Abstract
This study addresses emotional factors that are relevant for children’s social and emotional well-being. For those that may have deficits or biases in identifying and reacting to the emotions of others, especially when it results in an unexpected emotion expression for a given context, maladaptive interpersonal skills may emerge that can impact emotional competence. The present study investigated the relationship between emotion processing, context-incongruent (CI) anger, and externalizing behavior in four-and-five-year-old preschoolers (n = 74). Measures included parent report and behavioral measures of CI anger, behavioral measures of context congruent (CC) anger, anger perception bias, anger narrative bias, and parent and teacher reports of externalizing behaviors. The findings of the study replicated associations between CI anger and externalizing behavior, as well as provided novel findings supporting a specific anger bias affecting storytelling narratives called anger narrative bias. Children with greater parent-reported CI anger had greater parent-reported externalizing behavior. Greater levels of CI anger during a positive game tended to relate to higher anger narrative during non-anger pictures in the storybook, but did not relate to congruent anger narrative during anger pictures in the storybook. Anger narrative bias also predicted externalizing behavior for children with high CI anger, but unexpectedly, this association trended in a negative direction. These findings suggest that anger narrative bias should be researched further to help find interventions to mitigate the negative social consequences biased emotion processing has on children, as well as providing aspects of emotion processing in everyday life that may be relevant for CI anger.