Emotion Comprehension: The Impact of Nonverbal Intelligence

Abstract

A substantial body of research has established that emotion understanding develops throughout early childhood and has identified three hierarchical developmental phases: external, mental, and reflexive. The authors analyzed nonverbal intelligence and its effect on children's improvement of emotion understanding and hypothesized that cognitive level is a consistent predictor of emotion comprehension. In all, 366 children (182 girls, 184 boys) between the ages of 3 and 10 years were tested using the Test of Emotion Comprehension and the Coloured Progressive Matrices. The data obtained by using the path analysis model revealed that nonverbal intelligence was statistically associated with the ability to recognize emotions in the 3 developmental phases. The use of this model showed the significant effect that cognitive aspect plays on the reflexive phase. The authors aim to contribute to the debate about the influence of cognitive factors on emotion understanding.

Emotion understanding in preschool children

“…An alternate hypothesis is that script components that are first mastered throughout development may not be related with IQ, but script components associated with higher representational demands may be so. For example, Albanese et al (2010) found that nonverbal intelligence did not predict external components of emotion understanding that included, as in our study, attributions regarding external causes of emotion, but it did predict mental (e.g., beliefs) and reflective (e.g., moral emotions) components. Furthermore, Montirosso et al (2010) found that IQ was not associated with facial expression recognition in 4-18-year-olds.…”

“…Montirosso, Peverelli, Frigerio, Crespi, & Borgatti, 2010). Nonverbal intelligence was recently found to predict several key aspects of emotion understanding (Albanese, De Stasio, Di Chiacchio, Fiorilli, & Pons, 2010). Thus, processes that are central to analytical intelligence, such as the ability to address novelty, and the ability to reason and to solve problems involving new information may help children identify the right emotional cues that represent and communicate the emotion present in an emotional task (Albanese et al, 2010).…”

“…Therefore, the focus of the present investigation was to study the relation between EFs and emotion understanding whilst controlling for the effect of child's IQ, language, and ToM. IQ and language were controlled not only because these variables have long been known to be related with emotion understanding (Albanese et al, 2010;Ornaghi & Grazzani, 2013;Pons et al, 2003;Sullivan et al, 2008) but also because of their relation with EFs. IQ tests assess a diverse range of cognitive competences, some of which are related to problem solving competencies (Wechsler, 2003).…”

Desenvolvimento da Compreensão Emocional

“…Os principais resultados mostraram que, em cada modelo testado, a componente cognitiva não-verbal não tornou-se significativa depois de entrar a idade na equação. As crianças apresentam uma clara melhoria com a idade em cada componente da compreensão (Albanese et al, 2010). Um aumento no pensamento analítico pode melhorar a capacidade de representação nos aspetos mais complexos de compreensão da emoção.…”

The Relationship between Emotion Comprehension and Internalizing and Externalizing Behavior in 7- to 10-Year-Old Children

“…In accordance with these findings, training studies confirm the positive effect of explicit emotion state talk on emotion comprehension (e.g., Pons et al, 2003; Gavazzi and Ornaghi, 2011). Additionally, factors like the socioeconomic status, the quality of attachment between family members, or non-verbal intelligence scores have been identified as positive predictors of emotion comprehension (Meins and Fernyhough, 1999; Albanese et al, 2010; Colle and Del Giudice, 2011). …”