Abstract
This study explores the associations between exposure to domestic violence and children's ability to identify and express emotions. One hundred twenty children, 60 from families whose mothers had experienced violence in the last year, participated in a story-telling task in which they were shown pictures and asked to describe what each character was feeling. Responses were coded for positive emotions, negative emotions, affiliative emotions, non-affiliative emotions, and the level of sophistication of emotions used in the stories. In general, subjects attributed more emot ions to child characters in their stories than to adult figures. Subjects expressed negative emotions more frequently than positive emotions in their stories, and they expressed more nonaffiliative than affiliative emotions. While age and gender did not affect the overall quantity of emotion words appearing in children's stories, these variables did relate to the types of emotions expressed. Analyses of variance showed that children from violent families were significantly less likely to identify and express affiliative, or relational, emotions, compared to children from nonviolent families. This finding suggests that the experience of family violence may inhibit children's ability to express affiliative emotions in an interpersonal context.
