343

British Journal of Developmental Psychology (2005), 23, 343363

q 2005 The British Psychological Society

The
British
Psychological
Society
www.bpsjournals.co.uk

More than talk: Relations between emotion

understanding and positive behaviour in toddlers
Rosie Ensor and Claire Hughes*
Centre for Family Research, University of Cambridge, UK
Background. Associations between positive behaviour, emotion understanding
and verbal ability have been reported in studies of preschoolers (Cassidy, Werner,
Rourke, Zubernis, & Balaraman, 2003), but have yet to be investigated in younger
children.
Methods. In this study the performance of 36 toddlers (17 boys and 19 girls; mean
age 29 months, SD 3:9 months) on standardized verbal ability assessments and
four simple tests of emotion understanding was examined in relation to three measures
of positive behaviour: maternal ratings of prosocial behaviour (Strengths and Difficulties
Questionnaire; Goodman, 1997), and video-based coding of the toddlers in 20-minutes
dyadic play with (i) mothers and (ii) familiar peers.
Results. Relations between the three measures of positive behaviour were rather
modest, and only significant for the association between maternal ratings and observed
positive behaviours with peers. Maternal ratings of prosocial behaviour were
significantly correlated with performance on the emotion-understanding tasks, even
when age effects were controlled. Together, emotion understanding and verbal ability
explained over half the variance in maternal ratings of prosocial behaviour; unique
predictive effects were significant for emotion understanding but not verbal ability.
Further, emotion understanding mediated the relationship between verbal ability and
mothers ratings of prosocial behaviour.
Conclusions. These findings highlight the importance of emotion understanding as a
proximal influence on very early prosocial behaviour.

Prosocial behaviours such as sharing and comforting (and other deliberate efforts to aid
or support others) are evident in the first 3 years of life (Hay, 1979; Hoffman, 1982;
Rheingold, 1976; Zahn-Waxler, Radke-Yarrow, Wagner, & Chapman, 1992). Prosocial
children show more frequent positive interactions with peers (Farver, 1994), including
developmentally advanced play (Howes & Matheson, 1992) and cooperation (Dunn &
Munn, 1986). Moreover, studies of aggressive children demonstrate that it is the absence
of positive social behaviour (rather than the simple presence of aggression) that leads to

* Correspondence should be addressed to Dr Claire Hughes, Centre for Family Research, University of Cambridge, Free School
Lane, Cambridge CB2 3RF, UK (e-mail: ch288@cam.ac.uk).
DOI:10.1348/026151005X26291

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Rosie Ensor and Claire Hughes

rejection by peers (Denham, McKinley, Couchoud, & Holt, 1990; Volling, MacKinnon
Lewis, Rabiner, & Baradaran, 1993). These findings highlight the importance of positive
social behaviours for establishing harmonious relationships.
Developmental changes in the frequency of prosocial behaviour are a matter of some
debate. Although meta-analytic findings (Fabes & Eisenberg, 1996) indicate a general
age-related increase in prosocial behaviour, longitudinal studies of very young children
do not always support this view. For example, Hay (1994) suggested that the capacity for
prosocial behaviour acts emerges in the second year in life and declines thereafter. What
is more generally agreed is that stable individual differences in prosocial behaviours can
be found from about 2 years of age (Dunn & Munn, 1987; Hay, Castle, Davies,
Demetriou, & Stimson, 1999).
There is also considerable debate as to how young childrens positive behaviours
should be assessed. Most studies rely on questionnaire ratings from adults (usually the
mother). However, findings from several studies suggest that both maternal factors such
as depression (Briggs-Gowan, Carter, & Schwab-Stone, 1996; Hay et al., 1999) and
transactional effects (Masten & Curtis, 2000; Patterson, Dishion, & Chamberlain, 1993)
influence maternal ratings. Direct observations provide a valuable means of avoiding
these problems, but are typically time-consuming, difficult to standardize and strongly
influenced by day-to-day variability in behaviour, such that they show little or no
agreement with aggregate ratings (Epstein, 1983; Hops, Davis, & Longoria, 1995; Jones,
Reid, & Patterson, 1975; Stoolmiller, Eddy, & Reid, 2000). Given these contrasting
advantages and disadvantages, in the present study both maternal questionnaire ratings
and direct observations were used to assess individual differences in toddlers positive
social behaviours.
A core aim of the study was to investigate early cognitive characteristics associated
with individual differences in positive social behaviour, with a particular focus on
individual differences in early emotion understanding. Research on emotion understanding has largely focused on charting developmental milestones. Thus, it is known
that from around 18 months, toddlers understand simple emotions such as happiness
(Borke, 1971), anger and sadness (Michalson, 1985), and show some understanding of
how situations relate to emotions (Harris, 1989) and can use others emotional
expressions to interpret others desires (Bartsch & Wellman, 1995; Repacholi & Gopnik,
1997). By 3 years of age, children begin to understand the subjectivity of emotion. For
example, 3-year-olds can recognize that a given situation may evoke different emotions in
different people (Denham & Couchoud, 1990). However, it is not until the early school
years that children come to understand mixed emotions (Gordis, Rosen, & Grand, 1989;
Lourenco, 1997; Peng, Johnson, Pollock, Glasspool, & Harris, 1992).
Studies of individual differences in emotion understanding have largely focused on
preschoolers. Such studies (Denham & Couchoud, 1991; Denham et al., 1990; Strayer,
1980) demonstrate that children who show advanced emotion understanding also
display more positive social behaviour towards peers, are more liked by their peers, and
are rated as more socially competent by teachers. However, a recent study that included
measures of emotion understanding and verbal ability revealed that associations
between the emotion understanding measures and social competence overlapped
entirely with the influence of verbal ability on social competence (Cassidy et al., 2003).
Much less attention has been paid to individual differences in emotion
understanding in the toddler years. This paucity of research is striking given that, as
argued by Dunn (2001), young childrens understanding of emotions and of others
perspectives carries important implications for individual differences generally in

