Emotion Recognition in Preterm and Full-Term School-Age Children

Area of Science:

• Developmental Psychology
• Neuroscience
• Child Psychiatry

Background:

• Children born preterm (<37 weeks’ gestation) exhibit heightened vulnerability to socio-emotional challenges.
• Difficulties in socio-emotional development can increase the risk of behavioral and psychiatric issues later in life.
• Accurate decoding of facial emotional signals is crucial for early social interaction and understanding others' intentions.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate differences in emotion recognition between preterm and full-term children.
• To explore the relationship between emotion recognition abilities and socio-emotional skills in children.
• To examine the link between emotion recognition and problem behaviors in everyday activities.

Main Methods:

• Assessed 55 school-age children (34 preterm, 21 full-term) using a cognitive battery for comparable abilities.
• Administered an Emotion Recognition Task involving identifying emotional expressions from peers' faces.
• Utilized parent-reported questionnaires to assess children's emotional, social, and behavioral outcomes.

Main Results:

• Preterm children demonstrated lower accuracy in detecting positive emotional expressions compared to full-term children.
• Preterm children exhibited poorer social and behavioral outcomes.
• Correlational analyses revealed a significant association between emotion recognition ability and socio-emotional functioning.

Conclusions:

• Early difficulties in decoding facial emotional signals are critically linked to emotional and behavioral regulation problems in preterm children.
• Impaired emotion recognition in preterm children has significant implications for social skill development and interpersonal interactions.
• Interventions targeting emotion recognition may be beneficial for improving socio-emotional outcomes in children born preterm.