Children and Teen's Ability to Detect Emotions in Others - How it Happens and Why it Matters
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Emotion recognition can be thought of as the ability to identify and understand emotions in other people. The concept of ‘emotional awareness’ can be thought of a person’s ability to notice and understand their own emotions. Both emotion recognition and emotional awareness are of course precursors to the more complex skills of effectively managing and responding to emotions (in ourselves or others) which are sometimes referred to as the skills of ‘emotion regulation’.
I’ve been reading a lot about emotion recognition in kids and teens recently, and have just completed an article for professionals about this (click here if you are a mental health or educational professional and want to access this) – but thought it might be helpful for parents/caregivers to know something about this too – what follows therefore is a summary of some of the ideas psychologists think about in this area and what this might mean for parents/caregivers helping their children and teens with this skills.
How do humans recognize how others are feeling?
The process by which we identify emotions in others is complex and multifaceted. Studies suggest that humans consider facial expressions, body language (including posture, and body movements) and tone of voice (pitch, volume, speed) – and we also use something researchers refer to as ‘contextual clues’. These clues might be information gleaned from the background environment, scene information, surrounding faces and bodies, etc. – for instance, seeing people gathering around an ambulance, or seeing a present on someone’s lap or a swinging fist coming in someone’s direction. As people learn about possible situational triggers for emotions through accumulating life experience (seeing people lose games and get upset teaches them that losing is a possible trigger for someone to feel disappointed), they are then more able to take in contextual clues around them at any given time, compare them to the information they have learnt about possible triggers – and use this information (adding to the cues they get from a person’s face/voice/body) – to help them know what someone else is feeling.
It is no wonder therefore that brain imaging suggests that identifying emotions seems to involve many parts of the brain – and although it can be done in milliseconds, is actually a very complex process.
How and when do children develop the skills of identifying emotions in others
I always love reading about the amazing development of psychological skills in infants, and this is no exception. From 7 to 8 months of age, babies can discriminate between different facial expressions. Children start being able to then describe these facial expressions - using emotional words at approximately two to three years of age – there seems to be reliable patterns - happiness is recognised and labelled first, and most reliably - and then then anger and sadness. Of the basic facial emotions, surprise or fear is recognised last.
This ability to recognize basic human emotions (fear, happiness, sadness and anger) from facial expression reaches adult levels by mid childhood - pretty impressive given most other psychological and communication skills don’t reach adult levels until much later.
However, being able to identify more complex and less intense emotions from facial expressions – and being able to identify emotions when facial expressions only provide ambiguous cues – takes much longer to develop. In other words, when kids and teens are required to use other non facial cues (e.g. vocal, body language and contextual clues) they find it harder to do this at adult levels. While they will at least start trying to use these non-facial cues quite early – from 8 or 9 onwards – to recognize emotions in others, their ability to do this quickly and effectively slowly develops over time.
Also being able to recognize the presence of mixed emotions and be able to recognize changeability in emotions – and being able to do all of this quickly – also develop more slowly and all of these skills may not reach adult like levels until late adolescence (with some studies suggesting it may even be not fully developed until even young adulthood –those of you with 18 year olds who sometimes seem to miss some of life’s bits and pieces – this will make sense).
Difficulties some children have in Identify Emotions
Of course, like all skills, the ability to recognize emotions in others is variable - some children and young people find it more difficult to do this than average. For instance, studies have shown that children and young people with learning problems, autistic children/young people, those with ADHD, children and young people with depression and anxiety disorders, young people who have experienced traumatic life situations, and those who struggle with higher rates of challenging behaviours - are more likely to make more mistakes/be slower to identify emotions in other people.
However, it is important to note that this area of research is not without inconsistency. There have also been many studies which have failed to find these differences. There have been some studies which have compared children and adolescents with emotional/mental health challenges or neurodiversity to neurotypical or those challenges – and have found no differences at all between groups in their emotion recognition skills.
And at the other end of the spectrum, some studies have found that some children/young people – specifically those with depression - might be more accurate on some occasions at identifying sad or distressed faces than those without these challenges.
To try and understand the contradictions in the research, some writers suggest that it might be that children with particular types of challenges might have – not emotion recognition skill difficulties across the board – but particular difficulties with recognizing some particular types of emotions.
For example, some studies of children and teens with high levels of disruptive behaviours suggest these young people in particular might have difficulties with identifying sadness and anxiety in others – but not with identifying happiness nor anger in others.