Toddlers positive social behaviour

345

positive social relations. Support for this view comes from an early report that individual
differences in emotion understanding in 2- and 3-year-olds are related to prosocial
responses to others emotions (Denham, 1986). What remains in question however, is
the extent to which this relationship is independent of relations between verbal ability
and prosocial behaviour. Given that young children show striking individual differences
in their verbal skills, and that experimental assessments of emotion understanding
typically require a certain level of verbal ability, this question is both methodologically
and conceptually important.
As indicated above, studies of preschoolers demonstrate that individual differences
in emotion understanding and in verbal ability show closely entwined influences upon
positive social behaviours. One plausible account of this close relationship is that
childrens growing verbal skills provide increasing opportunities to engage in
conversations about inner states that will foster the maturation of their emotion
understanding. In support of this view, longitudinal studies have demonstrated
predictive associations between early engagement in conversations about feelings and
childrens later success on emotion-understanding tasks (Dunn & Brown, 1993; Dunn,
Brown, Slomkowski, Tesla, & Youngblade, 1991; Slomkowski & Dunn, 1996). In turn,
individual differences in emotion understanding are likely to have a proximal influence
on prosocial behaviours such as comforting (Murphy, 1937) and concerned response to
distress (Cummings, Hollenbeck, Ianotti, Radke-Yarrow, & Zahn-Waxler, 1986). By this
account, emotion understanding should mediate the influence of individual differences
in verbal ability upon differences in childrens positive social behaviour. However,
emotion understanding has not yet been directly examined as a mediator of this relation.
More generally, as noted above, there is a lack of research on the links between
positive social behaviours, emotion understanding and verbal ability in the toddler
years. Addressing this gap was the main goal of the present study. A first preliminary aim
was to examine three sources of information about toddlers positive social behaviour:
maternal ratings and direct observations of the toddlers with mothers and with familiar
peers. Our second main aim was to use regression analyses to elucidate the joint and
unique influences of verbal ability and emotion understanding on toddlers positive
social behaviours. Given the findings from studies of preschoolers, we predicted
significant overlap in the influences of verbal ability and emotion understanding upon
toddlers positive social behaviour.
Our third aim was to test the hypothesis that individual differences in emotion
understanding mediate the influence of verbal ability on positive social behaviour. One
widely used method of investigating mediation effects consists of assessing the results
from regression analyses against four logical steps (Baron & Kenny, 1986). These four
steps are: (i) the outcome variable is predicted by the initial variable; (ii) the outcome
variable is predicted by the posited mediator; (iii) the posited mediator is predicted by
the initial variable; and (iv) when entered simultaneously as predictors of the outcome
variable, the effect of the initial variable is attenuated, but the effect of the mediator is
maintained. If satisfied, these criteria demonstrate that the data are consistent with
a mediation account. However, they do not establish conclusively that mediation has
occurred, since other models are consistent with these criteria. In this study we
therefore adopted statistical methods by which mediation may be formally assessed
(MacKinnon & Dwyer, 1993; MacKinnon, Waris, & Dwyer, 1995).

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Rosie Ensor and Claire Hughes

