Introduction

Emotional understanding development gives children the set of skills to recognize based and mixed emotions; understanding the impact of events, such as reminders, desires and beliefs on emotional feelings; finally, understanding cognitive and behavioural strategies to emotional expression control (Pons, Harris and de Rosnay, 2000; Pons et al., 2002).A substantial body of research has established that emotion understanding develops across childhood between the ages of 18 months and 12 years (Brown and Dunn, 1996; Ruffman, Slade and Crowe, 2002; de Rosnay, Pons, Harris and Morrell, 2004). Pons and Harris (2004) have found important changes in children’s understanding organized into three hierarchical developmental periods. The first period (around 5 years), named external phase, is characterized by the understanding of important public aspects of emotions: their situational causes; their outward expression; and those events or objects that serve as external prompts or reminders that reactivate emotion. The second period (around 7 years), named mental phase, is characterized by the understanding of the mentalist nature of emotions: the connection to desires and beliefs; and the distinction between expressed and felt emotion. Finally, the third period (around 9-11 years), named reflexive phase, is characterized by how an individual can reflect upon a given situation from various perspectives and thereby feelings; distress at a failure to confess; and the cognitive regulation of emotion (Pons et al., 2004). Several studies have specifically addressed the issue about causal variables that influence the development of children’s emotion comprehension. Earlier research on this topic coming from Dunn and Colleagues (Dunn, Bretherton and Munn, 1987) has pointed out the importance of early linguistic input, mainly studied in mother-child interaction. More recently de Rosnay and Harris (2002) showed that language and emotions comprehension are intimately related. These findings are consistent with studies on deaf children who have a delay in emotions understanding development (Deleau, 1996; Figueras-Costa and Harris, 2001). These investigations demonstrated that children’s emotion understanding is strongly correlated with their language ability and the variance explained by it was slightly higher than the variance explained by age.Few studies have specifically addressed the issue about children’s intellectual level that influence their development of emotion comprehension. Children’s development of emotion understanding is facilitated by cognitive factors (Brown and Dunn, 1996; Ruffman, Slade and Crowe, 2002; de Rosnay, Pons, Harris and Morrell, 2004) appraises as an emergence of their  theory of mind (Astington, Harris and Olson, 1988; Harris, 2000).However there aren’t many studies addressed to analyse the specific effect of intellectual level on children’s emotional comprehension. In our previous research (Albanese et al., 2006) we investigated the effect of non verbal intellectual dimension on emotion understanding in children between 7 and 9 years old. Regression analysis showed a significant direct effect of non verbal intelligence on mental and reflective dimension of  emotional comprehension. However, it also emerged the low effect of this cognitive variable to explain emotion comprehension dimension. This finding encourages studies that analyzing pattern of causal variables in a contemporary view.

 Aims and hypothesis

The aim of this study is to  analyze the roles played by age,language and the nonverbal intellectual dimension in predicting emotion comprehension. The main hypothesis is that language abilities, non-verbal cognitive characteristics are associated with emotional comprehension.

 In particular we hypothesize that:

1.Age,linguistic abilities, non-verbal cognitive factors are positively associated with emotion comprehension;

2.Age has an effect on cognitive and emotional factors;

3.Linguistic abilities have an effect on the understanding of emotions.

Method

Participants

103 children’s group balanced for sex (53% males and 47% females) aged from 3,6 to 5 years (M =4.27; D.S. = 0.89), in months 40 to 71  (M = 54.04; D.S. = 9.56). All children came from Italian public kindergartens. Family backgrounds ranged from middle class to upper class and with no known learning, language or behavioural problems.

Procedure

Children were individually tested at: Test of Emotion Comprehension (TEC) (Pons e Harris, 2000), Standard Progressive Matrices (SPM) (Raven, 1968) and the Test for the Reception of Grammar (TROG) (Bishop, 1989).  After having determined the subject’s mean scores on TEC,on SPMs, and on TROG the hypotheses of the study were tested by  hierarchical regressions analyses.

 Results

Analyses confirmed that correlations between level of emotion understanding, non verbal intellectual aspects and level of language ability  were significant. Several hierarchical regressions analyses were performed, where level of emotion understanding of the children (overall, and for each stadial component) was the dependent variable and age, intellectual non verbal component and language ability were independent variables. Main results found that in each model tested non-verbal cognitive component became not significant, after having entered age in the equation. These findings suggest that children emotion comprehension and its components are mainly accounted for by level of verbal ability and age. Furthermore, verbal ability has a mediating role between age and emotional understanding. The results obtained in this study suggest that in general children’s emotional understanding, as assessed by Test of Emotion Comprehension, is correlated with children’s cognitive process, as assessed by Standard Progressive Matrices. As far as concern our hypothesis we found that children’s non-verbal intelligence is not a predictor of children’s emotional comprehension components but they are explained both by age and language. Implications of these findings are concerned with cognitive and emotional development as important determinants of scholastic experience. Recent research emphasize that, since preschool period, children’s emotional understanding is linked to their social relationship with peers and adults.This kind of research should allow us to design adequate intervention programmes (cognitive versus affective) dealing with emotions and in general with psychosocial adjustment at school.