Emotion Processing and Social Competence in Head Start Children

Bradley Hospital, Riverside RI

Investigators

Abstract

The project will examine emotion in 4-year-old children attending Head Start. For the most part, the study of emotion has focused on middle class children, a much smaller set of basic information is available for children from poverty backgrounds. Thus, the first aim of this research is to extend what is known about the development of emotion to children from limited income families. The second aim is to measure emotion in several ways, so that coherence among indexes may be evaluated. These assessments will include interviews of children regarding basic emotion knowledge, observation of children to evaluate freely displayed emotions, laboratory assessments to examine emotion coping and response to emotion-eliciting stimuli, assessment of hypothalamic pituitary adrenal (HPA) axis reactivity (baseline cortisol, cortisol reactivity), and assessment of heart rate variability. The third aim is to assess relations between the several measures of emotion and indicators of social competence, with social competence assessed using sociometric techniques and by multiple direct observation of social behavior. One basic hypothesis is there will be modest correspondence among the different measures of child emotion: cognitive understanding of emotion, behavioral expression of emotion, reports of emotion experience, and physiologic indicators of emotion. A second basic hypothesis is that emotion measures will be moderate predictors of social competence, and that degree of prediction will be enhanced by using information from multiple sources. This project will have broad impact in three ways. First, it will inform theory regarding the development of emotion processing in children, particularly limited income children. Second, it will obtain knowledge regarding systems that support learning and school success in young children. Although many low-income children experience environmental challenges, children who are more emotionally skilled may fare better than others in terms of school readiness and subsequent learning. Social competence is likely an important mediator between individual emotion processing and learning performance in classroom environments. Third, it will inform understanding of the development of behavior problems and disorders. Because emotion processing is a core feature of many disorders, such as depression, conduct disorder, oppositional defiant disorder, and anxiety disorders, enhanced understanding of early development of emotion processing could prove useful in developing more effective interventions focused on children's behavioral health.