Method
Participants
Participants were 36 toddlers, 17 boys and 19 girls (mean age 29 months, SD 3:9
months), recruited from four mother-toddler groups in Cambridge, UK. Six toddlers
were aged 20- to 24-months; 10 were aged 25- to 28- months; 14 were aged 29- to 32months, and 6 were aged 33- to 36-months (there was no gender difference in the
distribution of ages). All the toddlers were Caucasian; most were from middle-class
families. Information about family background and structure was collected from
mothers during the visit. For parental occupation, 75% of the heads of households were
in professional/managerial occupations; 10% were in skilled non-manual occupations
and 15% were in manual occupations. For parental education, 66% of mothers and 72%
of fathers had college degrees; 22% of mothers and 13% of fathers had A-levels
(equivalent to high school diploma); 12% of mothers and 12% of fathers had GCSEs or
equivalent; and 3% of fathers had no educational qualifications. In terms of family
structure, 6% of mothers were lone parents; 47% of the toddlers were singletons; 47%
had one sibling, and 6% had two siblings (90% of all siblings were older siblings).
Materials
Observational sessions
Props for the mother-toddler sessions included 20 plastic zoo animals and safari play
mat, and six jigsaws ranging in difficulty from simple-inset to 25-piece interconnected
puzzles. Props for toddler peer play included pretend-play toys (fireman, policeman,
fairy and nurse outfits; toy cooker, pans, utensils, food; toy garden tools), and a double
trampoline and safety mats.
The British Abilities Scales naming subtest is based on an A6 picture book of simple
objects (e.g fish, cup, watch). The comprehension subtest includes an A4 picture card
of a teddy bear; a box of eight small items (toy car, toy horse, toy watch, toy soldier,
miniature cat and dog, button, pencil); and an inset puzzle with nine elements (two
boys, big and small house/tree; car, van, bridge).
The Emotion Photos task included a set of eight A4 laminated sheets, each with two
A5 colour photographs showing a happy face and a sad/angry face. Four cards showed
two photos of a boy, four cards showed two photos of a girl, both children were about
7 years old. The photos were taken from an educational game Jeux de visages (Nathan,
France).
The Emotion Puppet tasks included four puppets (two male, two female, with one
blank-faced puppet in each pair) and four felt faces (approx 10 cm in diameter) showing
happy, sad, and angry expressions, with a Velcro tab on the back so that they could be
placed on the blank-faced puppets. The puppet stories task also included a miniature
wooden ice-cream cone and some small wooden blocks.
Procedures
Pairs of toddlers matched for sex and age ( /2 3 months) and regularly attending the
same toddler group visited the lab together, accompanied by their mothers. At the start
of the visit, one toddler explored a playroom equipped with concealed cameras and a
one-way mirror while his/her mother completed the 25-item Strengths and Difficulties
Questionnaire (SDQ; Goodman, 1997). The mother and toddler were then filmed for 20
minutes playing together. In an adjacent room the other toddler completed first the

Toddlers positive social behaviour

347

emotion-understanding tasks, and second, the verbal ability assessments (mothers sat
away from the toddler during this time and completed two vocabulary checklists).
Toddlers were praised for taking part in each task, but were not given any feedback on
their performance. The two mothers and toddlers then swapped rooms and completed
the other activity. Following a snack break (in which information about the family was
collected from mothers) the toddlers played together in the playroom for the final joint
half-hour session.
Observational procedures
After a 5 minute free-play warm-up, mothers and toddlers were filmed for 10 minutes
playing with a pretend safari set and then for 10 minutes playing with jigsaws. In the
second observation the two mother-toddler dyads were brought together in a 10
minutes warm-up in which they were asked to work together in making and decorating
paper hats. The toddlers were then filmed for 10 minutes playing together with the
pretend toys, and then for 10 minutes playing on the double trampoline. Mothers were
asked to sit back and let the toddlers play by themselves as much as possible.
Assessments of verbal ability
Toddlers expressive and receptive verbal abilities were assessed using the naming and
verbal comprehension subtests from the British ability scales. Mothers also completed
two 100-item expressive vocabulary checklists, adapted by Dale et al. (1998) from the
MacArthur Communicative Developmental Inventory (Fenson, Dale, Reznick, & Bates,
1994).
Assessments of emotion understanding
Emotion recognition and labelling were assessed in three tasks. In the first of these,
toddlers were asked to identify which of a pair of colour photographs of faces showed
positive (happy) versus negative (angry and sad) emotions. Across eight trials, the
photographs were counterbalanced for position (left/right), gender and order. In the
next two tasks (Puppet Faces 1 and 2), taken from Denham (1986), three felt faces
portraying happy, sad, and angry expressions were used to assess toddlers expressive
and receptive identification of emotions. In Puppet Faces 1, a puppet with a blank face
(male for boys, female for girls) was introduced to the child as either Nancy or Johnny.
The experimenter then said, Were going to play a game, to see if you can tell me how
Nancy/Johnny is feeling. The three emotion faces were then placed in turn on the
puppet and the child was asked, How does Nancy/Johnny feel now? In Puppet Faces 2
the experimenter said, Now Im going to tell you how Nancy/Johnny feels, and I want
you to choose the right face to put on her/him. Look, Nancy/Johnny is feeling
Happy/Sad/Angry (these options were presented in a randomized order, and with
matching affective tone).
The fourth task (unambiguous puppet stories Denham, 1986) involved six simple
vignettes (enacted using Nancy/Johnny puppet plus Mummy and Sibling puppets) that
tapped childrens ability to infer a puppet characters emotion from unambiguous
situations associated with feelings of happiness, sadness, or anger (two of each type).
Each vignette (e.g. sibling pushes puppet, hurting the puppet) was narrated with
matching affective tone of voice, and the child was asked to choose the face that showed
how the puppet was feeling.

