Emotion recognition and social adjustment in school-aged girls and boys

The present study investigated emotion recognition accuracy and its relatio n to social adjustment in 7-10 year-old children. The ability to recognize basic emotions from facial and vocal expressions was measured and compared to peer popularity and to teacher-rated social competence. The results show ed that emotion recognition was related to these measures of social adjustm ent, but the gender of a child and emotion category affected this relations hip. Emotion recognition accuracy was significantly related to social adjus tment for the girls, but not for the boys. For the girls, especially the re cognition of surprise was related to social adjustment. Together, these res ults suggest that the ability to recognize others' emotional states from no nverbal cues is an important socio-cognitive ability for school-aged girls.