Test of Emotional Comprehension: Exploring the underlying structure through Confirmatory Factor Analysis and Similarity Structure Analysis.

Abstract

Some decades of research on emotional development have underlined the contribution of several domains to emotion understanding in childhood. Based on this research, Pons and colleagues (Pons & Harris, 2002; Pons, Harris & Rosnay, 2004) have proposed the Test of Emotion Comprehension (TEC) which assesses nine domains of emotion understanding, namely the recognition of emotions, based on facial expressions; the comprehension of external emotional causes; impact of desire on emotions; emotions based on beliefs; memory influence on emotions; possibility of emotion regulation; possibility of hiding an emotional state; having mixed emotions; contribution of morality to emotion experiences. This instrument was administered individually to 182 Portuguese children aged between 8 and 11 years, of 3rd and 4th grades, in public schools. Additionally, we used the Socially in Action-Peers (SAp) (Rocha, Candeias & Lopes da Silva, 2012) to assess TEC’s criterion-related validity. Mean differences results in TEC by gender and by socioeconomic status (SES) were analyzed. The results of the TEC’s psychometric analysis were performed in terms of items’ sensitivity and reliability (stability,

test-retest). Finally, in order to explore the theoretical structure underlying

TEC

a Confirmatory Factor Analysis and a Similarity Structure Analysis were computed. Implications of these findings for emotion understanding assessment and intervention in childhood are discussed.