Comprehension of emotion

Emotion comprehension (EC) is known to be a key correlate and predictor of prosociality from early childhood. In the present study, we examined this relationship within the broad theoretical construct of social understanding which includes a number of socio-emotional skills, as well as cognitive and linguistic abilities. Theory of mind, especially false-belief understanding, has been found to be positively correlated with both EC and prosocial orientation. Similarly, language ability is known to play a key role in children’s socio-emotional development. The combined contribution of false-belief understanding and language to explaining the relationship between EC and prosociality has yet to be investigated. Thus, in the current study, we conducted an in-depth exploration of how preschoolers’ false-belief understanding and language ability each contribute to modeling the relationship between children’s comprehension of emotion and their disposition to act prosocially toward others, after controlling for age and gender. Participants were 101 4- to 6-year-old children (54% boys), who were administered measures of language ability, false-belief understanding, EC and prosocial orientation. Multiple mediation analysis of the data suggested that false-belief understanding and language ability jointly and fully mediated the effect of preschoolers’ EC on their prosocial orientation. Analysis of covariates revealed that gender exerted no statistically significant effect, while age had a trivial positive effect. Theoretical and practical implications of the findings are discussed.

Roazzi, A., Dias, M. B. B., Minervino, C. M., Roazzi, M. & Pons, F. (2009). Children´s comprehension of emotion: A cross-cultural investigation. In: D. Elizur & E. Yaniv. (Orgs.), Theory Construction and Multivariate Analysis: Applications of Facet Approach (pp. 83-102). Jerusalem: FTA. https://goo.gl/MmGzWm  DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.1.2790.3600
Abstract: A sample of 396 children balanced for sex and type of school - 42,2% from a state school and 57,8%  from a private school; 44,2% males and 55,8 % females) aged from 4 to 12 years - were individually tested at the Test of Emotion Comprehension (TEC) to assess their understanding of nine aspects of emotions. An SSA of the ordination of the scores in the nine components was computed in order to analyze the interrelationship between these two brazilian groups with three other groups: british, italian, and quéchua. Several similarities were observed between brazilian children and the other 3 groups, notwithstanding the fact that state school children presented strong discrepancies in 4 of the nine components of the TEC when compared with the british group. This discrepancy of the state school group is clearly depicted in the SSA plot indicating similarities and differences of these groups with the other children’s groups.  Implications of these findings for better comprehending the performance of children from different culture and social background in the  TEC is discussed.