Associations between vocal emotion recognition and socio-emotional adjustment in children

Abstract

The human voice is a primary channel for emotional communication. It is often presumed that being able to recognize vocal emotions is important for everyday socioemotional functioning, but evidence for this assumption remains scarce. Here, we examined relationships between vocal emotion recognition and socio-emotional adjustment in children. The sample included 141 6- to 8-year-old children, and the emotion tasks required them to categorize five emotions (anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, plus neutrality), as conveyed by two types of vocal emotional cues: speech prosody and non-verbal vocalizations such as laughter. Socio-emotional adjustment was evaluated by the children’s teachers using a multidimensional questionnaire of selfregulation and social behaviour. Based on frequentist and Bayesian analyses, we found that, for speech prosody, higher emotion recognition related to better general socio-emotional adjustment. This association remained significant even when the children’s cognitive ability, age, sex and parental education were held constant. Follow-up analyses indicated that higher emotional prosody recognition was more robustly related to the socio-emotional dimensions of prosocial behaviour and cognitive and behavioural self-regulation. For emotion recognition in non-verbal vocalizations, no associations with socio-emotional adjustment were found. A similar null result was obtained for an additional task focused on facial emotion recognition. Overall, these results support the close link between children’s emotional prosody recognition skills and their everyday social behaviour.