XI. Relationships and Social Perception: NEPSY-II Affect Recognition Subtest

Background

The ability to accurately decode facial expressions of emotion is critical for emotional development and appropriate social functioning. Preschool children’s ability to recognize and interpret emotional facial expressions has been shown to have long-term effects on social behaviour and academic competence in later childhood (e.g., Denham et al., 2003). Longitudinal research also showed that young children’s deficits in emotion knowledge predicted aggression in subsequent years (Denham et al., 2002). Such findings highlight the importance of being able to accurately assess aspects of emotion understanding in young children with the hope that interventions aimed at improving emotion understanding would reduce difficulties in social functioning. To drive forward the field concerned with the measurement of social and emotional development in children, Darling-Churchill and Lippman (2016) encouraged ongoing validation and refinement of extant measures. The current study examined the psychometric properties of the NEPSY-II Affect Recognition subtest for preschool children in Singapore.

Abstract

Understanding a child’s ability to decode emotion expressions is important to allow early interventions for potential difficulties in social and emotional functioning. This study applied the Rasch model to investigate the psychometric properties of the NEPSY-II Affect Recognition subtest, a U.S. normed measure for 3–16-year-olds which assesses the ability to recognize facial expressions of emotion. Data were collected from 1222 children attending preschools in Singapore. We first performed the Rasch analysis with the raw item data and examined the technical qualities and difficulty pattern of the studied items. We subsequently investigated the relation of the estimated affect recognition ability from the Rasch analysis to a teacher-reported measure of a child’s behaviors, emotions, and relationships. Potential gender differences were also examined. The Rasch model fits our data well. Also, the NEPSY-II Affect Recognition subtest was found to have reasonable technical qualities, expected item difficulty pattern, and desired association with the external measure of children’s behaviors, emotions, and relationships for both boys and girls. Overall, findings from this study suggest that the NEPSY-II Affect Recognition subtest is a promising measure of young children’s affect recognition ability. Suggestions for future test improvement and research were discussed.

Scales and Subscales

The NEPSY-II battery assesses neurocognitive abilities in six functional domains: Attention and Executive Functioning, Language, Memory, and Learning, Sensorimotor, Social Perception, and Visuospatial Processing. The Affect Recognition subtest falls under the Social Perception domain. This 25-item subtest assesses the ability to recognize facial expressions of emotions. The stimuli include color photographs of eight children (boys and girls) displaying six different expressions: happiness, sadness, anger, disgust, fear, and a neutral expression. A child is asked to match facial expressions from an array of photographs.

Funding

Funded by Singapore Ministry of Education (MOE) under the Education Research Funding Programme (OER 09/14 RB; Singapore Kindergarten Impact Project) and administered by the National Institute of Education (NIE), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

References

Darling-Churchill, K. E., & Lippman, L. (2016). Early childhood social and emotional development: Advancing the field of measurement. Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, 45, 1-7. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.appdev.2016.02.002

Denham, S. A., Blair, K. A., Schmidt, M., & DeMulder, E. (2002). Compromised emotional competence: Seeds of violence sown early? American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 72, 70–82. https://doi.org/10.1037//0002-9432.72.1.70

Denham, S. A., Blair, K. A., DeMulder, E., Levitas, J., Sawyer, K., Auerbach–Major, S., & Queenan, P. (2003). Preschool emotional competence: Pathway to social competence?. Child Development, 74(1), 238-256. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8624.00533

Korkman, M., Kirk, U., & Kemp, S. (2007). NEPSY-II: A developmental neuropsychological assessment. San Antonio, TX: The Psychological Corporation.

Yao, S. Y., Bull, R., Khng, K. H., & Rahim, A. (2018). Psychometric properties of the NEPSY-II affect recognition subtest in a preschool sample: a Rasch modeling

approach. The Clinical Neuropsychologist, 32(1), 63-80. https://doi.org/10.1080/13854046.2017.1343865

Citation

Yao, S. Y., Bull, R., Khng, K. H., & Rahim, A. (2018). Psychometric properties of the NEPSY-II affect recognition subtest in a preschool sample: a Rasch modelling         approach. The Clinical Neuropsychologist, 32(1), 63-80. https://doi.org/10.1080/13854046.2017.1343865