PENETRATING THE SOCIAL FRONT: A DEVELOPMENTAL ANALYSIS OF EMOTIONAL DECODING ABILITY (EMPATHY DEVELOPMENT, EMOTION SOCIALIZATION, DEVELOPMENTAL SOCIAL COGNITION)

In this research, a social-cognitive analysis was applied to the process of understanding "regulated" emotional expression (display rules). The model proposed that children's capacities to understand an "emotional front," and infer another's private experience would reveal qualitative changes over the course of cognitive development, related to the core socio-cognitive process of perspective-taking, intersubjective social knowledge, and an affective variable, emotional responsivity. The relationship between parental regulation of emotional expression and their children's level of emotional reasoning was also investigated, as well as how children evaluate the act of emotion regulation.;Results indicated that children by age eleven were quite accurate at discounting salient overt cues to infer internal experience. Seven year olds accepted overt emotional presentations as veridical; nine year olds identified underlying affect, but had little notion of rationales for expression regulation. Age changes were revealed on all the model's independent indices; Perspective-Taking and Social Knowledge (Picture Arrangement) directly predicted emotional decoding ability (EDA). Emotional responsivity ("affective" empathy) was positively associated with EDA for females, but negatively associated for males. Child Norm Scale related to the other socio-cognitive measures, and predicted Perspective-Taking level.;Older children's emotional expression was found to be regulated by parents more than younger children; familial expressivity was tentatively associated with higher child emotional reasoning. Answer certainty decreased developmentally; positive pretense was harder to decode than negative. Overall, females generated the most favorable evaluations of the "regulating actor"; the control vignettes yielded higher evaluations than the regulated expression vignettes. Understanding increased regard for the actor on positive pretense vignettes but decreased regard on negative pretense vignettes. Females were more tolerant of "face-saving" behavior than males. Results support the view that emotional displays are powerful social cues and that middle school children are capable of a sophisticated diagnostic judgment process.;First, third, and fifth graders (N = 100) were administered hypothetic vignettes involving the substitution, exaggeration and minimization of positive and negative affect, as well as direct expression vignettes (controls). Selman's Perspective-Taking interview, Bryant's Empathy Index, and two indices of social norm knowledge were also administered. Parents were mailed Saarni's Parent Attitude Toward Child Expressiveness Scale (PACES).