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Rosie Ensor and Claire Hughes

Scoring
Maternal ratings of behaviour
For each of the 25 items in the SDQ, mothers rated the behaviour as not true (1),
sometimes true (2), or certainly true (3). This questionnaire has proven utility in
screening for childhood difficulties in community samples (Goodman, Forth, Simmons,
Gatward, & Meltzer, 2003) and includes four difficulty subscales (attention deficit/
hyperactivity, conduct disorder, internalizing problems and peer problems) that are
validated against ratings from much longer questionnaires such as the Child Behaviour
Checklist (Goodman & Scott, 1999). However, our focus in this paper is on positive
behaviours, and so our analyses are based on the fifth prosocial subscale (see Table 1 for
item details), which has a possible range of 515 points.
Toddlers behaviours with mothers
The ParentChild Interaction System (Deater-Deckard, Pylas, & Petrill, 1997) was used
by the first author (who was unaware of the toddlers task scores) to provide videobased ratings of the toddlers behaviour with their mothers in the jigsaw and safari play
settings. Three 0 to 6-point Likert scale ratings are the focus of the present paper:
(1)

(2)

(3)

Responsiveness verbal or behavioural responsiveness to mothers questions,

comments, and behaviours (0 no response, ignored all mothers comments,
questions, and behaviours; 3 responded to about half the mothers comments,
questions or behaviours, often with some delay; 6 always responds immediately
and expands upon some comments made by the mother).
On-task initiative and persistence with the task (0 no interest or initiative;
3 moderate interest and initiative, completed the task with their mother;
6 consistent interest and initiative).
Compliance doing what the mother asks (0 constantly refused or did something
contrary to what the mother asked; 3 moderate amounts of compliance,
i.e. during about half of the session; 6 consistently did what the mother asked).

Ratings for each behaviour were strongly correlated across settings (inter-item
correlations ranged from .38 to .50, all significant at p , :05 level) and so were summed
to create three 012 point scales.
Toddlers behaviours with familiar peers
Howes peer play scale (Howes & Matheson, 1992) was used by the first author to code
three aspects of the toddlers interactions with familiar peers in each of the 10 minute
observational setting. The first of these was complexity of play. Across ten 30 second
segments, selected at even intervals from each of the two observational settings, the
most complex play observed was rated according to the following ordinal scale:
(0) Parallel play engaged in a similar activity to the peer, but without eye contact or
social behaviours;
(1) Parallel aware play engaged in a similar activity to the peer with eye contact;
(2) Simple social play displays social behaviours (e.g. vocalizations, offers of an
object, smiles) that are directed to the peer;
(3) Complementary and reciprocal displays of role reversals with the peer
(alternating roles in chasing games, swapping roles in pretend play)

Emotion understanding

Verbal ability

Observed positive behaviours to peer

Observed positive behaviours to mum

Prosocial
Behaviours (SDQ)

Considerate of other peoples feelings

Shares readily with other children
(treats, toys, pencils etc.)
Helpful is someone is upset, hurt or feeling ill
Kind to younger children
Often volunteers to help others
(parents, teachers, other children)
Responsiveness
Compliance
On-task
Highest level of interaction
Frequency of joining peers play
Frequency of verbal recruitment of peer
Comprehension (BAS)
Naming (BAS)
Vocabulary (mother ratings)
Photos (receptive)
Puppet Faces 1 (expressive)
Puppet Faces 2 (receptive)
Puppet stories (inferring emotion)

Variable

1.55
1.92
2.94
1.43
0.63
1.33
6.09
4.36
47.17
2.38
2.47
2.60
4.42

0.59
0.61
0.63

2.24
2.46
2.32
8.19
9.64
8.61
4.61
0.29
0.76
17.32
8.58
137.58
6.06
1.86
3.14
3.86

0.60
0.39

SD

2.16
2.09

Mean

Table 1. Descriptive statistics for toddlers verbal abilities, emotion understanding and positive behaviour

012
012
012
06
020
020
027
020
0200
08
06
06
012

13
13
13

13
13

Poss. range

511
412
112
26
04
06
025
016
12194
08
06
06
012

13
13
13

13
13

Range

Toddlers positive social behaviour

349

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Rosie Ensor and Claire Hughes

Ratings of play complexity across the two settings were correlated, r35 :54, p , :01,
and so were summed to create a single 0 to 6-point scale. The next two rating scales
assessed the frequency of two particular behaviours: joining the peers play, and verbally
recruiting the peer to his or her own play. The first of these was rated according to the
number of 30 second segments from each of the two observational settings (020 scale) in
which the child successfully joined the peers play (i.e. child makes an action that is
directed to the peer and that elicits a positive response, but is not a response to an action
directed towards him or her from the peer). The second score was rated according to the
number of 30 second segments from each of the two observational settings (020 scale) in
which the toddler was successful in verbally engaging their peer in his or her own play.
This was defined as actions verbally directed to the peer that elicited a positive response.
A second trained graduate established reliability through double coding of 25% of all
videotapes. Inter-rating agreement for each scale was good or excellent. For toddlers
positive behaviour with mothers, Spearmans r was .96 for responsiveness, .94 for
compliance, and .88 for on task. For toddlers positive behaviour with peer, Spearmans
r was .90 for social play, .83 for successful joining, and .79 for successful verbal
recruitment.
Verbal ability
Standard scoring procedures from the British abilities scale were applied; this gave a
possible range of 020 points for naming vocabulary and 027 for verbal
comprehension. The two 100-item maternal checklists for expressive vocabulary gave
a possible range of 0200.
Emotion understanding
For the photos task, children received 1 point for each correct trial (giving a possible
range of 08 points). For all three puppet-tasks, children received 2 points for each trial
with a correct response, and 1 point for a response that was the correct valence, but not
the correct specific emotion (e.g. calling the angry face sad). Thus the possible range of
scores was 06 points for each of the two puppet faces tasks and 012 points for the
puppet stories task.
Next, the binomial theorem (see Appendix 1) was used to establish statistically
significant (i.e. p , :05) criteria for passing each task. For the photos task, this criterion
was seven of eight trials correct. For the Puppet Faces 2 task the criterion was a score of
2 points on all three trials. The criterion for the puppet stories was a score of 2 points on
five out of six stories. Finally, the criterion for the Puppet Faces 1 task was a score on 2
points on all three trials. Fifty-five percent of the toddlers correctly identified the happy,
sad, and angry faces in the photos task; 42% of the toddlers identified the face that
matched the emotion for five out of six of the simple vignettes in the Puppet Faces 2
task; 58% of the toddlers correctly identified the emotion valence in seven of eight trials
in the puppet stories; and 33% of the toddlers could provide a verbally correct label for
all three faces in the Puppet Faces 1 task. Each child was then given a total passes score
(04 points).

