Abstract
Simple stories were presented to severely or profoundly prelingually deafened children and hearing controls in two age groups. Participants were asked to choose the appropriate emotion for the central characters. While at either age level, the hearing children's success rate was significantly higher than that of the deaf children, the older deaf children showed a marked improvement compared with the younger deaf children. In each age group, the profiles of the average scores of the deaf children over the six emotions studied were similar to those of their hearing peers, suggesting that the deaf children found the same emotions easier (or more difficult) to assign to the story characters. It would appear that deaf and hearing children code their emotional experiences using the same categories, which are progressively refined with age. The developmental delay in deaf children's emotional understanding is interpreted in terms of the social experience of the deaf child of hearing parents, which affords limited opportunity to discuss emotional causality.
Similar content being viewed by others
REFERENCES
British Association of Teachers of the Deaf (1981). Audiological definitions and forms for recording audiometric information. J. Brit. Assoc. Teach. Deaf 5: 83–87.
Brody, L., and Harrison, R. (1987). Developmental changes in children's abilities to match and label emotionally laden situations. Motiv. Emotion 11: 347–365.
Bullock, M., and Russell, J. A. (1984). Preschool children's interpretation of facial expressions of emotion. Int. J. Behav. Dev. 7: 193–214.
Carlson, C., Felleman, E., and Masters, J. (1983). Influence of children's emotional states on the recognition of emotion in peers and social motives to change another's emotional state. Motiv. Emotion 7: 61–79.
Clarke School for the Deaf (1953). 86th Annual Report, Northampton, MA.
DeConti, K. A., and Dickerson, D. J. (1994). Preschool childrens understanding of the situational determinants of others emotions. Cogn. Emotion 8: 453–472.
Denham, S. (1986a). Affective understanding in young preschoolers and reactions to peers’ emotions. Paper presented at the American Psychological Association, Washington, DC.
Denham, S. A. (1986b). Social cognition, prosocial behaviour, and emotion in preschoolers: contextual validation. Child Dev. 57: 194–201.
Denham, S. A., and Couchoud, E. A. (1990). Young preschoolers’ understanding of emotion. Child Study J. 20: 171–192.
Dorr, A. (1985). Contexts for experience with emotion, with special attention to television. In Lewis, M. and Saarni, C. (eds.), The Socialization of Emotion, Plenum Press, New York, pp. 55–85.
Dunn, J., Bretherton, I., and Munn, P. (1987). Conversations about feeling states between mothers and their young children. Dev. Psychol. 23: 132–139.
Dunn, J., Brown, J., and Beardsall, L. (1991). Family talk about feeling states and children's later understanding of others’ emotions. Dev. Psychol. 27: 448–455.
Dunn, J., and Brown, J. R. (1993). Early conversations about causality: content, pragmatics and developmental change. Brit. J. Dev. Psychol.
Fabes, R. A., Eisenberg, N., Nyman, M., and Michealieu, Q. (1991). Young children's appraisal of others’ spontaneous emotional reactions. Dev. Psychol. 27: 858–866.
Fehr, B. J., and Exline, R. V. (1987). Social visual interaction: A conceptual and literature review. In Siegman, A. W., and Feldstein, S. (eds.), Nonverbal Behavior and Communication, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Hillsdale, New Jersey, pp. 225–326.
Gray, C., Banks, J., Fyfe, R., and Morris, A. (1992). The use of verbatim and schematic strategies in the recall of written stories by deaf and hearing children. Brit. J. Educ. Psychol. 62: 88–105.
Gray, C.D., Hosie, J.A., Russell, P., and Ormel, E. (2001). Emotional development in deaf children: Understanding facial expressions, display rules and theory of mind. In Marschark, M., Clark, D., and Karchmer, M. (eds.), Context, Cognition and Deafness, Gallaudet University Press, Washington, pp. 135–160.
Gregory, S. (1976). The Deaf Child and His Family, Halsted Press, New York.
Hadwin, J., and Perner, J. (1991). Pleased and surprised: Children's cognitive theory of emotion. Brit. J. Dev. Psychol. 9: 215–234.
Harris, D. B. (1963). Children's Drawings as Measures of Intellectual Maturity, Harcourt, Brace and World, New York.
Harris, P. L. (1985). What children know about the situations that provoke emotion. In Lewis, M., and Saarni, C. (eds.), The Socialization of Emotion, Plenum Press, New York, pp. 161–185.
Higgenbotham, D. J., and Baker, B. M. (1981). Social participation and cognitive play differences in hearing-impaired and normally hearing preschoolers. Volta Rev. 83: 135–149.
Hosie, J. A., Gray, C. D., Russell, P. A., Scott, C., and Hunter, N. (1998). The matching of facial expressions by deaf and hearing children and their production and comprehension of emotion labels. Motiv. Emotion 22: 293–313.
