Abstract
Brinton, B., Fujiki, M., Hurst, N. Q., Jones, E. J., & Spackman, M. P. (2015). The ability of children with language impairment to dissemble emotions in hypothetical scenarios and natural situations. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools, 46, 325–336.
Children with language impairment (LI) often have difficulty with emotional understanding. Problems include recognizing emotion expressed on faces (Spackman, Fujiki, & Brinton, 2006), discerning emotion conveyed by prosody (Courtright & Courtright, 1983; Fujiki, Spackman, Brinton, & Illig, 2008; Trauner, Ballantyne, Chase, & Tallal, 1993), and matching prosody with facial expressions of emotion (Boucher, Lewis, & Collis, 2000).
A higher level emotional understanding involves emotion dissemblance, the ability to dissemble, or modify, the expression of emotion for social purposes. This skill can be needed in some social situations, such as when a child receives a gift which he does not like. Preschool children express their disappointment, but 10-year-olds are likely to say, “thank you,” and hide their true feelings. To give this dissembled response, the child must (a) understand that the emotion that he experiences can be different from the one he expresses, (b) anticipate a person’s response to a negative comment, and (c) understand the display rules (social conventions) that govern the appropriate expression of emotion within his culture.
Emotional display rules guide appropriate expression of emotions:
Cultural display rules reflect the norms and expectations of a particular cultural group (e.g., remaining stoic at a funeral as opposed to openly expressing grief).
Personal display rules are related to individual patterns of behavior and experience (e.g., one child may be taught by parents to be candid regardless of the social consequence; another child might be taught to hide emotions to avoid hurting feelings).
Prosocial display rules, which protect the feelings of others (e.g., hiding disappointment when receiving a gift).
Self-protective display rules protect one’s self (e.g., hiding fear to avoid ridicule).
Parents and other adults often provide direction instruction about the proper display of emotion in social situations. In addition to a child’s developing awareness of social expectations, motivational factors dictated by context influence the child’s behavior. For example, researchers found that 7- to 9-year-old children were more likely to tell a prosocial lie when the cost to themselves was low (e.g., when telling a lie to protect another’s feelings did not have a negative personal consequence) as opposed to when the cost was high (e.g., telling a lie to protect another’s feelings resulted in the loss of a desired gift; Popliner, Talwar, & Crossman, 2011).
The purposes of this study were as follows:
To examine children’s judgment of the need to dissemble when presented with hypothetical scenarios.
To examine how children with LI dissembled in more naturalistic scenarios.
The hypothetical scenarios that were presented to the child allowed for a range of dissemblance contexts to be assessed, some of which could not be readily observed naturalistically (e.g., fear-eliciting situations). The naturalistic contexts allowed the researchers to contrast high- and low-cost scenarios in a real way that could not be duplicated with the same emotional impact in a hypothetical scenario. In both conditions, the performance of children with LI was compared with that of their typically developing peers.
The Study
Participants
Twenty-two children with LI and their typically developing peers (7.1–10.11 years) participated in the two tasks. First, participants were presented with hypothetical scenarios in which the main character was exposed to situations that would require dissembling an emotional reaction for social purposes (e.g., receiving a disappointing gift from a grandparent). In the second task, children were presented with four naturally occurring opportunities to dissemble emotion (e.g., receiving a disappointing reward for taking part in the study).
Once children were identified, the Comprehensive Assessment of Spoken Language (CASL; Carrow-Woolfolk, 1999) and the Universal Nonverbal Intelligence Test (UNIT; Bracken & McCallum, 2003) were administered to provide consistent measures of cognitive and language abilities for all participants. All children produced IQ scores at or above 70 and composite language scores more than 1 SD below the mean. Children with LI produced their lowest mean CASL subtest scores on pragmatic judgment and syntax construction. None of the children had a diagnosis of social communication disorder, pragmatic LI, or autism spectrum disorders.
All participants took part in a series of tasks examining emotional intelligence. These included identifying the emotion expressed on faces, identifying emotion expressed by voice, and the structured dissemblance task described in this study. The structured dissemblance task consisted of presenting the participants with hypothetical social situations and then asking them to make judgments regarding the need to dissemble. In between and after the various tasks that the children performed, the children were presented with naturalistically occurring opportunities to dissemble. The presentation of the hypothetical social scenarios and the naturalistic opportunities to dissemble are described as follows.
Methods
Dissemblance in hypothetical situations
Each child was presented with 10 hypothetical social scenarios (e.g., receiving a gift). Each story was designed to elicit one of five emotions: (a) happiness, (b) sadness, (c) fear, (d) disgust, or (e) anger. These emotions were depicted on five separate cards by a graphic representation and the written emotion word. A card with a question mark was also given to the child for a response of “I don’t know” or “I’m not sure.” In each scenario, Chris encountered a social situation that would elicit one of the five previously identified emotions. The following is an example of a story designed to elicit disgust: This is Chris. This is Chris’s mom. Chris’s mom always cooks something good for dinner. One day, Chris’s mom is sick. She has to stay in bed. The next door neighbor, Mrs. Smith, brings dinner for Chris’s family. Mrs. Smith brings tuna casserole. Chris thinks the tuna casserole is very yucky.
After reading the story, the examiner asked each participant four questions.
A comprehension question to determine whether the child understood the story (e.g., “How does the casserole taste?”).
“How does Chris feel?” to determine whether the child perceived the emotion Chris would experience.
A question was asked to determine whether the participant would recommend that the child in the scenario dissemble his or her emotion (“What should Chris say to Mrs. Smith?”).