Some studies have found that children or adolescents with anxiety or depressive disorders are more likely to inaccurately label neutral facial expressions as being threatening, angry, or sad.
Other studies conducted with adolescents with autism have suggested that there were deficits only in these young people’s ability to notice complex emotions (e.g. embarrassment, pride, boredom) and not deficits in the recognition of simple emotions.
Still other studies suggest that kids and young people with all kinds of emotional or mental health challenges only have difficulties with emotional recognition to the extent that they also have learning or attention problems. In other words, the more learning and attention problems a young person has, the more likely it is tough for them to be able to identify emotions – and this is regardless of whether they also have other mental health challenges at the same time.
All in all, we can probably conclude that many children with other difficulties – emotions, life challenges, attention problems etc - are more likely than average child to have emotion recognition issues, but of course this is not necessarily the case for any individual child/teen.
How much does having emotion recognition difficulties matter for kids?
If a child or teen does have poorer emotion identification skills, studies suggest that it does seem to be more likely that they will then go on to have difficulties with social behaviour, ability to resolve conflict with others, may be less likely to be accepted by their peers and have more difficulties with educational outcomes.
Of course, all of these studies have been ‘correlational’ – in other words, research suggests emotion recognition and other problems are found together, but NOT necessarily that the emotion recognition difficulties cause these problems. It might be something else entirely that causes both difficulties with emotion recognition AND other problems (for example – some biological differences).
However, there are some plausible theories to suggest emotion recognition might in fact cause problems, even if it can’t be proved by the research: for example - when children and young people have difficulties in noticing emotions in others, it seems likely they will respond in ways which undermine relationships (eg not noticing anxiety in a peer and acting insensitively), or experience higher distress themselves (eg misperceiving frustration towards them instead of sadness in a parent) which then may undermine other areas of functioning.
Are there programs and approaches psychologists use to improve emotion recognition in children?
There have been many therapeutic programs aiming to increase emotion identification in children or young people which have been developed over the years. They include these kinds of components:
- The child/young person is usually presented with videos, images, avatars or pictures and are asked to identify emotions (or emotion triggers) and given feedback (or game like rewards) to help their performance.
- Often (but not always) the programs give explicit training in decoding facial expressions (look at eyebrows, mouth shapes – upward eyebrow means surprise etc.), certain emotions and to try to learn and remember these when they see these situations occur.
- Some of these programs also get children/teens to mimic facial expressions.
- Some programs also – or instead - train children and teens in the types of contextual and environment clues which might cause emotions - by getting them to identify typical situations which trigger these emotions in themselves and others. They might be asked to draw upon examples in their own life, or to imagine scenarios which cause c
These programs have been tested and have usually been found to help – and sometimes even to be linked with other improvements in social functioning too. Of course, there are always caveats – not all kids improve, and we don’t really know for how long these improvements might last.
There are of course many other programs which teach emotion recognition within a broader program of understanding and managing emotions – most therapy programs would say they do this.
There are also parent directed therapeutic programs which explicitly aim to help children better deal with emotions, for example the tuning into kids/teens programs which help parents to talk about and encourage emotional expression in children/young people.
Take aways for parents: Helping kids and teens with emotion recognition at home
What might this research suggest for parents/caregivers – and especially those who are concerned about their child or teen’s well-being or behaviours? Here are a few ideas to consider.
1. Being aware of emotion recognition skills as being one potential cause of our young person’s to difficulties
To start with, it might be helpful for parents to remind ourselves that emotion recognition difficulties may be part of what is contributing to our children/young people’s difficulties – and to ask some questions and observe their abilities in this area. We might also ask them some questions about this, for example:
For older children and teens:
How often do you notice emotions in others? How skilled do you think you are at understanding what other people are thinking and feeling?
For younger kids:
Some skills are really good feeling finders, and some kids are still learning. A feeling finder is someone who can tell what feelings other people are having – like whether they are happy, sad, mad or worried. How do you think you go at noticing other people’s feelings?
We might then go on to try to notice particular emotion recognition problems which our young people experience, depending on their particular challenges. Here are some examples broken down into different problem types:
For children who struggle with frequently feeling frustrated by their peers / experiencing peer conflict we might ask:
When you are feeling frustrated by your friends/or when you have an argument – do you think you find it difficult to know how other people are feeling?
For example, do you think you can tell when someone is feeling hurt, worried, sad, left out or jealous?
Have you ever thought someone was angry and then found out later that they were not angry, but actually were feeling worried?
