Abstract
Cross-sectional studies support negative associations between children’s skills in recognizing emotional expressions and their problem behaviors. Few studies have examined these associations over time, however, precluding our understanding of the direction of effects. Emotion recognition difficulties may contribute to the development of problem behaviors; additionally, problem behaviors may constrain the development of emotion recognition skill. The present study tested the bidirectional linkages between children’s emotion recognition and teacher-reported problem behaviors in 1st and 3rd grade. Specifically, emotion recognition, hyperactivity, internalizing behaviors, and externalizing behaviors were assessed in 117 children in 1st grade and in 3rd grade. Results from fully cross-lagged path models revealed divergent developmental patterns: Controlling for concurrent levels of problem behaviors and first-grade receptive language skills, lower emotion recognition in 1st grade significantly predicted greater internalizing behaviors, but not hyperactivity or externalizing behaviors, in 3rd grade. Moreover, greater hyperactivity in 1st grade marginally predicted lower emotion recognition in 3rd grade, but internalizing and externalizing behaviors were not predictive of emotion recognition over time. Together, these findings extend previous research to identify specific developmental pathways, whereby emotion recognition difficulties contribute to the development of internalizing behaviors, and early hyperactivity may contribute to the development of emotion recognition difficulties, thus highlighting the importance of examining these processes and their mutual development over time.
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Notes
These divergent findings may reflect the use of different emotion recognition measures depicting facial versus non-facial (i.e., schematic) expressions. However, children’s performance levels were similar across measures and did not reach ceiling levels in either measure.
The neutral and ambiguous expressions are used to calculate attributional biases, or the tendency to attribute an emotion to a non-emotional or ambiguous display. These faces are, thus, not included in the calculation of emotion recognition accuracy for the ACES task.
We followed reviewers’ suggestions to explore child ethnicity as a potential covariate. We found that African American children received higher ratings of externalizing behaviors than European American children at both time points. However, a path model with child ethnicity entered as a covariate revealed no significant unique effects of child ethnicity on 1st and 3rd grade externalizing behaviors. Thus, we omitted child ethnicity as a covariate in subsequent models. For full exploratory results, see Appendix.
This pattern held when controlling for effects of child ethnicity on 1st and 3rd grade externalizing behaviors; see Appendix.
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This work supported by funding awarded to the third and fourth authors from the National Science Foundation (#NSF1023839; NSF-BCS-0126475; BCS-0720660) and two training grants awarded to the first author from the National Institutes of Health (NIA F32-AG048687; NICHD T32-HD07376).
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Cross-lagged path model of children’s emotion recognition and externalizing behaviors in 1st grade predicting children’s emotion recognition and externalizing behaviors in 3rd grade, controlling for receptive language skill in 1st grade and child ethnicity. Dashed lines indicate nonsignificant paths. Solid lines indicate significant paths, and include the standardized regression coefficient. Patterns mirror those of the model omitting child ethnicity as a predictor. *p < .05, **p < .01, ***p < .001
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Castro, V.L., Cooke, A.N., Halberstadt, A.G. et al. Bidirectional Linkages Between Emotion Recognition and Problem Behaviors in Elementary School Children. J Nonverbal Behav 42, 155–178 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10919-017-0269-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10919-017-0269-9