Children’s Social-Emotional Development: Links with Pro- and Antisocial Behavior

• In Event: 3-189 - Using Indicators of Social-Emotional Development to Inform Practice

Integrative Statement

Emotional responses in the context of social conflict serve as an important affective mechanism underlying children’s social behaviors (e.g., Malti & Ongley, 2014). Affective developmental theory posits that self-conscious emotions, such as guilt, are an important component of social-emotional development. In a meta-analytic review, guilt feelings have been linked negatively to aggressive behavior and positively to prosocial behavior (Malti & Krettenauer, 2013). Here we present a new measure, the Social-Emotional Responding Task (SERT; citation withheld for blind review), and its links to pro- and antisocial behavior. SERT is a developmental tool designed to assess children’s social-emotional responses in social conflict situations across early to middle childhood.

Data were collected from an ethnically diverse sample of 150 4- and 150 8-year-old children (M age = 6.55, SD = 2.02; 50% boys) from Canada. Children were presented six vignettes depicting three domains of transgressions (aggressive act, social exclusion, and prosocial omission) and were asked “how would you feel if you had done this”. In line with past research, two dominant types of emotions (i.e., happy and sad/guilty) were coded (1 = present, 0 = absent) from the responses. Caregivers rated children’s sympathy (5 items; α = .89; Malti, Zuffiano, & Noam, 2017), prosocial behaviors (5 items; α = .82; Goodman, 1997), and overt aggression (8 items; α = .85; Achenbach & Rescorla, 2001).

Percentages of anticipated emotions across age groups are presented in Table 1. As expected, results from confirmatory factor analyses supported a one-factor (“domain general”) model over a three-factor (“domain specific”) model, indicating that children’s anticipated emotions tend to converge across domains of aggressive act, prosocial omission, and social exclusion. Results from multiple group confirmatory factor analyses further supported partial scalar invariance across age groups and full scalar invariance across gender, indicating robustness of the task’s performance across development and gender. Compared to 4-year-olds, 8-year-olds were, as hypothesized, more likely to anticipate guilty emotions and less likely to anticipate happy emotions following the transgressions. No gender differences were observed. In relation to prosocial and antisocial outcomes, anticipated sad (happy) emotions were positively (negatively) related to sympathy and prosocial behavior. In addition, anticipated sad (happy) emotions were, as hypothesized, negatively (positively) related to overt aggression, lending support to the construct validity of the SERT tool (Table 2).

Taken together, the findings provide strong support for the psychometric properties of the SERT tool, including convergence across vignettes, measurement invariance across age groups and gender, and construct validity in relation to sympathy and social behavioral outcomes. Supporting a body of developmental literature, the findings also show the age-related decline in anticipated happy emotions (i.e., “happy victimizer” phenomenon) from early to middle-childhood, thus providing further evidence for the developmental sensitivity of the measure. Taken together, these findings suggest that SERT can be used as a valid assessment of children’s social-emotional capacities in developmental research, and we discuss implications for the design of developmentally tailored intervention approaches.

Authors

• Linlin Zhang, University of Toronto
  Presenting Author

• Tina Malti, University of Toronto
  Non-Presenting Author