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Updated: Aug 3, 2025
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Psychophysiological Assessment of the Effectiveness of Emotion Regulation Strategies in Childhood
Published on: February 11, 2017
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Emotion recognition links to reactive and proactive aggression across childhood: A multi-study design
Erinn L Acland1,2,3, Joanna Peplak1,2, Anjali Suri3
1Department of Psychology, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada.
Development and Psychopathology
|April 11, 2023
Summary
Children
Area of Science:
- Developmental Psychology
- Childhood Aggression Research
- Emotion Recognition Studies
Background:
- Difficulty recognizing negative emotions in children is linked to aggression.
- Specific types of emotion recognition deficits (insensitivities vs. biases) and their association with aggression functions remain unclear.
- Developmental changes in these associations across childhood require further investigation.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate how specific emotion recognition difficulties (insensitivities and biases) relate to proactive and reactive aggression in children.
- To examine whether these associations vary across different developmental periods (early, middle, and late childhood).
- To clarify the nuanced relationship between emotion recognition and aggression across childhood.
Main Methods:
- Two diverse community samples of children (aged 4-8 and 5-13) were studied.
- Children completed a behavioral task assessing recognition of facial expressions (sad, fear, angry, happy).
- Caregivers reported on children's proactive and reactive aggression.
Main Results:
- Difficulty recognizing fear and sadness was linked to increased proactive aggression, particularly in early childhood.
- Anger insensitivity (perceiving anger as neutral) correlated with proactive aggression in middle-to-late childhood.
- A happiness bias (mistaking negative emotions for happiness) was associated with reactive aggression in early childhood.
Conclusions:
- Distinct forms of emotion recognition deficits are differentially associated with proactive and reactive aggression across development.
- Understanding specific emotion recognition challenges is crucial for comprehending the developmental trajectory of childhood aggression.
- These findings highlight the importance of emotion recognition skills in regulating aggressive behaviors throughout childhood.
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