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Empathy is relevant to many psychiatric conditions. Empathy involves the natural ability to perceive and be sensitive to the emotional states of others. Thus, emotion recognition (ER) abilities are key to understanding empathy. Despite the importance of ER to normal and abnormal social interactions, little is known about how it develops throughout childhood. We examined genetic and environmental influences on children’s ER via facial and vocal cues in 344 7-year-old twin children [59 monozygotic (MZ) and 113 same-sex dizygotic (DZ) pairs], who were part of the Longitudinal Israeli Study of Twins. ER was assessed with the child version of the Diagnostic Assessment of Nonverbal Accuracy. For both facial and vocal cues of emotion, twin correlations were not higher for MZ twins than for DZ twins, suggesting no heritability for ER in this population. In contrast, correlations were positive for both types of twins, indicating a shared environmental effect. This was supported by a bivariate genetic analysis. This pattern was robust to controlling for twins being of the same sex and age. Effects remained after controlling for background variables such as family income and number of additional siblings. The analysis found a shared environmental correlation between facial and vocal ER ( r c = .63), indicating that the shared environmental factors contributed to the overlap between vocal and facial ER. The study highlights the importance of the shared environment to children’s ER.

Background The current study provides information about differences in parent–child discourse during shared book reading (SBR) surrounding narrative and didactic book genres about ‘positive’ (e.g. love, happiness) and ‘negative’ (e.g. anger and sadness) emotions. Research shows that characteristics of different children's book genres impact discourse during SBR, but narrative and didactic books have not been examined. Children's books often relate to the characters' inner mental and emotional states. Research has not explored parent–child conversations during SBR regarding different types of emotions, yet studies on other discourse contexts reveal that parents discuss ‘positive’ emotions differently than ‘negative’ emotions. Methods Participants were 26 mothers of 5‐ to 6‐year‐olds (M = 64.30 SD = 6.27). There were 18 boys and 8 girls. Eleven dyads received a narrative and didactic book on ‘positive’ emotions, and 15 dyads received a narrative and didactic book on ‘negative’ emotions. Interactions were video‐recorded and analysed. We examined the number of turns, initiations, general utterances and mental–emotional utterances. Results Primary results revealed that mothers used more general utterances when reading both narrative and didactic books surrounding ‘negative’ emotions compared with books surrounding ‘positive’ emotions. Mothers used more mental–emotional utterances with a didactic book on ‘negative’ emotions compared with a narrative on ‘negative’ emotions and with a didactic book on ‘positive’ emotions compared to a narrative on ‘positive’ emotions. Conclusions This study highlights the importance of text selection for SBR and how it may impact the discourse. Mothers used didactic books for detailed conversations with their children. The simpler structure of the book may have facilitated the discourse about emotions. Mothers related more to anger and sadness compared with love and happiness. This may indicate that they feel they have to explain and teach their children about ‘negative’ emotions and how to cope with them, whereas positive emotions may be more implicitly understood.