By Katelyn Tran, Undergraduate Research Assistant, Duke University
The ability to recognize emotions in the facial expressions of others is a critical skill that shapes children’s relationships, social interactions, and capacity to regulate behavior. Yet, different home environments can prevent children from developing this ability equality, creating lasting disparity.
In a newly completed study, a team of researchers led by Dr. Helen Milojevich at Duke’s Center for Child and Family Policy has found that the children’s household socioeconomic status (SES) was associated with their emotion recognition sensitivity. Overall, children from families with higher SES identify facial emotions slightly faster than those from lower SES families, influenced by warmer caregiving and more organized home environments.
As Dr. Milojevich explains, prior research has largely focused on extreme forms of adversity rather than socioeconomic differences. She notes that “there is an extensive literature documenting differences in emotion recognition based on adversity exposure--specifically, maltreated children tend to show deficits in emotion recognition relative to non-maltreated children.”
However, Milojevich emphasizes that “these previous studies have used clinical or high-risk samples of children and less is known about how adversity may influence the development of children’s emotion recognition across the SES spectrum.” This study aimed to address this gap by examining emotion recognition across a broad spectrum of family backgrounds.
The Environment Risk (E-Risk) Longitudinal Twin Study followed twin children in the United Kingdom from early childhood to adolescence at ages 5, 7, 10, and 12. The cohort was composed of varying socioeconomic statuses and home environments, studying their progress through home visits. At age 10, the children completed an emotion recognition task that measured how accurately they could identify varying facial expressions such as happiness, sadness, fear and anger at different levels of intensity.
Milojevich and her team also measured additional factors to account for a range of home environments that could influence emotional development over time. These factors included polyvictimization, maternal warmth, orderly home, negative parenting, maternal depression, and child IQ.
The results indicated that children from higher-income homes possessed greater emotion recognition sensitivity skills than those from lower- and middle-SES households. Furthermore, maternal warmth and orderly homes most significantly contributed to children’s recognition of negative emotions, indicating that structured and predictable home environments provide the stability necessary for children to develop their emotion recognition.
Notably, the study challenged findings drawn from previous high-risk research.
"Contrary to prior studies drawn from high-risk samples (e.g., maltreated children), we did not observe a robust association between victimization during childhood and emotion recognition,” said Dr. Milojevich. "In this representative sample, there was no evidence that maltreatment was associated with children’s ability to recognize facial emotional expressions after accounting for child IQ and sex.” Instead, broader aspects of children’s everyday home environments appeared to play a more significant role.
Together, these findings demonstrate the importance of early, preventative intervention for parents and caregivers before issues arise. They call for federal policies that promote positive parenting through centralized programs to cultivate equitable emotional development outcomes across socioeconomic groups.
Looking ahead, Dr. Milojevich and her team plan to investigate the long-term implications of these emotion recognition differences. The team is planning a study now to examine how emotion recognition at age 10 predicts mental health at age 18. They hope to determine if the differences in emotion recognition ability across SES explains the higher rates of mental health problems in lower SES children.
