Tedra A. Walden

How I feel: a self-report measure of emotional arousal and regulation for children.

This article details the development and preliminary validation of a multidimensional self-report measure of emotion for 8- to 12-year-old children--the How I Feel (HIF). Item generation and selection occurred via 2 pilot administrations (ns = 250 and 378, respectively). Ten experts provided data on content validity. Exploratory factor analysis and subsequent confirmatory factor analysis with samples of 406, 524, 349, and 349 3rd-through 6th-grade children supported a 3-factor model, including the frequency and intensity of (a) positive emotion, (b) negative emotion, and (c) positive and negative emotion control. Results showed moderate longitudinal stability for 120 children over 2 years. Concurrent validity was established. The HIF can be useful in understanding the interplay between arousal and control in social-emotional adjustment in school-age children.

Understanding Feelings and Coping with Emotional Situations: A Comparison of Maltreated and Nonmaltreated Preschoolers

The effects of maltreatment on childen’s emotion knowledge (e.g., recognition of facial cues for happy, sad, mad, scared, and surprised expressions), parent- and teacher-rated social and expressive behavior (e.g., aspects of emotion regulation such as emotional intensity, regulation of emotionally-driven behavior, and classroom social competence with peers such as conflict management), and hypothetical social problem-solving skills were examined in a sample of 45 preschool-aged, predominantly African-American preschoolers. Comparisons between maltreated, high-risk, and low-risk groups revealed no reliable differences in emotion knowledge, but several significant differences in hypothetical social problem-solving skills and in parent- and teacher-rated social and expressive behavior. Specifically, maltreated children were rated high on negative emotionality and emotional support-seeking at school, and they were rated low on support-seeking at home, instrumental action at home, problem-focused social problem-solving strategies, and conflict management. In general, teachers rated maltreated children as the least competent, low-risk children as intermediate, and high-risk children as the most competent.

Dual Diathesis-Stressor Model of Emotional and Linguistic Contributions to Developmental Stuttering

This study assessed emotional and speech-language contributions to childhood stuttering. A dual diathesis-stressor framework guided this study, in which both linguistic requirements and skills, and emotion and its regulation, are hypothesized to contribute to stuttering. The language diathesis consists of expressive and receptive language skills. The emotion diathesis consists of proclivities to emotional reactivity and regulation of emotion, and the emotion stressor consists of experimentally manipulated emotional inductions prior to narrative speaking tasks. Preschool-age children who do and do not stutter were exposed to three emotion-producing overheard conversations—neutral, positive, and angry. Emotion and emotion-regulatory behaviors were coded while participants listened to each conversation and while telling a story after each overheard conversation. Instances of stuttering during each story were counted. Although there was no main effect of conversation type, results indicated that stuttering in preschool-age children is influenced by emotion and language diatheses, as well as coping strategies and situational emotional stressors. Findings support the dual diathesis-stressor model of stuttering.

The Effect of Context and Age on Social Referencing.

The present study investigated social referencing in 2 settings, familiar child-care centers and an unfamiliar university laboratory. 48 children from 6 to 40 months, divided into 3 age groups (6-12, 13-23, and 24-40 months), participated with 1 parent. Looking at parents varied with age and setting. Younger children looked more often when parents expressed positive reactions, whereas middle children looked more at fearful expressions, and the oldest children looked equally at positive and fearful expressions. Children looked at their parents sooner and were more involved with parents in the child-care setting. Behavioral regulation--less play with the fearful-message than the positive-message toy--was observed in both settings. Affect was not influenced by setting and showed regulation only for the oldest children. These results indicate that some effects of social referencing, such as behavior regulation, may be generalizable across some settings, but that parent proximity and looking at parents are sensitive to the context in which referencing occurs.

Emotional Reactivity, Regulation and Childhood Stuttering: A Behavioral and Electrophysiological Study

UNLABELLED The purpose of this preliminary study was to assess whether behavioral and psychophysiological correlates of emotional reactivity and regulation are associated with developmental stuttering, as well as determine the feasibility of these methods in preschool-age children. Nine preschool-age children who stutter (CWS) and nine preschool-age children who do not stutter (CWNS) listened to brief background conversations conveying happy, neutral, and angry emotions (a resolution conversation followed the angry conversation), then produced narratives based on a text-free storybook. Electroencephalograms (EEG) recorded during listening examined cortical correlates of emotional reactivity and regulation. Speech disfluencies and observed emotion regulation were measured during a narrative immediately after each background conversation. Results indicated that decreased use of regulatory strategies is related to more stuttering in children who stutter. However, no significant differences were found in EEG measurements of emotional reactivity and regulation between CWS and CWNS or between emotion elicitation conditions. Findings were taken to suggest that use of regulatory strategies may relate to the fluency of preschool-age childrens speech-language output. LEARNING OUTCOMES The reader will be able to (1) describe emotional reactivity and regulation processes, (2) discuss evidence for or against the relations of emotional reactivity, regulation and stuttering, (3) understand how multiple measures can be used to measure emotional reactivity and regulation.

