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Facial emotion recognition in adopted children
Amy L Paine1, Stephanie H M van Goozen2, Daniel T Burley2
1School of Psychology, Cardiff University, Tower Building, 70 Park Place, Cardiff, CF10 3AT, UK. paineal@cardiff.ac.uk.
European Child & Adolescent Psychiatry
|July 6, 2021
Summary
Adopted children show poorer emotion recognition, particularly for sad and angry faces. Early adversity did not hinder, but warm parenting improved, their emotional identification and behavior.
Area of Science:
- Developmental Psychology
- Child Psychiatry
- Adoption Studies
Background:
- Children adopted from public care often exhibit higher rates of emotional and behavioral difficulties.
- Emotion recognition deficits may contribute to these adverse outcomes in adopted children.
- Understanding these deficits is crucial for targeted interventions.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate emotion recognition (discrimination accuracy and response bias) in adopted children.
- To examine associations between emotion recognition, early adversity, and psychological adjustment.
- To explore the role of adoptive parenting warmth in emotion recognition and behavior.
Main Methods:
- A mixed-method, multi-informant study involving 4-to-8-year-old adopted children (N=42) and a matched comparison group (N=42).
- Emotion recognition tasks assessed discrimination accuracy and response bias for facial emotions.
- Data collected included pre-adoptive adversity (cumulative adverse childhood experiences), parent/teacher-rated emotional/behavioral problems, and parent-child interaction warmth.
Main Results:
- Adopted children demonstrated significantly lower accuracy in discriminating sad and angry facial emotions compared to non-adopted peers.
- Poorer discrimination of scared/neutral faces correlated with higher parent-reported behavioral problems.
- Better discrimination of angry/scared faces linked to fewer parent/teacher-reported emotional problems.
- Higher pre-adoptive adversity was unexpectedly associated with greater accuracy in identifying negative emotions.
- Warmer adoptive parenting correlated with fewer behavioral issues and less misidentification of angry faces.
Conclusions:
- Adopted children exhibit specific deficits in facial emotion recognition, particularly for negative emotions like sadness and anger.
- Emotion recognition skills are linked to behavioral and emotional problems, but the relationship with early adversity is complex.
- Supportive adoptive parenting appears to mitigate some behavioral challenges and influence emotion recognition biases.
- Findings highlight the need for interventions to enhance emotion recognition skills in adopted children to improve psychological adjustment.
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