Children and adolescents’ knowledge of emotion expression and underlying regulation

BACKGROUND Emotions have, in their expression, a communicative function (Ekman, 1997) and, expressing emotions within social interaction can create, maintain or change the quality of relationships with others (Frijda, 1986). An effective emotional competence requires more than recognizing and reacting to emotional expressions. Knowing what has caused an emotion, and the effects of emotion display on social interaction, is important because it places the emotional experience within a sociocultural context. The present study, with reference to developmental changes, tried to understand the motives underlying emotion expression, and emotion regulation that is related to display rules, in negative emotions, i.e., sadness, anger, and fear. METHOD Subjects. Two groups of 7-9 year-old children, and 11-14-year-old adolescents were tested (N=162, males and females). Material and Procedure. Subjects listened to three stories describing situations designed to elicit an emotion in the protagonist, i.e., Sadness (A friend moves to another town), Anger (Broken toy), and Fear (Horror film). The stories involved child-child (or adolescent-adolescent) interactions; the 'recipient' or witness of the main character's emotional reaction to the event was portrayed as a friend of the story protagonist. Subjects answered open questions as if they were the protagonists of the stories. Subjects were asked a) what facial expression they would display in response to each emotionally laden situation, and they answered by pointing to one of seven facial expressions (i.e., happiness, sadness, anger, surprise, fear, disgust, neutral), b) to specify their motive for their selected facial expression in each story, c) to say if they thought their friend expected that they would display the emotion of sadness, fear or anger in the specific circumstance, and, if yes, why, d) to say if their friend could understand what they were actually feeling, although they concealed their real emotion, and, if yes, why. RESULTS Results showed that whereas children and adolescents display a facial expression that conveys the felt emotion in most cases, they are able to regulate the felt emotion, e.g. by concealing the felt emotion and displaying a positive emotion or a neutral expression; children’s regulation was more frequent in the Fear than in the other conditions. The extent to which children engage in emotion-regulation whenever they think that the felt emotion is ‘inappropriate’ in a specific circumstance, varied as a function of (i) the emotion type, (ii) the nature and salience of children’s goals and motives, (iii) the degree of salience of situational antecedent. Age differences for knowledge of display rule were documented. CONCLUSION In sum the results obtained in this study offer experimental support to the hypothesis that children’s emotional competence includes knowledge of social information about the nature of the relationship between the expresser and the recipient of an emotion (Saarni, 1989).