Concepts of emotion in institutionalized children

Institutionalized children of 7, 11 and 15 years of age were interviewed with regard to their concept of emotion. Questions were posed pertaining to the identification of emotion, the effects of emotion on other psychological processes, and the strategies by which both the display and experience of emotion may be regulated. The results of this study were analysed together with those from an earlier study conducted by Harris, Olthof and Meerum Terwogt (1981) in which non-institutionalized schoolchildren were interviewed. The institutionalized children show the same general (development) shift in their conception of emotions, albeit in a delayed fashion in some cases, as was found in the earlier study for the non-institutionalized schoolchildren. That is to say, whereas the youngest children focus on the publicly observable components of an emotion, the older children also take the hidden mental aspect of an emotion into consideration. The institutionalized children differ from the non-institutionalized children in that they claim to be less attentive to their own emotions as well as those of others; they do not consider it feasible to actually change an emotion; and they consider the effect of emotions to be more detrimental. These results are discussed in terms of a learned helplessness explanation.