Related Experiment Video
Updated: Oct 25, 2025
08:09
Psychophysiological Assessment of the Effectiveness of Emotion Regulation Strategies in Childhood
Published on: February 11, 2017
11.7K
Children's emotion recognition and aggression: A multi-cohort longitudinal study
Erinn L Acland1,2, Marc Jambon1,2, Tina Malti1,2
1Department of Psychology, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada.
Aggressive Behavior
|August 9, 2021
Summary
Children’s difficulty recognizing negative emotions (NEs) is linked to aggression. Both NE insensitivity and misspecifications uniquely predict overt aggression in children, not general externalizing problems.
Area of Science:
- Child Psychology
- Developmental Psychology
- Behavioral Science
Background:
- Difficulty recognizing negative emotions (NEs) in children is associated with externalizing problems.
- Key aspects of this relationship, including specificity to aggression and developmental changes, remain unclear.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the association between NE recognition and externalizing problems in children.
- To determine if NE recognition specifically relates to aggression versus other externalizing issues like ADHD and ODD.
- To examine the roles of NE insensitivity and misspecifications in aggression and how these relationships evolve developmentally.
Main Methods:
- Assessed emotion recognition, overt aggression, ADHD symptoms, and ODD symptoms in Canadian children aged 4 and 8.
- Followed up with participants one year later.
- Utilized a behavioral task for emotion recognition and caregiver reports for externalizing symptoms.
Main Results:
- Lower NE recognition was linked to higher initial overt aggression, but not subsequent aggression.
- NE recognition was not associated with nonaggressive externalizing symptoms (ADHD, ODD) concurrently or longitudinally.
- Both NE insensitivity and misspecifications were significantly associated with higher concurrent overt aggression.
Conclusions:
- NE insensitivity and misspecifications are uniquely important predictors of children's overt aggression.
- Findings emphasize the importance of distinguishing between aggressive and nonaggressive externalizing problems.
- The study highlights the significance of specific deficits in NE recognition for understanding childhood aggression.
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