In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

9 EMOTIONAL DEVELOPMENT IN DEAF CHILDREN: FACIAL EXPRESSIONS, DISPLAY RULES, AND THEORY OF MIND Colin D. Gray, Judith A. Hosie, Phil A. Russell, and Ellen A. Ormel Little is known about emotional development in deaf children. The psychology of deafness has been comparatively slow to benefit from the vigorous research programs on emotional development that, in recent years, have transformed mainstream developmental psychology. Since the fifties, there have been reports that prelingually deaf children raised in a spoken language environment have difficulties with their emotional and social development. The real nature of these difficulties , however, is unclear, and there are many potential confounding variables, both contextual and methodological. There are, however, some recurring themes. Problems with empathy and impulsive control, for example, have frequently been reported (Bachara, Raphael, and Phelan 1980; Greenberg and Kusche 1993; Levine 1956, 1960; Levine and Wagner 1974; Odom, Blanton, and Laukhuf 1973). Later work has set the emotional life of deaf children in the broader contexts of communication and parent-child interaction. For example, Calderon and Greenberg (1993) have studied their emotional development within families. To date, however, there have been few controlled investigations of emotional development in deaf children, and it is the purpose of this chapter to present some recent experimental work. The question of how deaf children acquire emotional understanding is one of some urgency. The recognition and labeling of those emotions that are most clearly reflected in facial expressions are correlated with measures of social competence (Custrini and Feldman 1989), as well as with popularity and social likeability (Denham and Burton 1996; Denham et al. 1990; Nowicki and Duke 1992). In hearing children, emotional understanding, social development, and intellectual growth have all been shown to be closely linked (Nowicki and Duke 1992). The attention paid to emotional understanding in intervention programs designed to The research described in this chapter was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council grant #R000236273. The authors wish to thank William P. Brown, Diane Clark, Michael Karchmer, and Marc Marschark for reading the manuscript and making so many helpful comments. We are grateful to Christeen Scott and Norma Hunter for gathering the data with such care and thoroughness . We also wish to thank Mairi Macaulay, Margaret Falconer, Joan Grant, and the other teachers at the Aberdeen School for the Deaffor their unfailing support and encouragement. 135 136 COLIN D. GRAY, JUDITH A. HOSIE, PHIL A. RUSSELL, AND ELLEN A. ORMEL facilitate social adjustment (Denham and Burton 1996; Greenberg and Kusche 1993) is further testimony to its importance for success in school. In the United Kingdom, following the strong endorsement of "mainstreaming " by the Warnock Committee (1978), the emphasis has been moving away from the specialized school for the deaf toward the provision of extra help for deaf children in ordinary schools. With deaf children, however, the success of mainstreaming is likely to depend at least partly upon the extent to which they adjust emotionally and socially to their new environment. THE COMPLEX NATURE OF EMOTIONAL UNDERSTANDING The development of emotional understanding is, as stated earlier, an integral part of a child's personal, social, and intellectual development (Barrett 1993; Barrett and Campos 1987; Campos, Campos, and Barrett 1989; Goleman 1995; Jenkins, Oatley, and Stein 1998; Salovey and Mayer 1990). However, emotional understanding has several components. Some, such as the identification of facial expressions of emotion and the interpretation of voice tone, are perceptual, in the sense that they require the presence of a physical stimulus (a real or pictured face, the sound of a voice). Others, however, are inferential in nature and do not depend on the presence of any particular physical stimulus. Empathy, for example, can be achieved through various channels of communication: direct conversation, watching a film or play, reading a story, or correspondence by letter or e-mail. Many other aspects of emotional life are similarly nonspecific to any particular medium. The authors examined those aspects of children's emotional understanding that involve the identification of emotional expressions, the understanding of the causes of different expressions, and the knowledge and use of display rules. The children's understanding, however, was also considered in the wider context of social cognition. For this reason, we also decided to explore the children's performance on tests of theory of mind and related functions, such as the ability to ascertain another person's mental state from their line of regard. LINGUISTIC BACKGROUND AND EDUCATION: AN IMPORTANT DISTINCTION The education of deaf children is a field fraught with...

Share