What do parents know about their children's comprehension of emotions? Accuracy of parental estimates in a community sample of pre‐schoolers

Abstract

Parents' ability to estimate the level of their child's EC was characterized by a substantial overestimation. The more competent the child, and the more sensitive and structuring the parent was interacting with the child, the more accurate the parent was in the estimation of their child's EC.

Social skills in preschool children with unilateral and mild bilateral hearing loss

“…For the TH group, the parents' overestimation of their child's abilities was not unexpected, as this was reported in the larger study from which our TH group was drawn (Kårstad et al, 2013). It is interesting that parents of children with HA think that their children perform at a lower level than parents of TH children, even though this is not the case.…”

“…These were included in our study. Findings concerning emotion understanding and parents' estimations in this longitudinal cohort study have been published elsewhere (Kårstad, Kvello, Wichstrøm, & Berg-Nielsen, 2013;Kårstad et al, 2015). Demographic information of all participants is described in Table 1.…”

Social Cognition in Preschoolers: Effects of Early Experience and Individual Differences

“…Nevertheless, parents are not trained observers: their judgment may be biased by social desirability, they may be incapable of perceiving their children’s real competence (Fenson et al, 1994), and social representation of childhood may play a role in distorting adults’ observations and managing the reliability of the measures (for a wider discussion of this topic, see: Molina and Bulgarelli, 2012b). It is also worth noticing that children’s social cognition involves internal states that are not always directly observable: thus, parents may not be accurate in evaluating this competence (Kårstad et al, 2014). For these reasons, in the current study social cognition was measured directly with the children, through standardized tools that are internationally used to assess ToM and EU.…”

Young Brazilian Children’s Emotion Understanding: A Comparison within and across Cultures

“…Furthermore, an ordered sequence of gradually lower scores for components in the hypothesized "later" or "more developed" periods were not evident in the two Brazilian samples in this study. In fact, the results from this study and those obtained using four other samples (Karstad et al, 2014;Molina et al, 2014;Pons et al, 2004;Tenenbaum et al, 2004) show that Recognition is the only component that stands out as easier to develop than all the others. Scores for the other components generally show little variation with frequent and unsystematic juxtaposition compared to an idealized normative sequence.…”

“…The samples from other studies of children's EU that were compared to the Brazilian sample were: 882 Norwegian children (M age 4.4) (Karstad, Kvello, Wichstrom, & Berg-Nielsen, 2014), 114 Italian children (M age 4.8) (Molina et al, 2014) and 18 Peruvian children (M age 6) (Tenenbaum et al, 2004). Table 2 shows the parents' level of education for the Brazilian high-SES children, Norwegian children and Italian children.…”