Poster #205 - A Little Anger Goes a Long Way: Age-Related Change in Preschoolers’ Persistence

• In Event: 1-115 - Poster Session 03
  In Poster Session: PS 03 Section - Social, Emotional, Personality

Integrative Statement

The functionalist perspective posits that emotions serve adaptive functions(e.g., Barrett & Campos, 1987). Despite its general acceptance in emotional development research, most studies of children focus on anger and sadness in terms of dysfunction rather than function. A few studies indicate that children’s and adults’ anger can be associated with appropriate effort toward overcoming goal blockage (Dennis et al., 2009; He et al., 2012; Lench & Levine, 2008; Tan & Smith, 2018). However, those studies did not incorporate the functionalist view that emotion is a continuous, dynamic psychological process, and that studying emotion requires study of change (Cole, 2016; Keltner & Gross, 1999; Thompson, 1994). Indeed, we know little about whether the functionality of an emotion like anger matures with age.

We employed temporal analyses to study the function of 120 preschool age children’s anger and sadness in the context of their persistence in a blocked goal task at age 36 and 48 months. As children gain in skill at emotion regulation between 36 and 48 months of age (Cole et al., 2011), their modulation of anger may enhance their appropriate persistence at a blocked goal. Low intensity sadness, which indicates relinquishment of a goal, should not predict persistence. Using survival analyses we examined the extent to which low intensity anger predicts appropriate on-task behavior persistence during the transparent locked box task (Goldsmith et al., 1995), and tested whether that relation improved at age 48 months relative to 36 months. We used hidden Markov models (HMM) to test whether children are better able at age 48 months to transition between periods of anger and calm in the task. Using second-by-second emotion expression and task behavior, we quantify age-related differences in the: (a) influence of angry and sad expressions on the probability of transitioning from on-task to off-task behavior, i.e., to giving up (survival analysis); and (b) transitions between states defined by emotion expressions (angry, sad, calm) and on- or off-task behavior (HMM).

Age moderated the influence of proportion of angry expressions prior to being off-task β = -.07, 95% CI [.89, .99], p = .01, without main effects of age or emotion. Greater proportion of anger was associated with greater probability of giving up earlier in the task at 36 months, but with lower likelihood of giving up earlier in the task at 48 months (Figure 1). HMM analyses revealed four states: calm effort, angry effort, sad with limited effort, and calm without effort (Table 1); and that children were more likely to transition from calm effort to calm no effort at 36 months, but more likely to transition between angry effort and calm effort states, and to remain in angry effort states, at age 48 months.

We discuss how modulating anger comes to help children persist appropriately at a blocked goal, including being able to move flexibly in and out of angry states, and how this type of analytical work prompt new ideas about the measurement of self-regulation.

Authors

• Kizzann Ashana Ramsook, The Pennsylvania State University
  Presenting Author

• Lizbeth Benson, The Pennsylvania State University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Nilam Ram, Penn State University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Pamela M. Cole, The Pennsylvania State University
  Non-Presenting Author