The role of maltreatment experience in children's understanding of the antecedents of emotion

Abstract

The ability to understand the causes and likely triggers of emotions has important consequences for children's adaptation to their social environment. Yet, little is currently known about the processes that contribute to the development of emotion understanding. To assess how well children understood the antecedents of emotional reactions in others, we presented children with a variety of emotional situations that varied in outcome and equivocality. Children were told the emotional outcome and asked to rate whether a situation was a likely cause of such an outcome. We tested the effects of maltreatment experience on children's ability to map emotions to their eliciting events and their understanding of emotion–situation pairings. The present data suggest that typically developing children are able to distinguish between common elicitors of negative and positive events. In contrast, children who develop within maltreating contexts, where emotions are extreme and inconsistent, interpret positive, equivocal, and negative events as being equally plausible causes of sadness and anger. This difference in maltreated children's reasoning about emotions suggests a critical role of experience in aiding children's mastery of the structure of interpersonal discourse.

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by NIMH grant MH61285 to SDP and NICHD grant HD37520 to CWK. SBP was supported by a University of Wisconsin Hilldale Undergraduate Research Award.

We gratefully acknowledge the participation and help of the teachers and children at Eagle's Wing Day Care, the University of Wisconsin Preschool Laboratory, and St James School. We also thank Martha Alibali for discussion throughout the process of this project, Anna Bechner for her assistance in testing children, Erik Thiessen for assistance with stimulus production, and Craig Rypstadt for computer programming.

Notes

¹Stimulus items and child ratings are available from the authors.

²This analysis assumes that there is a categorical (rather than continuous) difference between the one-star, rejection, response and the other response options. Some evidence for this interpretation is that two-star ratings were very rare for predictions of happy responses to negative situations (12% of responses for comparison group children, 10% for maltreated). These items reliably evoked a one-star rating (73% for comparison group, 78% for maltreated). In contrast, two-star ratings were relatively infrequent for predictions of happiness following positive events. These predictions generally received three-star ratings (for comparison group, 9% vs. 85%; for maltreated group, 6% vs. 83%). These data, especially when combined with the results from the preliminary study, suggest that participants were interpreting the intermediate rating as intended. This analysis focused on ratings of predictions of happiness because the control and maltreated group children generally agreed on these items. Group differences appeared in ratings of judgements of anger and sadness.

³This analysis does not include the rare instances in which an event was rejected as a cause of any emotion.