Results
We begin by presenting descriptive statistics and data reduction for all measures.
Following the three main aims of this study, we next summarize the relationships

Toddlers positive social behaviour

351

between the three measures of toddlers positive behaviours. We then examine relations
between emotion understanding, verbal ability and positive behaviour, using regression
analyses to assess the overlap between emotion understanding and verbal ability as
predictors of individual differences in positive behaviour. Finally, we test the hypothesis
that individual differences in emotion understanding play a mediating role in the
relationship between verbal ability and positive behaviour.

Descriptive statistics
Table 1 presents the means, standard deviations, and ranges for all raw scores, including
emotion-understanding tasks, psychometric assessments of verbal ability, maternal
ratings of vocabulary and prosocial behaviours, and observational ratings of toddlers
positive behaviours with mothers and peers. No significant gender differences were
found for 16 of the 18 measures shown in Table 1, t1; 34 , 1:66, p . :11. The two
exceptions were one item from the SDQ prosocial subscale (often volunteers to help
others parents, teachers, other children) for which girls scored marginally higher than
boys, t1; 34 1:95, p :06, and the emotion puppet stories task, for which boys
outperformed girls, t1; 34 2:51, p , :05. However, when maternal education was
entered as a covariate in an ANOVA, these gender differences were no longer significant,
F1; 34 , 2:20, p :15. For 17 of the 18 measures, no differences were found
between singletons versus children with siblings, t1; 34 , 21:52, p . :14). The
exception was an item from the SDQ prosocial scale (helpful if someone is hurt, upset,
or feeling ill) for which singletons had marginally higher scores even when maternal
education was co-varied in an ANOVA, F1; 34 3:25, p :08). To simplify the
analyses, the data are reported for the whole sample in all the following sections.

Data reduction
Positive behaviour
The correlations for the five items in the SDQ prosocial subscale, although not all
significant, were all in the expected positive direction (inter-item correlations ranged
from .17, ns to .51, p , :01). Cronbachs a for this subscale was .57. Although this
suggests rather weak internal consistency, it is worth noting that recent findings from a
study in which the SDQ was administered to parents, teachers, and children in a
nationwide epidemiological sample of 10,438 British 5- to 15-year-olds (Goodman,
2001) demonstrate the reliability of this prosocial subscale (values of Cronbach a were
.65 for parental report, .85 for teacher report and .66 for self-report).
In the mother-toddler observations, toddlers responsiveness, compliance, and on
task behaviours were strongly correlated with each other (inter-item correlations ranged
from .61 to .79, p , :01), and so these three ratings were averaged to create an
overall index of toddlers positive behaviour with their mothers. Cronbachs a for
this overall score was .82, indicating excellent internal consistency. The distribution of
this overall score of toddlers positive behaviours with their mothers was normal.
In the peer observations, toddlers complexity of play, frequencies of successful
joining and verbal recruitment of peer were correlated (inter-item correlations ranged
from .39 to .53, p , :05). As the complexity of play score was on a 06 scale, in contrast
with the 020 scales for the other two measures, all three measures were converted to
010 scales before being averaged to create an overall index of toddlers positive
behaviour towards their peer. Cronbachs a for this overall score was .77, indicating

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Rosie Ensor and Claire Hughes