Hosie, J. A., Russell, P. A., Gray, C. D., Scott, C., Hunter, N., Banks, J. S., and Macaulay, M. C. (2000). Knowledge of display rules in prelingually deaf and hearing children. J. Child Psychol. Psychiat. 41: 389–398.
Ireson, J., and Shields, M. (1982). The development of the young child's representation of emotion (ERIC Document Reproduction Service No. ED 263 983). London, England: University of London Institute of Education.
Lederberg, A. R., and Mobley, C. E. (1990). The effect of hearing impairment on the quality of attachment and mother-toddler interaction. Child Dev. 61: 1596–1604.
Markham, R., and Adams, K. (1992). The effect of type of task on children's identification of facial expressions. J. Nonverbal Behav. 16: 21–39.
Michalson, L., and Lewis, M. (1985). What do children know about emotions and when do they know it? In Lewis, M., and Saarni, C. (eds.), The Socialization of Emotions, Plenum, New York, pp. 117–139.
Odom, P. B., Blanton, R. L., and Laukhuf, C. (1973). Facial expressions and interpretation of emotion-arousing situations in deaf and hearing children. J. Abnormal Child Psychol. 1: 139–151.
Peterson, C. C., and Siegal, M. (1995). Deafness, conversation and theory of mind. J. Child Psychol. Psychiat. 36: 459–474.
Peterson, C. C., and Siegal, M. (1997). Psychological, biological and physical thinking in normal, autistic and deaf children. In Wellman, H. M., and Inagaki, K. (eds.), The Emergence of Core Domains of Thought, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, pp. 55–70.
Reichenbach, L., and Masters, J. C. (1983). Childrens use of expressive and contextual cues in judgements of emotion. Child Dev. 54: 993–1004.
Remmel, E., Bettger, J. G., and Weinberg, A. M. (2001). Theory of mind development in deaf children. In Clark, M. D., Marschark, M., and Karchmer, M. (eds.), Context, Cognition and Deafness, Gallaudet University Press, Washington, DC, pp. 113–134.
Rieffe, C., and Meerum Terwogt, M. (2000). Deaf children's understanding of emotions: Desires take preference. J. Child Psychol. Psychiat. 41: 601–608.
Russell, J. A. (1980). A circumplex model of affect. J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 39: 1161–1178.
Russell, J. A., and Bullock, M. (1985). Multidimensional scaling of emotional facial expressions: Similarity from preschoolers to adults. J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 48: 1290–1298.
Russell, J. A., and Bullock, M. (1986). On the dimensions preschoolers use to interpret facial expressions of emotion. Dev. Psychol. 22: 97–102.
Russell, J. A., Suzuki, N., and Ishida, N. (1993). Canadian, Greek and Japanese freely produced emotion labels for facial expressions. Motiv. Emotion 17: 337–351.
Spelke, E. S., and Cortelyou, A. (1981). Perceptual aspects of social knowing: Looking and listening in infancy. In Lamb, M. E., and Sherrod, L. R. (eds.), Infant Social Cognition: Empirical and Theoretical Considerations, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Hillsdale, NJ, pp. 61–84.
Stein, N. (1979). How children understand stories: A developmental analysis. In Katz, L. G. (ed.), Current Topics in Early Childhood, Ablex, Norwood, N. J., Vol. 2, pp. 261–290.
Stein, N., and Glenn, C. (1979). An analysis of story comprehension in elementary school children. In Freedle, R. (ed.), Advances in Discourse Processes: New directions in Discourse Processing, Ablex, Norwood, N. J., Vol. 2, pp. 261–190.
Vandell, D., and George, L. (1981). Social interaction in hearing and deaf preschoolers: Successes and failures in initiation. Child Dev. 52: 627–635.
Walden, T. A. (1991). Infant social referencing. In Garber, J., and Dodge, K. A. (eds.), The Development of Emotion Regulation and Dysregulation. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 69–88.
Wedell-Monnig, J., and Lumley, J. M. (1980). Child deafness and mother-child interaction. Child Dev. 51: 766–774.
Wellman, H. M., Harris, P. L., Banerjee, M., and Sinclair, A. (1995). Early understanding of emotion: Evidence from natural language. Cognition Emotion 2(3): 117–149.
Wertheimer, M. (1961). Psychomotor coordination of auditory and visual space at birth. Science 134: 1692.
Acknowledgments
The authors wish to thank Mairi Macaulay (Head Teacher), Margaret Falconer, Joan Grant, and the other teachers at the Aberdeen School for the Deaf for their help at all stages of the research and for their unfailing support and encouragement. We would also like to acknowledge the support of the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC: Grant Number R000236272).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Gray, C., Hosie, J., Russell, P. et al. Attribution of Emotions to Story Characters by Severely and Profoundly Deaf Children. J Dev Phys Disabil 19, 145–159 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10882-006-9029-1
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10882-006-9029-1