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

Abstract

The influence of internalizing and externalizing problems on children’s understanding of others’ emotions has mainly been investigated on basic levels of emotion comprehension. So far, studies assessing more sophisticated levels of emotion comprehension reported deficits in the ability to understand others’ emotions in children with severe internalizing or externalizing symptoms. The aim of this study was to investigate the relation between emotion comprehension and interindividual differences, with a focus on internalizing and externalizing behavior in children aged 7–10 years from the general population. A sample of 135 children was tested for emotion understanding using the Test of Emotion Comprehension. Information on internalizing and externalizing behavior was assessed with the Child Behavior Checklist 4/18. Age, bilingual upbringing, and amount of paternal working hours were significant control variables for emotion comprehension. In contrast to prior research, overall level of emotion understanding was not related to externalizing symptoms and correlated positively with elevated levels of somatic complaints and anxious/depressed symptoms. In addition, and in line with previous work, higher levels of social withdrawal were associated with worse performance in understanding emotions elicited by reminders. The present results implicate not only an altered understanding of emotions among more specific internalizing symptoms, but also that these alterations occur already on a low symptom level in a community based sample.

Behavioral and Neural Dysregulation to Social Rewards and Links to Internalizing Symptoms in Adolescents

“…Indeed, greater inhibitory failures to social reward relative to social threat cues were associated with greater internalizing symptoms. Youths with greater internalizing symptoms, but not externalizing symptoms, tend to have better emotion comprehension such as understanding of others’ emotions (Göbel et al, 2016). In a social context, adolescents with internalizing symptoms have better identification of happy than angry facial cues (Vanhalst et al, 2017) and have faster reaction times to happy than angry and fearful facial cues in Go/NoGo tasks (Stoycos et al, 2017).…”

REAC Non-invasive Neurobiological Stimulation for Mitigating the Impact of Internalizing Disorders in Autism Spectrum Disorder

“…Internalizing problems are characterized by anxiety, depressive symptoms, social withdrawal, and somatic complaints (Gobel et al, 2016). The scientific literature provides ample support to the fact that the comorbidity of internalizing disorders, such as depression (DeFilippis, 2018;Gegelashvili, 2019), anxiety (Kim et al, 2021;Vasa et al, 2020), and stress-related disorders (Corbett et al, 2021;Taylor et al, 2021), in ASD can affect the deficit severity, symptomatologic expression, and overall quality of life of individuals with ASD.…”

Culture shapes preschoolers’ emotion recognition but not emotion comprehension: a cross-cultural study in Germany and Singapore

“…It has been shown that emotion recognition develops linearly throughout childhood with 3-to 6-year-olds being less accurate than 7-to 10-year-olds, and the latter age group being less accurate than adults (Chronaki et al, 2015;Durand et al, 2007;Juen et al, 2012;Lawrence et al, 2015). Moreover, a large body of research provides evidence that children and adults recognize happy faces best, whereas disgust and fear are usually most difficult to identify (Durand et al, 2007;Gagnon et al, 2010;Griffiths et al, 2015;Juen et al, 2012;Lawrence et al, 2015;Prado et al, 2014;Widen & Russell, 2003).…”