Emotion-specific recognition biases and how they relate to emotion-specific recognition accuracy, family and child demographic factors, and social behaviour.

Abstract

The errors young children make when recognising others' emotions may be systematic over-identification biases and may partially explain the challenges some have socially. These biases and associations may be differential by emotion. In a sample of 871 ethnically and racially diverse preschool-aged children (i.e. 33-68 months; 49% Hispanic/Latine, 52% Children of Colour), emotion recognition was assessed, and scores for accuracy and bias were calculated by emotion (i.e. anger, sad, happy, calm, and fear). Child and family characteristics and teacher-reported social behaviour were also collected. Multilevel structural equation modelling revealed emotion-specific recognition accuracies varied between 36 and 65% whereas biases varied between 4 and 13%. Anger was the strongest bias followed by sad, happy, fear, and calm, in contrast to the pattern for accuracy - happy, sad, angry, fear, and calm. More variance was explained in emotion-specific recognition accuracies by child and family characteristics - 7-38% - than biases - 3-7%. Negatively-valanced emotion recognition biases associated with positively-valanced accuracies, and positively-valued emotion recognition biases associated with negatively-valued accuracies. Biases did not have meaningful associations with social behaviour. This study highlights that children's emotion recognition errors may partially be systematic, but future studies are needed to understand the underlying cognitive mechanisms.