For children who appear to have difficulties acting in empathic ways towards their peers, we might ask:
When you are around your friends – do you think you find it difficult to know how they are feeling?
For example, do you think you can tell when someone is feeling hurt, worried, sad, left out or jealous? Or do you not notice when this happens?
Have you ever found out later that someone was worried or frustrated about something, but you didn’t realise at the time?
For children/teens who are often anxious about their peers we might ask:
When you are feeling anxious – are you thinking that people are feeling angry or frustrated with you – or that people are feeling offended by something you’ve done? Do you ever feel like people don’t like you? And then you find out later they were not angry, or didn’t feel any dislike for you at all?
For teens experiencing frequent conflict with or feel hurt by parents/caregivers we might ask:
When you are feeling frustrated/having arguments with me – do you ever think I am feeling disappointed with you, when in fact they find out later, I was not feeling like that at all? Do you think you are good at noticing when we as your parents/caregivers are feeling hurt/sadness/fear themselves? Or is it hard to tell? Do you think having some difficulties knowing how we are feeling makes things hard for you at times?
For children/teens with low mood
When you are feeling sad and are thinking about or around other people – do you think they are feeling disappointed with you, when in fact you have found out later, they were not feeling like that at all? Or is this not a problem for you?
2. Introducing the concept of emotion recognition to children and young people
If we do decide improving emotion recognition skills would be helpful for our children or teens, we might want to talk with them about this. However, my experience is that talking about this with young people can make some of them feel criticized or defensive. We need to be careful to not suggest ‘you need to be more caring’ or ‘more understanding’ of others message and minimise any shame/blame.
There are a number of ways to do this – the way I do it is by emphasising the potential positive outcomes of emotion recognition – for all of us – rather than just for kids/teens.
For example:
Older kids/teens
Scientists and psychologists think that improving our skills at recognizing different types of emotions in others can be really helpful. If we can be a bit quicker at understanding what our friends and family are feeling, it can help us know what to say, reduce arguments and to get along better and have more fun together – that might be at school, or at sport or jobs or other places. It can also make it easier to talk about our own feelings.
Younger kids
Being a super powerful feeling finder means being really good at quickly working out how other people feel. This can help us know what to do and help us have good friends.
4. Exercises and activities to improve emotion recognition
There are a few different types of emotion recognition activities with different goals, and which of these we might pick will depend on the age and stage of the child/young person.
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a. Exercises to identify and understanding emotions
For preschoolers, and or children with learning or high level attention difficulties, we may need to start with very basic emotion recognition skills such as being able to understand the differences between the basic emotions such as fear/worry, anger/frustration, sadness and happiness – and to be able to identify facial expressions for each of these.
There are a number of online programs which might assist with this goal, many of them are free (google “feeling games kids”). There are also numerous commercially available games, emoji charts, books and pictures. We can ask kids to identify emotions on our faces periodically and to replicate these themselves (and even ask them to use video or mirrors to see what they look like). Giving feedback is likely to be an important part of this process.
b. Understanding of more complex emotions
For primary aged children or teens, working on understanding and identifying basic emotions like the above may be too easy and instead we might want to assist them to understand more complex emotions and what they are (so that we can move on to – see next section – start to identify these in others).
The complex emotions we might want to help young people understand include: shame/embarrassment, feeling overwhelmed/fatigued, feeling excluded/lonely, jealousy, guilt, resentment, vulnerability, inadequacy, helplessness, confusion, disappointment and regret.
There are a lot of potential complex emotions – so it can be good to focus on those which might be most helpful for any individual child or young people. For example, here are some particular types which might be helpful (and obviously it will vary depending on the young person):
For young people struggling with frustration with others, I’ve sometimes found that it has been helpful to focus on helping them to understand and identify when others are feeling lonely, embarrassed, helpless and confused.
For young people struggling with anxiety, I’ve found it helpful to focus on helping them understand others feel inadequate and vulnerable.
Here are some sentences we might use to help children understand these complex emotions:
It’s not too hard to notice when people are very angry, very sad, afraid or happy. But there are some more tricky or complex emotions which are harder to spot. Researchers seem to think that when people/kids get better at noticing these more tricky emotions in others, they tend to do better at knowing what to do. Would you like to talk with me about this for a while?
Let’s talk about (insert emotion) as this is one which might be good for you to notice (e.g. see the following options –
Shame or embarrassment is a feeling which is a bit of a mix of sad and worried, and happens when people feel they are being negatively judged by others or that someone is not good enough.
