The effect of school climate on children's emotion recognition

• In Event: Poster Session 07
  In Poster Session: PS 07 Topic - Social, Emotional, Personality

Abstract

Schools are an important environment where children spend a major amount of their time. Much of their social world is at school, where consequently, they are exposed to different emotional experiences. The main purpose of this study was to explore the effect of school climate on children's emotion recognition (ER) ability. Children's ER is the ability to understand and recognize others’ emotions using nonverbal cues. This ability is crucial for social interaction because it provides information about partners’ reactions, intentions, and likely behaviors (e.g., Garner & Waajid, 2012). ER also has a robust association with school success and academic performance (MacCann, et al., 2019). As far as we know, this is the first study that directly investigated the association between school climate and children's ER. We examined ER via facial and vocal cues in 378 7-year-old (M= 89.59 months; SD= 3.83) twin children. ER was assessed with the child version of the Diagnostic Assessment of Nonverbal Accuracy (DANVA) for happy, angry, sad, and afraid (Nowicki, 2010). Data on twins’ schools was obtained from the Israeli Ministry of Education. Three aspects of school climate were assessed: (1) child's well-being at school; (2) positive relationships; and (3) negative relationships. We used Multilevel analysis with families as clusters in Mplus V.8.0. while child’s sex, school achievement levels, and family SES were used as control variables. For total ER: at the child level, females had greater ER than males (b=.30, SE=.13). At the family level, there was a significant effect of the family's SES on ER (b=.30, SE=.13). At the school level, school achievement and school climate showed significant effects on ER (b = .27, SE = .14), (b = .26 SE = .13). Specifically, school climate related significantly to anger recognition (b = .19, SE = .09) and trended towards significance for fear recognition (b = .32, SE = .17). Children attending schools with more positive relationships with their teachers and classmates, sense of protection, and less violence had better overall recognition of emotions, and specifically, of anger and fear. The findings highlight the importance of school climate for children's emotional development. They are also consistent with other studies relating to emotional climate in the family (Tan & Smith, 2019). In an eye-tracking study, Scrivne and his colleagues (2019) found that when viewing violent interactions, participants attended significantly less to faces and significantly more to points of contact. Similarly, our study reveals that when children are in an environment with a negative climate they find it difficult to learn about the negative feelings of anger and fear and are busy with survival and vice versa. The educational implications of the study are that school climate is an important environmental factor for emotional learning. It is crucial to create a positive climate in schools so children can learn about the emotional world.

Group Authors

Rotem Schapira, Hillary Anger Elfenbein, and Ariel Knafo-Noam

Authors

• Rotem Schapira, Levinsky College of Education and Tel-Aviv university, Israel
  Presenting Author

• Hillary Anger Elfenbein, Olin School of Business Washington University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Ariel Knafo-Noam, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
  Non-Presenting Author