Teachers’ Beliefs About Children’s Anger and Skill in Recognizing Children’s Anger Expressions

Abstract

Everyday beliefs often organize and guide motivations, goals, and behaviors, and, as such, may also differentially motivate individuals to value and attend to emotion-related cues of others. In this way, the beliefs that individuals hold may affect the socioemotional skills that they develop. To test the role of emotion-related beliefs specific to anger, we examined an educational context in which beliefs could vary and have implications for individuals' skill. Specifically, we studied 43 teachers' beliefs about students' anger in the school setting as well as their ability to recognize expressions of anger in children's faces in a dynamic emotion recognition task. Results revealed that, even when controlling for teachers' age and gender, teachers' belief that children's anger was useful and valuable in the school setting was associated with teachers' accuracy at recognizing anger expressions in children's faces. The belief that children's anger was harmful and not conducive to learning, however, was not associated with teachers' accuracy at recognizing children's anger expressions. These findings suggest that certain everyday beliefs matter for predicting skill in recognizing specific emotion-related cues.

PerCEIVED: Perceptions of children’s emotions in videos, evolving and dynamic task.

“…First, studies using the pilot version of this measure with adult faces have demonstrated expected associations with other measures of emotion recognition and knowledge (Castro, Halberstadt, & Garrett-Peters, 2016), the typical gender difference of girls performing more accurately than boys (Rehder et al, 2017), higher scores for second-grade children thought to be typically developing compared to children with conduct problems and callous/unemotional behaviors (Rehder et al, 2017), and longitudinal effects of hyperactivity on emotion recognition (Castro, Cooke, et al, 2018). Second, teachers who report valuing children’s anger in educational settings also demonstrated anger accuracy on the PerCEIVED task (Hagan et al, 2020). Third, with regard to emotion bias, studies have focused on anger and the degree to which misperception of anger is differentially imposed on Black compared to White faces; this phenomenon has now been verified in the similar measure with adult faces (Halberstadt et al, 2018), as well as the PerCEIVED task with child faces and in several studies with various populations (Cooke, 2020; Halberstadt et al, 2020).…”

“…This sample included 43 fourth- and fifth-grade teachers participating in a larger study (see also Hagan et al, 2020). Teachers received $40 compensation for their time (IRB #11681).…”

Lay perspectives on emotion: past, present, and future research directions

“…One growing and exciting area of emotion perspectives research involves the emotion perspectives that individuals have of others' emotions. Except for research on parents' and teachers' beliefs about children's emotions (e.g., Hagan et al, 2020;Halberstadt et al, 2013), this is a relatively understudied area of emotion perspectives research, notably with regard to beliefs concerning emotion malleability/controllability which is otherwise a robust area of study. In the current special issue, Smith and colleagues present research that addresses these gaps in the literature to examine if there is a potential cost to holding stronger beliefs in the controllability of emotion, and specifically controllability beliefs about others' emotions (Smith et al, 2023).…”

Socialization of Knowing How to Feel through the Epew in Mapuche Culture: Guidelines for Early Childhood Education

“…These recursive processes of action-internalization and the representation of emotion are articulated in daily socialization activities and early childhood education, both in institutionalized education [4,5] (notably preschools) and in family education [6]. These spaces of formal and informal education transmit norms-explicitly or implicitly-that indicate emotional guidelines expressed in language about what is expected or desirable in a social context, which are then culturally reinforced [7].…”