Emotion Expression in Children's Peer Interaction

Julie A. Hubbard

Duke University

The goal of the current study was to examine the nature of children's emotion expression during peer interaction, with a focus on sociometric status differences, level of aggressiveness differences, and gender differences. Subjects were 111 African-American children in the second grade. These children were divided between children of rejected and average sociometric status, between children considered aggressive and non-aggressive by their peers, and between boys and girls.

Children's emotion expression was observed using a paradigm in which participants interacted with a same-sex, slightly older confederate in a game-playing situation that was videotaped. Interactions were designed to evoke emotional arousal (losing a game and a prize, playing with a confederate who cheated). Emotion expression was assessed with facial, verbal intonation, and nonverbal emotional expression coding procedures. In all three procedures, happy, sad, and angry emotions were coded. Following the interactions, subjects were interviewed regarding: 1) their social-versus-instrumental goal orientation, 2) their emotional experience, and 3) their emotional expression.

Rejected children expressed both happiness and anger to a greater extent than average children, across facial, verbal intonation, and nonverbal modalities. This pattern of emotion expression suggests greater expressed arousal across both positive and negative emotions, rather than emotion expression that is specific to negatively valenced affect.

Rejected children endorsed the instrumental goal of winning the game over the social goal of being liked by the game partner more than average status children. This finding suggests that rejected children may have felt less motivation than average children to regulate the expression of their emotions.

Boys expressed more anger than girls across all three modalities, while girls expressed more facial sadness than boys. Using an attributional theory of emotion, these findings suggest that boys actively try to influence the course of the game, while girls more passively accept that they are going to lose.