Singaporean Children’s Emotion Understanding, Social Skills, and Academic Achievement

• In Event: Emotional Competence in Childhood: Underlying Mechanisms and Consequences

Abstract

Understanding one’s own or other’s emotions is a fundamental skill in children’s life. Studies in Western cultures have shown that children’s emotion understanding predicts their prosocial behaviors, social competence, academic achievement, and psychological wellbeing (Denham et al., 2003; Izard et al., 2001; Rhoades, Warren, Domitrovich, & Greenberg, 2011). However, culture shapes children’s emotional development (Yang & Wang, 2019). Little is known regarding the development of children’s emotion understanding and its relations to their developmental outcomes in Asian cultures. This project aims to examine children’s emotion understanding and its relations to social competence and academic achievement in an Asian sample. Understanding these relations could provide avenues for understanding the mechanisms and identifying individuals at risk for socioemotional and school difficulties.
Singaporean children (Age range: 4-9 years; target n = 120) are recruited through local preschools, primary schools, and social media. The tasks are introduced to children as adventure games, including computer games assessing children emotion understanding, and paper and pencil games assessing their academic achievement. In the Face emotion game, children see pictures of children’s faces with different emotion expressions and are asked to judge the emotion displayed in each picture by pressing one of four buttons (with happy, sad, angry, and scared cartoon faces). Children’s academic skills, namely, listening comprehension (receptive vocabulary and oral discourse comprehension), early reading skills, mathematic problem solving, and spelling, are assessed using the Wechsler Individual Achievement Test – Third Edition (WIAT-III; Wechsler, 2009). Additionally, their social competence is rated by their parents with the Social Skills Improvement Systems Rating Scales (SSIS-RS; Gresham & Elliot, 2008).
Preliminary results (n = 60) showed that older children and girls were better at recognizing emotions than younger children, F(5,58) = 7.33, p < .001, and boys, t(62) = 1.94, p = .056, respectively. Among the four basic emotions, happiness, sadness, fear, and anger, happy faces were recognized with higher accuracy, F(2.14, 134.6) = 18.8, p < .001, and shorter reaction time, F(2.34, 144.8) = 42.4, p < .001, than the other three categories of emotional faces. Linear regression models showed that children’s emotion recognition was associated with their social and academic skills. Specifically, children’s emotion recognition accuracy was positively associated with their parent-reported social engagement skills, R2 = .095, F(1, 60) = 5.56, p = .020, expectedly suggesting that children who are better at recognizing basic emotions may be better equipped to handle social experiences or situations, shared with other people. Moreover, children’s shorter reaction time in emotion recognition task was related to their better discourse comprehension skills, R2 = .657, F(1, 60) = 4.92, p = .03. It is possible that being able to accurately recognize emotions faster may have facilitated children’s social interactions and in turn allow them to enhance their listening comprehension skills. The findings shed critical light on Singaporean children’s holistic development and provide us with information regarding the relations between children’s social emotional development and academic achievement.

Authors

• Yang Yang, Nanyang Technological University
  Presenting Author

• Kelly Adelia, Nanyang Technological University

• Corina Möller, Saarland University

• Stella Tsotsi, University of Oslo