good internal consistency. The distribution of this overall score of toddlers positive
behaviours with peers was normal.
Verbal ability
The three measures of the toddlers verbal ability were highly correlated (inter-item
correlations ranged from .64 to .68, p , :01). As there was a tenfold difference in the
range of scores across measures, standard z-scores were calculated and then averaged to
create a composite index of verbal ability. Cronbachs a for this composite score was
.76, indicating good internal consistency. The distribution of this composite verbal score
was normal.
Emotion understanding
Relations between individual task performances on the four emotion tasks were
calculated using Pearsons correlation coefficients for the total points (raw score) and
f contingency coefficients for the pass/fail ratings. For the raw scores, the mean
correlation was .49, p , :01; all six correlations were significant at the p , :05 level
(range .38.77). For the pass/fail ratings, the mean value of f was .42, p , :01). Five
of the six coefficients were significant at the p , :05 level (range .39.77); the sixth
coefficient was between photos and puppet stories and was marginally significant
(f .29, p :07).
These significant between-task correlations supported the creation of two aggregate
emotion-understanding scores. The first aggregate was the raw total, and represented
the total number of points gained across all tasks. The second aggregate represented the
total number of tasks passed. Cronbachs a was .86 for the raw total and .77 for the
total passes, indicating good internal consistency for both aggregates. An even
(i.e. platykurtic) distribution was found for both aggregates, but the non-normality of
these distributions was not significant (zem raw 1:62; zem pass 1:85, ns for both). The
group mean values, standard deviations, and ranges for the two aggregates were as
follows: X em raw 18:36, SD 11:69, range 032; X em pass 2:00, SD 1:52,
range 04.
The second aggregate is a more stringent (and therefore more reliable) index of the
toddlers emotion understanding; however, with a possible range of just 04 points
(compared with 032 points for the raw total) it is a less powerful measure of individual
differences in emotion understanding. For these reasons, all analyses are reported
separately for each aggregate. Although calculated in quite different ways, these two
aggregates were highly correlated, r36 :95, p , :001), supporting the internal
validity of childrens scores on these emotion tasks.
Relations between different measures of toddlers positive behaviours Table 2
shows that maternal ratings of toddlers prosocial behaviour were marginally correlated
with observational ratings of toddlers positive behaviours with their peers, r35 :31,
p , :10, and with their mothers, r36 :32, p , :10. However, toddlers observed
positive behaviours with mothers were not significantly related to observed positive
behaviours with peer, r36 :26, ns.
Relations between emotion understanding, verbal ability and positive behaviour
Our main focus in this study concerned the relations between emotion understanding
and positive social behaviours. Table 2 shows that emotion understanding was
correlated with maternal ratings of prosocial behaviour, r em raw 36 :54 p , :01;
r em pass 36 :56, p , :01, and observed positive behaviours with peers,

**p , :01, *p , :05, p , :10.

Verbal composite
Emotion raw total
Emotion total pass
Prosocial (SDQ)
Positive with mother
Positive with peer

.57**
.57**
.54**
.25
.30

Verbal

.95**
.54**
.10
.38*

Emotion raw

.56**
.10
.31

Emotion pass

.32
.31

Prosocial (SDQ)

.26

Positive mother

Positive peer

Table 2. Age-partialled correlations between toddlers verbal ability, emotion understanding, mother-rated prosocial behaviour and observed
positive social behaviours

Toddlers positive social behaviour

353

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Rosie Ensor and Claire Hughes

r em raw 36 :38, p , :05; r em pass 36 :31, p , :10, but was not correlated with
observed positive behaviours towards mothers.1 Since the relationship between
emotion understanding and maternal reports of prosocial behaviours was particularly
robust, these maternal reports were chosen as the variable for the regression analyses.
Separate hierarchical regression analyses were conducted to examine emotion
understanding and verbal ability as predictors of prosocial behaviour. In the first
analyses, age, verbal ability, and emotion understanding were entered into the equations
simultaneously as predictors of maternal ratings of prosocial behaviour, and together
explained over half of the variance, R2em raw :55, F1; 34 13:59, p , :001;
R2em pass :51, F1; 34 11:58, p , :001. This substantial effect was then examined
further by asking whether verbal ability and emotion understanding each predict unique
variance in prosocial behaviour.
In the regression analyses shown in Table 3, we assessed whether emotion
understanding contributed any unique variance in prosocial behaviour by entering age
and verbal ability into the equations at Step 1. Together, these variables explained 44%
of the variance (R 2 :44, F2; 33 13:57, p , :001). Adding emotion understanding
at Step 2 significantly increased the explained variance in prosocial behaviour,
DR2em raw :11, F inc 1; 34 4:63, p , :05; DR2em pass :07, F inc 1; 34 4:63,
p , :05. In the regression analyses shown in Table 4, we assessed whether verbal
ability contributed any unique variance in prosocial behaviour, by entering age and
emotion understanding into the equations at Step 1. Together, age and the total emotion
raw score explained 53% of the variance, R 2 :53, F2; 33 14:6, p , :001); and
adding verbal ability at Step 2 did not increase the explained variance in maternal ratings
of prosocial behaviour, DR 2 :03, F inc 1; 34 0:03, ns. A similar pattern was evident
for total emotion tasks passed: age and total passes explained 46% of the variance,
R 2 :46, F2; 33 18:76, p , :001; and adding verbal ability at Step 2 did not
significantly increase the explained variance in prosocial behaviour, R 2 :05,
F inc 1; 34 3:41, p :10:
A mediation model Our findings so far show that verbal ability and emotion
understanding are highly correlated and jointly explain over half the variance in
toddlers prosocial behaviour; in addition, emotion understanding but not verbal ability
shows a unique contribution to the variance. To address the question of whether
emotion understanding mediates the effect of verbal ability on prosocial behaviour, we
used the Sobel test, which directly examines the reduction in the effect of the initial
variable on the outcome. More specifically, we used the Aroian version of the Sobel test
(Baron & Kenny, 1986), as this version does not assume small standard errors for the
regression coefficients, both between the independent variable and mediator, and
between the mediator and the dependent variable (Preacher & Leonardelli, 2001).
These analyses demonstrated that emotion understanding does mediate effects of verbal
ability on toddlers prosocial behaviour (zem raw 2:63, p , :01; z em pass 2:05,
p , :05).
1
With age partialled, SDQ total difficulty scores were marginally (and inversely) correlated with maternal ratings on the SDQ
prosocial subscale, r(36) 2 .30, p , .08, but were not significantly correlated with emotion understanding,
rem raw(36) 2.27, ns; rem pass(36) 2.22, ns. Thus the strong correlation between emotion understanding and
prosocial behaviour cannot be attributed to a more general association between task performance and toddlers behaviour.