If the participant’s response did not address emotions, the examiner prompted the child with a second question: “What should Chris say about his/her feelings?”
Finally the child was asked, “What would Chris’s parents want him/her to do?” It was assumed that most parents would teach their children that certain social situations required hiding emotions for self-protective or prosocial reason.
The comprehension question received a score of 1 if the participant’s answer was correct and a score of 0 if the answer was incorrect. The emotion question received a score of 1 for an emotion of the correct valence that was a plausible reaction to the situation (e.g., mad or sad). Participants received a score of 0 for an emotion of a different valence or for a response of “I don’t know.” The responses to the questions “What should Chris say?” and “What would Chris’s parents want him/her to do?” received a score of 1 if the child suggested dissemblance and a score of 0 if the child indicated that the emotion be displayed.
Dissemblance in naturalistic situations
Four scenarios were developed in which the participants were presented with situations that might require dissemblance. Three of the scenarios were considered to be of low cost to the child in that hiding or not hiding their emotional reaction could affect the feelings of the examiner but was of little personal consequence for the child. One scenario was high cost, in that dissembling emotion led to the loss of a desired prize.
An example of a low-cost scenario is as follows:
The ugly boyfriend
Examiner 1, who administered the testing, pulled from her stack of papers a photo of an odd-looking young man with large glasses, messy hair, vacant expression, and food falling out of his mouth. The examiner commented,
“I have a new boyfriend. I think he’s so cool! This is my boyfriend. [showed the child the picture] What do you think of him?”
Child: (opportunity to dissemble)
After this exchange, Examiner 1 left the room, leaving the photo on the table. Examiner 2 then entered the room, looked at the photo, and asked,
“Who is this?”
[If the child did not answer that question, Examiner 2 followed up with a second question.]
“Is this [name of Examiner 1’s] boyfriend?”
(opportunity to respond)
[looked around conspiratorially] “What do you think of him?”
(opportunity to respond)
“Do you think he looks cool?”
(opportunity to respond)
Example of high-cost scenario:
Disappointing prize
Prior to beginning the activities, each child ranked six prizes in order from the most to least desirable. After the completion of the final task, Examiner 1 gave the child the prize that he or she had ranked as least desirable in a paper bag (e.g., a paper clip). If the child did not spontaneously open the bag, Examiner 1 told the child to open it. The child then had an opportunity to dissemble or display his or her reaction. Examiner 1 then told the child that Examiner 2 would be in shortly to take the child back to class. Examiner 1 left, and Examiner 2 entered the room. Examiner 2 initiated the following exchange:
“How do you like your prize?”
(opportunity to respond)
All four scenarios were video recorded and scored by the authors. Facial expression and other nonverbal features were used in conjunction with spoken language to assess when the children were dissembling. Response categories were labeled display, dissemble, and noncommittal. Display characterized obvious displays of emotion. Dissemble referred to obviously dissembled emotion. Noncommittal indicated neutral comments, pauses, and fillers that might or might not represent dissemblance but that would appear to be dissemblance.
Results
Dissemblance to Hypothetical Scenarios
Emotion question: Participants with LI correctly identified the valence of the emotion 90% of the time, compared with 97% for the typically developing group. Approximately half of the incorrect responses to this question were children who answered with “I don’t know” or “I’m not sure.”
Dissemblance question: Children with LI suggested dissemblance significantly less often than their peers with typically developing language skills. As a group, children with LI indicated that Chris should dissemble on 24% of trials compared with 48% for the typically developing children.
Display rule question: Children with LI indicated that Chris’s parents would want him or her to dissemble 62% of the time, compared with 76% for the typically developing children.
Although the groups did not differ in their understanding of the social conventions (parental preferences) about displaying emotion in the scenarios, children with LI were less likely to judge that those display rules should govern the character’s responses.
Naturalistic Opportunities to Dissemble
There was no difference between the typically developing participants and participants with LI on the number of dissemblance or noncommittal responses to the naturalistic low-cost scenarios.
In the high-cost scenario, when initially given the prize, more children with LI displayed negative emotion; typically developing children dissembled or were noncommittal more often. These differences approached significance.
The ability of children in both groups to dissemble was more nuanced in the naturalistic scenarios. In the three low-cost scenarios, there was relatively little difference between the groups. The high-cost scenario (the disappointing prize) showed a greater difference, as children with LI were twice as likely to display their negative emotion as were children with typically developing language skills (11 vs. five, respectively). Half of the typically developing children said nothing in response to the prize until the second examiner asked directly, “Is that what you wanted?” In contrast, half of the children with LI openly voiced their disappointment with responses such as, “Whoa, a paper clip?” or “I don’t want this!” Although the children with LI tended to be more reticent than the typically developing children in their general interactions, they were more likely to speak up about the disappointing prize. Not only did children with LI display their emotions more often, they sometimes displayed negative emotions more intensely.
These results suggest that typically developing children are generally more likely to dissemble their emotions than children with LI. Popliger, Talwar, and Crossman (2011) speculated that developing social cognitive abilities (e.g., empathy and perspective taking) and adult instruction both contribute to the ability to tell a prosocial lie. Children with LI have limitations in both of these areas. Popliger et al. also suggested that motivation plays a role in dissemblance. In the low-cost scenarios used in this study, there was little benefit to hiding one’s emotions. This lack of motivation may have leveled the playing field, with many children in both groups seeing little need to dissemble. Failure to dissemble in certain social situations could potentially affect children’s peer relationships. Consequently, this is an area that speech-language pathologists should consider in intervention.