PROCODER: a professional tape control, coding, and analysis system for behavioral research using videotape

PROCODER is a software system for observing and coding events that have been recorded on videotape. The system uses a personal-computer-based tape controller to control a VHS tape while observations are recorded. Frequencies of events, durations of events, and calculations of inter-observer agreement of events or intervals are included. Data can be output in ASCII format for use with other statistical programs. A sample study in which the system is used is described as well.

Developmental trends in emotion understanding among a diverse sample of African-American preschool children

The contributions of age and cognitive-language skills to childrens emotion understanding (e.g., recognition of facial expression and understanding of contextual cues for five basic emotions: happy, sad, mad, scared, and surprised; as well as childrens application of their understanding of emotions to hypothetical situations requiring them to cope with maternal anger) were examined in a sample of 45 preschool-aged African-American children. These children came from diverse SES and parenting backgrounds, with a heavy concentration of the sample from disadvantaged homes. The results were similar to studies of Caucasian children. Specifically, the results indicated that both age and cognitive-language skills contribute to childrens emotional understanding. However, the contribution of age to emotion understanding was more consistent than the contribution of cognitive-language skills. Judgments of anger showed an age-related increase in accuracy in the contextual cue condition but not in the facial cue condition. Compared to other samples, children in this study were fairly accurate at judging and identifying fear. The results are discussed in terms of parent emotion socialization practices and implications for childrens emotional development.

Better Working Memory for Non-Social Targets in Infant Siblings of Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder.

We compared working memory (WM) for the location of social versus non-social targets in infant siblings of children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (sibs-ASD, n = 25) and of typically developing children (sibs-TD, n = 30) at 6.5 and 9 months of age. There was a significant interaction of risk group and target type on WM, in which the sibs-ASD had better WM for non-social targets as compared with controls. There was no group by stimulus interaction on two non-memory measures. The results suggest that the increased competency of sibs-ASD in WM (creating, updating and using transient representations) for non-social stimuli distinguishes them from sibs-TD by 9 months of age. This early emerging strength is discussed as a developmental pathway that may have implications for social attention and learning in children at risk for ASD.

Production and Perception of Facial Expressions in Infancy and Early Childhood

Publisher Summary Facial expressions are a major channel of interpersonal communication. They occupy a unique role in the understanding and regulation of interpersonal interactions because the face is often impossible to conceal and difficult to control. Moreover, facial expressions may convey underlying affect more readily than the more easily manipulated verbal expressions. This chapter reviews examples from the adult literature that have provided many of the questions and paradigms for researchers of infant and child facial expressions. It presents examples of infant and child research relevant to the developmental questions suggested by the adult literature. A series of infant and preschool studies in which it assessed relationships between production and perception of facial expressions are described. The chapter presents a developmental model that may integrate these studies and the existing literature.

Influence of Stuttering Variation on Talker Group Classification in Preschool Children: Preliminary Findings.

UNLABELLED The purpose of this study was to investigate whether variations in disfluencies of young children who do (CWS) and do not stutter (CWNS) significantly change their talker group classification or diagnosis from stutterer to nonstutterer, and vice versa. Participants consisted of seventeen 3- to 5-year-old CWS and nine 3- to 5-year-old CWNS, with no statistically significant between-group difference in chronological age (CWS: M=45.53 months, S.D.=8.32; CWNS: M=47.67 months, S.D.=6.69). All participants had speech, language, and hearing development within normal limits, with the exception of stuttering for CWS. Both talker groups participated in a series of speaking samples that varied by: (a) conversational partner [parent and clinician], (b) location [home and clinic], and (c) context [conversation and narrative]. The primary dependent measures for this study were the number of stuttering-like disfluencies (SLD) per total number of spoken words [%SLD] and the ratio of SLD to total disfluencies (TD) [SLD/TD]. The results indicated that significant variability of stuttering did not exist as a result of conversational partner or location. Changes in context, however, did impact the CWS, who demonstrated higher SLD/TD in the conversation sample versus a narrative sample. Consistent with hypotheses, CWS and CWNS were accurately identified as stutterers and nonstutterers, respectively, regardless of changes to conversational partner, location or context for the overall participant sample. Present findings were taken to suggest that during assessment, variations in stuttering frequency resulting from changes in conversational partner, location or context do not significantly influence the diagnosis of stuttering, especially for children not on the talker group classification borderline between CWS and CWNS. LEARNING OUTCOMES Readers will be able to: (1) Describe the role of variability in stuttering frequency for young children who stutter; (2) Identify three fundamental measurements of the frequency of stuttering-like and nonstuttering-like disfluencies; (3) Describe the effects of stuttering variation on talker group classification of stuttering or nonstuttering.