A naturalistic observational study of children’s expressions of anger in the family context.

Abstract

Traditional approaches to the study of children's expressions of anger rely on tightly controlled study environments to test hypotheses about outcomes and correlates of expression characteristics. An unexplored area in the study of emotion expression is a naturalistic examination of school-age children's spontaneously occurring expressions of emotion in their real, uncontrolled family contexts. This observational study describes the naturally occurring characteristics and contexts of 8- to 12-year-old children's anger expressions with family members. Thirty-one families were videotaped for 2 days at home and in community settings. Children's expressions of anger were identified and coded for angry facial, vocal and physical behaviors, and for the expressions' instigating situational contexts. The majority of anger expressions were of mild intensity and brief duration, and most often contained vocal behavioral characteristics (e.g., loud voice, whining). The most common cause of an anger expression was a verbal disagreement; other frequently occurring situational causes included homework, requests for compliance, and reprimands. Patterns in the angry behaviors children exhibited in response to specific situational causes support a functionalist perspective on emotion expression in that children engaged in behaviors that appeared to be attempts to get their needs met. Few differences were observed between mothers' and fathers' rates of instigating children's anger expressions, and between boys' and girls' expression characteristics and contexts. This study offers an ecologically valid, uniquely naturalistic methodology to describe children's observable expressions of anger as they occur in family contexts.

Nontoxic Family Stress: Potential Benefits and Underlying Biology

“…In fact, the most common stressful events in families fit this description, precipitating mild feelings of annoyance or disappointment. In the naturalistic observational study mentioned earlier, the majority of negative emotions that children expressed at home were of low intensity and brief duration (Sears et al, ). Of course, some family stressors present greater challenges to emotional recovery, particularly when they arouse more intense negative affect or occur in closely spaced repeated sequences.…”

Short‐Term Resilience Processes in the Family

“…Family members also completed diaries and provided saliva samples at multiple points on 3 days (Ochs & Kremer‐Sadlik, ). This rich data archive is extending our understanding of short‐term family processes that may be related to resilience, such as patterns of family interactions after work and school (Campos, Graesch, Repetti, Bradbury, & Ochs, ) and situational contexts of children's emotion expressions in the home (Bai et al, ; Campos et al, ; Sears, Repetti, Reynolds, & Sperling, ). Other direct recording methods and designs have also been used to assess family processes in ecologically valid contexts.…”

Families Under the Microscope: Repeated Sampling of Perceptions, Experiences, Biology, and Behavior

“…The literature on emotional expression, for example, has already benefited greatly from the use of video recordings of minute changes in facial expression and vocal tone in the laboratory. Although much less work has capitalized on technological advancements to study emotion expression in everyday life, the CELF study demonstrated the feasibility of using this type of video recording to examine the facial, vocal, and physical characteristics of children's expressions of positive and negative emotion and the naturally occurring behaviors and situations in the family that evoke and sustain them (Bai, Repetti, & Sperling, ; Sears, Repetti, Reynolds, & Sperling, ) as well as the factors that affect general emotional tone and expressivity at home (Campos et al, ).…”