Poster #204 - Emotional Expressiveness in the Environment and Emotion Understanding in Early Childhood

• In Event: 1-061 - Poster Session 02
  In Poster Session: PS 02 Section - Social, Emotional, Personality

Integrative Statement

The ability to understand and interpret others’ emotions is crucial for healthy social (Denham et al., 2003) and academic (Denham et al., 2012) development. Additionally, stability in emotion understanding has been demonstrated from 3 to 6 years (Brown & Dunn, 1996), and from 7 to 12 years (Pons & Harris, 2005). Despite the importance of early emotion understanding for later emotional, social, and academic competence, little is known about environmental factors that can impact the development of this skill. Thus, the present study investigated the emotion understanding of 2.5-year-old children (an age just before emotion understanding may begin to stabilize), and the impact of emotional expressiveness in their environment.

Participants in this study were 35 children (17 male), ranging in age from 29.21 months to 30.75 months (M=30.02, SD=0.31). Parents completed the Family Expressiveness Questionnaire (FEQ; Halberstadt, 1986), which asked how frequently individuals in the immediate family express themselves in particular situations. Additionally, parents filled out the Berkeley Expressivity Questionnaire (BQ; Gross & John, 1997), which measured the emotional expressivity of only the parent who brought the child into the lab (as opposed to the entire family). Then, the children participated in Denham’s Affective Knowledge Test (AKT; Denham, 1986), a commonly used measure of emotion understanding for preschool-aged children that involves asking children to expressively and receptively identify emotional faces, as well as identify the face that matches the emotion conveyed in a puppet show.

The results revealed that total performance on the AKT was significantly related to parent responses on the BQ (r=.369, p=.029) (Figure 1), but not related to responses on the FEQ (r=.147, p=.401) (Figure 2). To further investigate the relation between the BQ and child performance on the AKT, we split the BQ into its three distinct subscales: Negative Emotionality, Positive Emotionality, and Impulse Strength (Gross & John, 1997). When each of these subscales was correlated with child AKT performance, the relation to Impulse Strength was significant (r=.419, p=.012), but not the relation to Negative Emotionality (r=.236, p=.171) or Positive Emotionality (r=.253, p=.152).

Overall, these data suggest that exposure to emotional expressiveness in the environment is important for the development of early emotion understanding, but particularly when it is the expressiveness of a parent, and not necessarily the family environment as a whole. This may be the case among our tested age group because many children are beginning to attend preschool at this age, and thus experience examples of emotions from others outside the family. However, the primary caregiver may still be a source that children frequently look to for help understanding emotions. Additionally, the importance of parental impulse strength for AKT performance suggests that observing a parent who experiences emotions more intensely than others may be particularly beneficial for learning to identify emotional expressions and appropriate emotional reactions to various scenarios. These results provide insight into the importance of the environment for early emotion understanding development, and may hold implications for early interventions.

Authors

• Marissa Ogren, University of California, Los Angeles
  Presenting Author

• Scott Johnson, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)
  Non-Presenting Author