Children’s and Adults’ Identification of Internal and Displayed Emotions by Age, Valence and Emotional Consistency

• In Event: Poster Session 03
  In Poster Session: PS 03 Topic - Social, Emotional, Personality

Abstract

Knowledge of emotional display rules refers to understanding that because of social norms, one must at times display emotional expressions that differ from emotions that one is experiencing (Jones et al., 1998). Smiling politely upon receiving a disappointing gift or concealing one’s glee at a disliked peer’s misfortune are both examples of situations in which masking an emotion while displaying another is preferred, although the valence of the felt emotion is negative in the former but positive in the latter. Understanding display rules is important for children’s successful social relations (Garner et al., 1994), although comparatively few studies exist examining the potential contribution of demographic variables such as age or gender and emotion-related variables such as valence.
The current study examined display rule knowledge of children using data from a single time point of a large sample of 4- to 12-year-olds (N = 1664) attending 15 schools in 5 communities participating in the Socially and Emotionally Aware Kids (SEAK) project. The SEAK project is a 4-year Canadian longitudinal cohort-sequential school-based intervention study designed to evaluate PATHS (Promoting Alternative Thinking Strategies; Kusché & Greenberg, 1994) on children’s developing cognition, language, social-emotional skills, academic performance, and mental and physical health. Data from 35 undergraduates were also collected for comparison. The Display Rule Knowledge task used in this study included 8 vignettes (some adapted from Jones et al., 1999 and new ones) involving different storylines presented via touchscreen laptops and participants touched the appropriate emotion out of seven possible emotions (see Table 1 for vignette examples). Two vignettes depicted a protagonist who felt a positive emotion and could display it and two vignettes depicted a protagonist who felt a positive emotion but needed to display a negative emotion according to social norms. The four other vignettes were analogous, but protagonists felt negative emotions.
A 10(age group) x 2(gender) x 2(valence of internal emotion) x 2(consistency of external/internal emotions) x 2(emotion identified: [internal/felt vs. external/displayed]) mixed ANCOVA was conducted, using children’s performance on separate measures of their knowledge of facial expressions and of situational emotions as covariates (see Garner, 1999). For the between-groups variables, age, F(9,1677)=31.90, p<.001, MSe=5.97, Partial η2=.15, but not gender (p = .79), significantly predicted performance. Post-hoc analyses revealed five developmentally distinguishable groups that significantly differed (Fig.1). All three within-groups main effects were significant (all ps < .04), although they were subsumed under a significant 4-way interaction with age, F(9,1677)=3.52, p<.001, MSe=0.40, Partial η2=.02. Follow-up analyses revealed that 4-year-olds were generally poor at judging vignettes. However, valence mattered for 5-8-year-olds (but not for older participants) who did better on vignettes in which protagonists felt internal positive emotions. Interestingly, the consistency between the displayed and internal emotion mattered only for 5-year-olds. A remarkable shift occurred over development (Fig.1): Younger children better identified external emotions, but this reversed for older children. Children in the middle age groups (as well as adults) identified internal/external emotions equally. The results of the current study suggest that different variables influence children’s understanding of display rules across development.

Author

• Sophie Jacques, Dalhousie University
  Presenting Author