Overwhelm or stress is a feeling when people feel really anxious or weighed down by too much around them or not being able to do things they feel they are expected to do.
Feeling left out or excluded is a kind of sadness where people feel like they don’t belong, or feel like they don’t have people they feel they fit with.
Feeling inadequate or not good enough is a kind of sad feeling people have when they think they are not as good as other people.
c. Learning contextual cues and situational triggers for complex emotions so young people can identify them in others
Understanding complex emotions is only the first step, however- young people need to then be able to identify these emotions in others. Given that it is difficult (or impossible) to do this using facial expressions, voice/body language alone, we will usually want children to get better at knowing which contextual cues are associated with these emotions. In other words, we want them to be familiar with typical situational triggers.
For example, we might ask:
“Now that you understand the complex/tricky emotion of feeling (insert complex emotion that you have discussed): What do you think are typical kinds of situations/things which might make people feel like this?
And then with prompts…
“Let’s think together – are there situations/things that make people feel like this: at school? online? When playing sport/games? At home with families? Watching media/TV?
And providing examples from our own life….
I think I have noticed people in my life feeling (complex emotion) when everyone else is talking to each other, but no-one asks them a question. Have you noticed that?
I’m going to describe a scenario to you – can you tell me whether a person might feel X or Y?
Once children/young people can identify common triggers for whatever emotion we are working on (and we might be doing a couple at a time), we can then go on to try to help children and young people apply this skill themselves.
Now we know the things that can set off/trigger feeling (insert complex emotion) – let’s see if you can be a really clever feeling finder and do this yourself. Could you see if you can notice three times in the next week when someone in your life or a person in something you watch - has felt (emotion)? We can set up a bingo/I spy game (etc) and see how many you can find.
d. Understanding mixed emotions – i.e. emotions underlying anger (eg fear, embarrassment, overwhelm) and sadness (eg guilt, left out, shame)
Another emotion recognition skill to work on in with some young people is the ability to understand mixed emotions – and in particular understand that often a simple emotion is driven by or accompanied by a more complex emotion.
For example, we might be wanting to help children with disruptive behaviours look at other distress underlying anger in their peers or help young people with anxiety look at identifying loneliness underlying dislike in their peers.
We might say something like:
Often tricky emotions hide underneath more simple emotions and are harder to spot.
Let’s see if we can think about the kinds of emotions which might hide underneath anger? Jealous, left out etc.
As always, we then would brainstorm activities to help young people do this in situations which have been problematic for them in the past.
e. Understanding neutral emotions – i.e. not overlabelling anger/dislike and frustration in others
The final skill we might be helping children and young people with is the ability to perceive neutral (or low intensity) emotions when they have a problematic tendency to assume others are experiencing negative emotions (or a tendency to assume others are experiencing high levels of negative emotions when in fact they are lower level).
I’ve found it useful to help children/teens who struggle in this area to use a scale to think about the intensity of emotions and to be able to identify lower numbers on the scale – rather than trying to get them to assume they are not experiencing anger/dislike at all.
For example:
I know that you feel really upset when your brain tells you that someone is angry at you, that makes you worried. Let’s think about a scale from 0 to 10 – where 0 is (not mad at all) to 10 (very angry). How can you tell if they are a 1 rather than a 5? Or a 2 rather than an 8?
I know that you feel really worried when your brain tells you that someone doesn’t like you. Let’s think about a scale from 0 to 10 – 0 means they don’t like you at all, 5 means they don’t really have any feelings about you, and 10 means they really like you. How can you tell the difference between someone being a 0 versus a 5.
In conclusion
I hope this gives you some ideas to think about in supporting your young person to learn to recognise emotions in other people.
For parents/caregivers who have a lot going on for them and their young people – thinking about extra ideas and work they can do to support their young people’s development can feel overwhelming – and all too hard.
If this is the case for you, please remember a few things:
a) You may already be doing this (in different ways) so don’t forget to stop and acknowledge the positive parenting and support you are already doing
b) Remember this is a marathon – not a sprint. You don’t have to do all of this at once – you could just take one of the sentences or activities above and do this with your young person and see how it goes.
All the best as you support your young person in this work.
If you would like to learn more about primary school children’s emotions, please go to calmkidcentral.com. Within this program, you can visit our parent’s library, which has a range of modules about parenting and supporting children with emotional health challenges. Additionally, there is a children’s library with videos, lessons and games specifically designed for 4-11 year old children. You can also ask questions of our child psychologists and receive a response within 48 hours. Follow the link above or click on the image to the left to find out more.
