UC Berkeley

This dissertation examined two distinct affective processes as antecedents of healthy socioemotional functioning: emotion recognition in vocal bursts and controllability beliefs about emotions. This investigation, consisting of two sections, utilized a longitudinal study spanning from early childhood through pre-adolescence (NT1 = 168, NT2 = 98). The first section explored children’s ability to recognize emotions in vocal bursts and its socioemotional correlates. Results revealed that gender differentially predicted the developmental trajectories of recognition accuracy in this modality. Specifically, while younger girls (vs. boys) were better at recognizing emotions in vocal bursts, this difference disappeared by age eight. In addition, higher competence in this ability predicted a lower likelihood of parent-reported conduct problems and a higher tendency toward parent-reported prosocial behavior concurrently, with the latter effect staying significant longitudinally. The second section investigated parents’ beliefs about children’s capacity to control their emotions (“emotion controllability”) as another antecedent for socioemotional development. Results indicated that parents’ beliefs about children’s emotion controllability predicted children’s own emotion controllability beliefs. These beliefs of children, in turn, predicted their use of cognitive change strategies and, subsequently, better socioemotional functioning. These findings contribute to our growing understanding of how both emotion recognition and emotion controllability beliefs are important factors in predicting children’s adaptive functioning.