Abstract
Internalizing behaviors in early childhood, such as anxiety and depression, have been consistently linked to sadness. However, the sadness-internalizing literature has almost exclusively treated sadness as a general tendency or composite with other emotions. Assessment of children’s sadness is often without consideration of whether it occurs in expected, contextcongruent (CC), or unexpected, context-incongruent (CI), contexts. CI emotional expressions may signal underlying vulnerabilities, as prior work on CI anger demonstrates links to maladaptive behavioral and social outcomes. The present study extended this framework to sadness by examining whether CI sadness is uniquely associated with internalizing symptoms in preschool-aged children and whether sad perception bias (SPB), the tendency to interpret emotional situations as sad, plays a role in this association. Participants include 74 preschoolers (ages 4–5). CI and CC sadness were assessed through parent-report and behavioral observations during two tasks, one involving provocation and one involving loss. SPB was measured as children’s tendency to label non-sad emotion-eliciting scenarios as sad. Internalizing symptoms were measured using parent and teacher reports of emotionally reactive and anxious/depressed symptoms. Parent-reported CI sadness predicted both emotionally reactive and anxious/depressed symptoms after accounting for parent-reported CC sadness. Behavioral CI sadness was associated with anxious/depressed symptoms only among children with higher behavioral CC sadness. SPB did not directly predict internalizing symptoms or CI sadness; however, SPB moderated the association between parent-reported CI sadness and emotionally reactive symptoms with a similar trend for anxious/depressed symptoms. Specifically, CI sadness was more strongly associated with internalizing symptoms among children with higher SPB. These findings suggest that considering the context of children’s sadness may help clarify early emotional vulnerabilities associated with internalizing risk.