Children's Sensitivity to Facial Emotional Expressions: The Mediating Roles of Maternal Warmth and Home Environment

Abstract

Children's ability to recognize emotions in the facial expressions of others is critical for their social functioning and self-regulation. Children exposed to adversity often show differences in their ability to recognize emotions. However, most prior research has relied on clinical or high-risk samples and focused on exposure to extreme forms of adversity, such as child maltreatment or serious deprivation. The present study utilized data from the Environmental Risk (E-Risk) Longitudinal Twin Study, an epidemiological cohort of 2232 British twins, to test whether (1) children growing up in households with lower versus higher socioeconomic status (SES) are less sensitive in their identification of emotions, controlling for child intelligence quotient (IQ) and sex, and, if so, (2) differences in parenting and household environment (maternal warmth, negative parenting, orderly homes, polyvictimization, or maternal depression) across lower versus higher SES households explains these differences. Results indicated that children living in higher versus lower-income households were more sensitive in identifying a range of facial emotions, even after accounting for child IQ and sex. Maternal warmth and the state of the children's homes, but not other factors, mediated this association. Additional within-family analyses showed that children whose mothers expressed more warmth when describing them, as compared to their same-sex twin, were also more sensitive to the recognition of negative emotions. Future research is needed to test whether enhanced maternal warmth or home environments can lead to improved emotion recognition among children.

Summary

• Children growing up in households with higher versus lower socioeconomic status (SES) are more sensitive in their identification of emotions, controlling for intelligence quotient (IQ) and sex.
• Maternal warmth and the state of the children's homes explained this association. Childhood victimization was not associated with children's abilty to recognize emotions after controlling for sex and IQ.
• Within-family analyses showed that children whose mothers expressed more warmth when describing them, as compared to their same sex co-twin, were more sensitive to the recognition of negative emotions.