Acland Erinn L, Peplak Joanna, Suri Anjali, Malti Tina
Department of Psychology, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada.
Centre for Child Development, Mental Health, and Policy, University of Toronto Mississauga, Toronto, Canada.
Dev Psychopathol. 2023 Apr 11:1-12. doi: 10.1017/S0954579423000342.
Difficulty recognizing negative emotions is linked to aggression in children. However, it remains unclear how certain types of emotion recognition (insensitivities vs. biases) are associated with functions of aggression and whether these relations change across childhood. We addressed these gaps in two diverse community samples (study 1: aged 4 and 8; = 300; study 2: aged 5 to 13, = 374). Across studies, children performed a behavioral task to assess emotion recognition (sad, fear, angry, and happy facial expressions) while caregivers reported children's overt proactive and reactive aggression. Difficulty recognizing fear (especially in early childhood) and sadness was associated with greater proactive aggression. Insensitivity to anger - perceiving angry faces as showing no emotion - was associated with increased proactive aggression, especially in middle-to-late childhood. Additionally, greater happiness bias - mistaking negative emotions as being happy - was consistently related to higher reactive aggression only in early childhood. Together, difficulty recognizing negative emotions was related to proactive aggression, however, the strength of these relations varied based on the type of emotion and developmental period assessed. Alternately, difficulty determining emotion valence was related to reactive aggression in early childhood. These findings demonstrate that distinct forms of emotion recognition are important for understanding functions of aggression across development.
难以识别负面情绪与儿童的攻击行为有关。然而，目前尚不清楚某些类型的情绪识别（不敏感与偏差）如何与攻击行为的功能相关联，以及这些关系在整个童年时期是否会发生变化。我们在两个不同的社区样本中解决了这些空白（研究1：4岁和8岁；n = 300；研究2：5至13岁，n = 374）。在各项研究中，孩子们执行了一项行为任务来评估情绪识别（悲伤、恐惧、愤怒和高兴的面部表情），而照顾者报告了孩子们明显的主动和反应性攻击行为。难以识别恐惧（尤其是在幼儿期）和悲伤与更强的主动攻击行为有关。对愤怒不敏感——将愤怒的面孔视为没有情绪——与主动攻击行为的增加有关，尤其是在童年中后期。此外，更大的快乐偏差——将负面情绪误认为是快乐——仅在幼儿期与更高的反应性攻击行为始终相关。总之，难以识别负面情绪与主动攻击行为有关，然而，这些关系的强度因所评估的情绪类型和发育阶段而异。另外，难以确定情绪效价与幼儿期的反应性攻击行为有关。这些发现表明，不同形式的情绪识别对于理解整个发育过程中攻击行为的功能很重要。