Toddlers positive social behaviour

355

Table 3. Summary of hierachical regression analyses: Emotion understanding predicts unique variance
in maternal ratings of prosocial behaviour
Total emotion raw score
Variable
Step 1
Age
Verbal ability
Step 2
Age
Verbal ability
Emotion

SE B

2 .02
.62

.13
.18

2 .02
.29
2.17

Total emotion tasks passed

B

SE B

0.03
0.65**

2 .02
.62

.13
.18

.13
20.02
.20
0.30
.76
0.52**
R 2 :44** for Step 1;
DR 2 :11** for Step 2

2 .02
.37
.87

0.03
0.65**

.13
20.02
.20
0.38
.40
0.39*
R 2 :44** for Step 1;
DR 2 :07* for Step 2

**p , :01, *p , :05.

Table 4. Summary of hierarchical regression analyses: Verbal ability does not predict unique variance in
mother ratings of prosocial behaviour
Total emotion raw score
Variable
Step 1
Age
Emotion
Step 2
Age
Emotion
Verbal ability

SE B

2 .02
2.82

.13
.63

2 .02
2.17
.28

Total emotion tasks passed

B

SE B

0.03
0.67**

.11
1.29

.12
.34

.13
20.02
.76
0.52**
.20
0.30
R 2 :53** for Step 1;
DR 2 :03 for Step 2

2 .02
.87
.37

0.14
0.59**

.13
20.02
.40
0.39*
.20
0.38*
R 2 :46** for Step 1;
DR 2 :05 for Step 2

**p , :01, *p , :05, p , :10.

Discussion
This study explored the relations between individual differences in toddlers emotion
understanding and verbal ability, and positive behaviour (assessed via maternal ratings
and direct observations of the toddlers with their mothers and with familiar peers). Our
key aim was to bring together research into early cognitive and social development.
Specifically, we examined whether individual differences in positive behaviour could be
predicted from toddlers performances on tests of emotion understanding and verbal
ability. Emotion understanding was assessed using both lenient (total points obtained)
and stringent (total tasks passed) aggregate scores, while a single multi-measure, multiinformant aggregate was used to assess verbal ability. Three main findings emerged from
this study. First, the different measures of positive behaviour were only modestly related
to each other, highlighting both the contextual and relationship-specificity of toddlers
positive behaviours. Second, both emotion understanding and verbal ability were
significant predictors of individual differences in maternal ratings of toddlers prosocial

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Rosie Ensor and Claire Hughes

behaviour (and jointly explained over half the variance), but only emotion
understanding predicted unique variance in prosocial behaviour. Third, individual
differences in emotion understanding mediated the relationship between individual
differences in verbal ability and prosocial behaviour. In this discussion section we
consider each of these findings in relation to the results from previous studies.
Contrasts between alternative measures of toddlers positive behaviour
Three sources of information about positive behaviour were used in this study: maternal
checklist ratings and direct observations of toddlers with mothers and with peers.
Maternal ratings of prosocial behaviour were positively correlated with both of these
observational ratings and when age differences were controlled, these correlations
remained marginally significant. This suggests that dispositional factors such as
personality or temperament contribute somewhat to measures of toddlers positive
behaviours (Fabes & Eisenberg, 1996).
That said, overall, the correlations between the three measures of positive social
behaviour were rather modest, as was the internal consistency for maternal ratings of
prosocial behaviour. These findings reflect (i) the contrast between direct observations
and information from mothers, (ii) the relationship specificity of toddlers positive social
behaviours, and (iii) the distinct nature of different prosocial acts (e.g. empathic
concern vs. routine helpfulness). With regard to the first point, our results highlight the
value of information from mothers, since only the maternal ratings of prosocial
behaviour remained robustly associated with individual differences in emotion
understanding once individual differences in age and verbal ability were taken into
account. This suggests that (at least for this predominantly educated sample) mothers
are aware of age- and ability-related contrasts in behaviour, and take these into account
when providing information about their toddlers behaviour. A second advantage of
maternal reports is that mothers are able to provide a broader view of their children,
based on interactions with multiple partners, and in diverse settings.
Our second point applies particularly to the non-significant correlation between the
ratings of positive behaviour to mothers and to familiar peers. These sessions took place
within a single lab visit, and so this low correlation is not explained by diurnal influences
or by day-to-day variability in behaviour. However, from Table 1 it can be seen that the
types of behaviour rated as positive with mothers and peers were rather different, and
this will contribute to the low correlation obtained. This qualitative contrast may reflect
differences in settings as well as in social partners. That said, individual behaviours
showed robust correlations across settings (e.g. goal-directed jigsaw play vs.
unstructured free play). Thus the main factor underpinning the low correlation across
toddlers play with mothers versus peers is likely to be the relationship specificity of
positive behaviour. In this way, our findings are consistent with previous studies that
report no relationship in observational ratings of joint pretend play ( Youngblade &
Dunn, 1995); conflict management (Slomkowski & Dunn, 1992), or mental-state talk
(Brown, Donelan-McCall, & Dunn, 1996) in childrens relationships with mothers,
siblings, and best friends.
Our third point highlights the need for future research to incorporate information on
childrens motivations, relevant experiences (e.g. comforting a younger sibling), and
personality characteristics within analyses of individual differences in prosocial
behaviour. More generally, the weak correlations between different methods and
informants (and the low internal consistency of the prosocial scale) present a significant
obstacle to constructing reliable indices of individual differences in behaviour. However,

