The importance of both individual differences and dyadic processes in children’s emotion expression

Abstract

Although children display strong individual differences in emotion expression, they also engage in emotional synchrony or reciprocity with interaction partners. To understand this paradox between trait-like and dyadic influences, the goal of the current study was to investigate children’s emotion expression using a Social Relations Model (SRM) approach. Playgroups consisting typically of four same-sex unfamiliar nine-year-old children (N = 202) interacted in a round-robin format (6 dyads per group). Each dyad completed two 5-minute tasks, a challenging frustration task and a cooperative planning task. Observers coded children’s emotions during the tasks (happy, sad, angry, anxious, neutral) on a second-by-second basis. SRM analyses provided substantial evidence of both the trait-like nature of children’s emotion expression (through significant effects for actor variance, multivariate actor-actor correlations, and multivariate intrapersonal correlations) and the dyadic nature of their emotion expression (through significant effects for partner variance, relationship variance, dyadic reciprocity correlations, and multivariate interpersonal correlations).

Acknowledgments

We are sincerely grateful to David A. Kenny for his guidance, support, and instruction as we conducted the Social Relations Model analyses described in this manuscript. We thank the children and families who participated in this research, as well as the research assistants who helped to collect these data. We also gratefully acknowledge the support of child protection agencies in Philadelphia.

Notes

1 The significance of relationship variance could not be determined due to the measurement approach.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by National Institutes of Health grant R01 1MH074374 to Mary Dozier. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.