A Longitudinal Study of Emotion Recognition and Preschool Children's Social Behavior.

Abstract

Little is known about relations between preschoolers' social behavior and emotion recognition accuracy and bias with familiar classmates, and no study has examined changes in emotion recognition over time. Participants were 90 4-year-old pre schoolers (47 male). Three weeks after preschool began and again 5 months later, children were photographed posing emotional expressions. At each time point classmates were asked to identify the expressions. Social behavior measures in cluded teacher ratings and peer sociometric ratings. Major conclusions were: (a) Recognition biases were more important than recognition accuracy in predicting social behavior, (b) Angry recognition biases negatively influenced social behavior, (c) Recognition biases that are beneficial may vary depending on children's familiar ity. (d) Recognition accuracy is not stable over time.