in high-risk dyads

Early emotional understanding is fostered by mother–child conversation in which mothers elaboratively enhance children's understanding. Little is known of the broader relational and risk factors influencing maternal discourse style, how discourse content and quality are associated with children's emotion language, and how these predict emotion understanding. In this longitudinal study of a high-risk sample, attachment security and family risks were assessed when children were 2 years old. One year later, observations of mother–child emotion conversation yielded measures of maternal discourse content and quality, and children's emotion words and emotion labels. Child emotion understanding was independently assessed one year later as well. Central findings were: (1) content and quality of maternal discourse was negatively related to family risk factors and positively associated with secure attachment; (2) child emotion language in conversation was positively associated with secure attachment beyond the effects of child language and maternal discourse content; and (3) differences in emotion language ability predicted children's emotion understanding.

The effects of explanatory conversations on children's emotion understanding

Ninety‐three children ranging in age from 5 to 8 years (M= 82.46 months,SD= 13.20) participated in a training study designed to improve their emotion understanding. Children either explained (self‐explanation condition) or listened to an experimenter who explained (experimenter‐explanation condition) the causes of protagonists' hidden and ambivalent emotional reactions in nine different vignettes. Compared to a control group who listened to the vignettes and answered questions unrelated to emotions, children assigned to the self‐explanation and experimenter‐explanation conditions increased from pre‐ to post‐test in their emotion understanding. The educational implications of explanatory conversations in facilitating children's emotion understanding and general learning are discussed.

The development of early children emotion understanding

儿童随着年龄的增长,其情绪理解能力亦向更高层次发展,这为他们社会认知和适应能力的发展奠定了基础.近年来,有关婴幼儿早期情绪发展能力的研究较多使用心理理论方法,认为儿童情绪理解与心理理论之间关系密切,两者协同促进儿童的社会化发展.影响情绪理解能力发展的因素很多,其中亲子依恋关系较受关注,现已证明依恋关系质量明显影响儿童的情绪理解能力及其发展进程.该文就儿童情绪理解能力的发展、与心理理论间的关系以及亲子依恋的影响三个方面的研究进展作一介绍。