Abstract
The present study explored the characteristics of children’s emotion recognition ability, as well as its relationships with peer status and friendship quality. Participants were 308 Chinese primary school children in Grades 2 to 6 (54% boys; Mage = 9.99 years, SD = 1.49). Emotion recognition ability was measured by responses to multimodal videos covering eight emotions. Peer status and friendship quality were measured by peer nomination and questionnaire, respectively. Results indicated that: 1) Emotion recognition ability showed an overall upward trend as children age, with girls performing better than boys; 2) There were significant differences on the accuracy scores between emotion categories (ranked from high to low as: anger, sadness, joy, amusement, fear, irritation, pleasure, and interest), as well as a significant interaction between emotion category and grade; 3) Emotion recognition ability was positively related with both peer status and friendship quality, demonstrating its ties to children’s interpersonal interactions. These results not only broaden understanding about the development of emotion recognition ability, but also evidence its importance as a sensitive indicator of children’s social relationships.
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Notes
In case that the improvement on accuracy with age was due to longer attention span, we tested the accuracy differences between the first half and second half of ERA test. Results indicated that children in grade 5 and 6 scored higher in the second half (p = .021 and .042 respectively), which might indicate a practice effect; for children in grade 2 to 4, there were no significant differences between the two halves (p = .328, .492, and .559), suggesting that even younger children could maintain their attention through the whole test.
The results of the regression model were basically the same whether or not the last dimension was included on the latent factor of friendship quality.
We also used multi-group models to further test whether the correlations between ERA and peer relations differed across gender and grade (five grades were divided into three groups according to the ER development trend: grade 2, grade 3 & 4, grade 5 & 6). The constrained model, where paths were set equal across gender/grade, was compared with the unconstrained model where paths were free to vary. The result showed non-significant chi-square differences either for gender [∆χ2(2) = 2.41, p = .300] or for grade [∆χ2(4) = 3.79, p = .436]. Thus, the model could be supposed as invariable across gender and grade.
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The research was supported by the MOE Project of Key Research Institutes of Humanities and Social Science at Universities, China (Grant No. 14JJD190003, 16JJD880007).
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Wang, Y., Hawk, S.T., Tang, Y. et al. Characteristics of Emotion Recognition Ability among Primary School Children: Relationships with Peer Status and Friendship Quality. Child Ind Res 12, 1369–1388 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12187-018-9590-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12187-018-9590-z