Picture this: a 3-year-old in a preschool classroom is playing with a popular toy when a classmate asks if they can have the toy. The first child says, “I’m playing with it.” This conversation can go a few different ways, some likely to end in the pre-K version of the Wide World of Wrestling while others ending with toys shared and peace maintained. The difference could be the child’s knowledge of emotion. To be able to regulate their emotional responses, a child has to be able to accurately decipher a situation and know what an appropriate response would be.
If the first child comes from a home in which there are high levels of anger or hostility and poor communication about feelings, they are likely to view the question as hostile and react accordingly. A child with greater awareness of emotions and an ability to empathize might simply respond with a shrug or a request for next.
Though emotional intelligence is often considered a “soft skill,” it forms the bedrock of learning and can help set up a child for success in school, their relationships, and their future work and earnings. Knowledge of emotions is the ability to recognize, label and understand emotions in yourself and others. It’s a prerequisite for emotional regulation: the foundation for effective communication, the ability to listen, the capacity to change one’s emotional state to meet immediate goals, and even the ability to manage stress.
The child’s ability to regulate their emotions predicts these attributes across socioeconomic strata, and various racial and ethnic groups, but can be especially valuable for children facing the twin stressors of poverty and racism.
Various studies have shown that emotional intelligence in adults and adolescents can be a significant moderator of stress responses, but no published studies to date have examined the association in any demographic for basic emotion knowledge and stress.
A recent study published in the journal Early Education and Development examined for the first time the association between emotion knowledge and levels of cortisol, a major marker for stress, in young children. The 307 children in the study attended Head Start preschool; all their families faced economic hardship, and 80% were Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC), positioned to experience systemic racism. The children’s median age was 4 years.
“I’ve been studying the physiological toll of poverty-related stress, and stress and trauma related to racism and systemic oppression,” says Dr. Eleanor Brown, professor of psychology at West Chester University and the study’s lead author. “We know that poverty gets under the skin, and when you’re exposed to stress or trauma related to poverty, your whole body responds.
“If you are exposed to a particular stressor, as in an incident of neighborhood violence, your cortisol levels are going to increase, which helps you marshal the physiological resources to respond. But chronic or repeated elevations in cortisol take a toll on physiological functioning in ways that are detrimental to social-emotional, cognitive and physical health. So, I’ve been interested in what might help children facing high levels of poverty-related stress modulate their physiological response, and a student working with me—Sara King—was especially interested in emotion knowledge.” King is co-first author on the current study.
According to the National Center for Children in Poverty, nearly 40% of children in the U.S. grow up in homes classified as poor ($25,926 for a family of four) or low-income ($51,852 for a family of four). That’s a lot of stress and a lot of cortisol in some very young kids.
Brown’s research focused on the Head Start preschool program because it represents the nation’s largest investment in early childhood education and was designed to support the development of children placed at risk by economic hardship. Head Start enrollment has been associated with improved language and literary skills in preschool children as well as fewer behavioral problems and increased social-emotional competencies. Most Head Start schools have implemented emotions-based prevention programs and curriculum support to increase students’ ability to identify, regulate and constructively use appropriate emotions.
A 2009 study with adolescents suggested that having strong emotional regulation skills helped mitigate some of the negative impact from repeated exposure to poverty-related stressors. Brown’s study looks at whether younger children who developed greater understanding of emotions would show fewer stress effects, as measured by their bodies’ cortisol levels.
Implementing renowned theorist Carroll Izard’s coding system that measures children’s ability to recognize and label expressions of emotion, the researchers found a statistically relevant association of greater emotion knowledge with lower amounts of cortisol. The study highlights the importance of addressing emotional competence in early childhood, Brown says.
When children can identify their emotions, they can exercise a level of cognitive control over their emotional arousal, which enables them to react appropriately to the situations and people they encounter. Emotion knowledge is also linked to the emergence of theory of mind between the ages of 3 and 5, when children become aware that other’s beliefs, desires and feelings may be different from one’s own—a foundational mechanism for navigating social interactions.
This age is the birthplace of empathy—also narcissism, the inability to imagine the needs or feelings of another. As children’s ability to understand emotions grows, their ability to negotiate social situations develops, which can set them on a positive course for elementary school and beyond. On the other hand, children who are unable to identify emotions in preschool may face behavioral and social problems as well as internalizing symptoms such as depression and anxiety.
Across cultures, humans (and some species) have evolved to recognize certain emotions like anger and fear as important knowledge for survival. Understanding potential causes and appropriate responses to these emotions is not so automatic. Much of the teaching of emotions happens naturally as parents and caregivers talk with children about emotion-provoking events they experience in their day-to-day. However, for households facing economic hardship and systemic racism, the picture may be somewhat different.
“A parent who is stressed about poverty or related hardship may be frustrated, anxious, sad, and exhausted,” Brown says. “Despite good intentions, they may treat the child harshly or withdraw emotionally and be less nurturing, less able to have the conversations with them about labeling shapes, learning the alphabet or asking, ‘How did that make you feel?’ A parent working multiple shifts or juggling too many responsibilities simply may not have the time or emotional energy for those conversations.”
Children growing up in chronic poverty also may have issues properly identifying their emotions simply because their stress levels are such that they don’t have the mental and physical bandwidth to do so.
One unfortunate finding of multiple studies is that parents across all socioeconomic strata are more likely to engage in emotion conversations with girls, more likely to offer space for emotional processing, and to support their taking time to work through emotions, Brown says. Parents are more likely to scaffold girls’ emotional processing with emotion coaching, talking about it, giving their emotions labels and helping them understand. Practically universally in American culture, parents of boys have less tolerance of them showing emotion—especially sadness and fear—and taking space to process it, which possibly explains lower levels of emotion knowledge among boys.
Children during this crucial period of development are not only building their knowledge of emotions, but they are also developing the neurocircuitry that will later support their ability to regulate their emotions, driving home the idea, Brown says, that early intervention with preschoolers may be critical for mitigating the impact of early stress exposure on brain development and functioning.
“This isn’t so much that someone who misses this window can never learn that someone who’s smiling is probably feeling happy,” she says. “They can learn to label emotions earlier or later. But this is a critical period for equipping children with the emotion understanding that will allow them to modulate their responses to meet social and learning goals. It’s also a critical period for the development of a key stress response system—the hypothalamic, pituitary adrenal axis (HPA)—which influences learning and memory as well as emotional and physical well-being.”
Brown adds, “There is a critical period of calibration of that system in early childhood that will influence the child’s development. You can’t necessarily reverse the impact of high stress in childhood, and these findings don’t definitively show that emotion knowledge is lowering the children’s cortisol, but the existence of the link we’ve shown suggests that there’s a good chance that by boosting children’s emotion knowledge, we can help them to regulate at a physiological level.
“This is hopeful because we may be able to use these opportunities with children in early childhood educational contexts to target emotion knowledge and skill development in ways that promote lower levels of stress.”
Early Education and Development: “Emotion Knowledge Relates to Cortisol for Children Attending Head Start Preschool” Authors: Eleanor D. Brown, Sara King, Mallory L. Garnett, and Steven J. Holochwost
Further Reading
- Chronic Stress Can Affect Preschooler’s Resilience and Self-Control: Sensitive Parenting Can Mitigate Those Risks
- Early Learning Nation magazine has published numerous articles featuring various aspects of Head Start.
K.C. Compton worked as a reporter, editor and columnist for newspapers throughout the Rocky Mountain region for 20 years before moving to the Kansas City area as an editor for Mother Earth News. She has been in Seattle since 2016, enjoying life as a freelance and contract writer and editor.
