Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2018 Aug;59(8):845-854.
doi: 10.1111/jcpp.12881. Epub 2018 Mar 7.

Exposure to childhood adversity and deficits in emotion recognition: results from a large, population-based sample

Erin C Dunn  1   2   3   4 , Katherine M Crawford  1 , Thomas W Soare  1   2   3 , Katherine S Button  5 , Miriam R Raffeld  1 , Andrew D A C Smith  6 , Ian S Penton-Voak  7 , Marcus R Munafò  7   8   9
Affiliations

Exposure to childhood adversity and deficits in emotion recognition: results from a large, population-based sample

Erin C Dunn et al. J Child Psychol Psychiatry. 2018 Aug.

Abstract

Background: Emotion recognition skills are essential for social communication. Deficits in these skills have been implicated in mental disorders. Prior studies of clinical and high-risk samples have consistently shown that children exposed to adversity are more likely than their unexposed peers to have emotion recognition skills deficits. However, only one population-based study has examined this association.

Methods: We analyzed data from children participating in the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children, a prospective birth cohort (n = 6,506). We examined the association between eight adversities, assessed repeatedly from birth to age 8 (caregiver physical or emotional abuse; sexual or physical abuse; maternal psychopathology; one adult in the household; family instability; financial stress; parent legal problems; neighborhood disadvantage) and the ability to recognize facial displays of emotion measured using the faces subtest of the Diagnostic Assessment of Non-Verbal Accuracy (DANVA) at age 8.5 years. In addition to examining the role of exposure (vs. nonexposure) to each type of adversity, we also evaluated the role of the timing, duration, and recency of each adversity using a Least Angle Regression variable selection procedure.

Results: Over three-quarters of the sample experienced at least one adversity. We found no evidence to support an association between emotion recognition deficits and previous exposure to adversity, either in terms of total lifetime exposure, timing, duration, or recency, or when stratifying by sex.

Conclusions: Results from the largest population-based sample suggest that even extreme forms of adversity are unrelated to emotion recognition deficits as measured by the DANVA, suggesting the possible immutability of emotion recognition in the general population. These findings emphasize the importance of population-based studies to generate generalizable results.

Keywords: ALSPAC; Sensitive periods; adversity; children; emotion recognition.

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

The authors have declared that they have no competing or potential conflicts of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Relationship between the adversity score and misattribution of a face as each emotion
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

    1. Barona M, Kothari R, Skuse D, Micali N. Social communication and emotion difficulties and second to fourth digit ratio in a large community-based sample. Mol Autism. 2015;6:68. - PMC - PubMed
    1. Ben-Shlomo Y, Kuh D. A life course approach to chroic disease epidemiology: conceptual models, empirical challenges, and interdisciplinary perspectives. International Journal of Epidemiology. 2002;31:285–293. - PubMed
    1. Boraston Z, Blakemore SJ, Chilvers R, Skuse D. Impaired sadness recognition is linked to social interaction deficit in autism. Neuropsychologia. 2007;45:1501–1510. - PMC - PubMed
    1. Bornstein MH, Arterberry ME, Mash C, Manian N. Discrimination of facial expression by 5-month-old infants of nondepressed and clinically depressed mothers. Infant Behav Dev. 2011;34:100–106. - PMC - PubMed
    1. Bouhuys AL, Geerts E, Gordijn MC. Depressed patients' perceptions of facial emotions in depressed and remitted states are associated with relapse: a longitudinal study. J Nerv Ment Dis. 1999;187:595–602. - PubMed

Publication types