Young Brazilian Children’s Emotion Understanding: A Comparison within and across Cultures

Research on children’s Emotion Understanding (EU) has been dominated by middle-class samples from Western societies. We studied cultural and Socioeconomic Status (SES) variation in young children’s EU in a high SES sample (n = 50) and a low SES sample (n = 50) of Brazilian preschoolers using the Test of Emotion Comprehension. We found that the high SES sample performed better at both the overall and component levels than the low SES sample on EU. The differences were especially substantial for the recognition of basic emotions, with the low SES children recognizing negative emotions better than positive and neutral emotions. In addition, we compared the two SES samples of Brazilian children to same-age samples from Norway, Italy and Peru. Between the Brazilian and the European samples and the Brazilian and other non-European samples, the variation in EU was observed to be more related to SES than to culture.