Toddlers positive social behaviour

357

these findings are wholly consistent with findings from other multi-method studies of
young children. For example, a study of 16- to 28-month-olds showed that most
correlations across methods or across raters were very close to, or below chance (Fagot,
1995). Establishing robust measures of individual differences in very young childrens
behaviour remains a challenge for future research.
Emotion understanding and verbal ability as predictors of prosocial behaviour
Previous studies have reported significant relationships between emotion understanding, verbal ability, and positive behaviour in preschool-aged children (Cassidy et al.,
2003) and between affective perspective taking and prosocial behaviour in school-aged
children (Hoffman, 1982; Underwood & Moore, 1982). Our findings add to this literature
by providing clear evidence for an equally strong relation between individual differences
in emotion understanding, verbal ability, and prosocial behaviour in toddlers.
Specifically, separate stepwise regression analyses showed that emotion understanding, but not verbal ability, made a unique contribution to the variance in toddlers
prosocial behaviour (although unique influences of verbal ability on prosocial behaviour
approached significance when emotion understanding was indexed by the more
stringent but less sensitive total passes measure). Thus our findings offer a contrast with
Cassidy et al.s (2003) report that, for preschoolers, associations between emotion
understanding and prosocial behaviour overlapped entirely with associations between
verbal ability and prosocial behaviour. This suggests that the mechanisms underlying
links between emotion understanding, verbal ability, and positive behaviour may shift
with development. In particular, emotion understanding appears central to
understanding individual differences in positive behaviour in toddler-hood, whereas
more general cognitive skills (e.g. verbal ability) appear to come to the fore by the
preschool years.
This shift may reflect developmental changes in the relationship between verbal
ability and emotion understanding. Research with preschoolers and older children
highlights the importance of language for childrens socio-cognitive development. This
message is particularly clear in recent research on childrens theory of mind acquisition.
For example, findings from both longitudinal studies of typically developing children
(Astington & Jenkins, 1999; de Villiers, 2000) and cross-sectional comparisons of
late-versus native-signing deaf children (Peterson & Siegal, 1995; Woolfe, Want, & Siegal,
2002) support the view that language is fundamental to theory of mind development.
Likewise, recent evidence indicates that emerging conversational skills, particularly on
the causes of negative emotions (Lagattuta & Wellman, 2002), enables and encourages
children to think causally about other peoples feelings. Similarly, Saarni (1999, 2001)
argued that the ability to label and talk about personal and interpersonal experiences is
a central component of emotional competence.
Conversely, recent research on infants word learning provides convincing evidence
that the acquisition of even simple nouns requires rich conceptual, social, and linguistic
capacities interacting in complex ways (Baldwin, 1995; Baldwin, Markman, Bill,
Desjardins, & Irwin, 1996; Baldwin & Moses, 2001; Bloom, 2001, 2002; Morales et al.,
2000; Mundy & Gomes, 1998). In particular, the developmental course of what Camaioni
(2001) calls the ontogenesis of reference, starts with joint attention and culminates in
the use of words as symbols to communicate about shared meanings. Since joint attention
is also a foundation for childrens early social understanding (Tomasello, 1995), early
individual differences in verbal ability are likely to reflect individual differences in
socio-cognitive competencies (such as emotion understanding).

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Rosie Ensor and Claire Hughes

Emotion understanding mediates the relation between verbal ability and prosocial
behaviour
Our findings also contribute to our understanding of the mechanisms underlying links
between emotion understanding, verbal ability, and positive behaviour. Mediation
effects have been considered in at least one previous study (Denham et al., 1990) in
which preschoolers knowledge of emotion situations was found to mediate the relation
between age and peer ratings of likeability; however the effects of verbal ability were
not considered.
The results from the present study indicate that, for toddlers, the influence of verbal
ability on individual differences in toddlers prosocial behaviour appears to operate
largely through the more proximal influence of emotion understanding. This result is
unlikely to stem from a weakness in our measure of verbal ability, since this included
both psychometric assessments of receptive and expressive language ability and
maternal checklist ratings of their toddlers expressive vocabulary.
Instead, the evidence from this study suggests that emotion understanding mediated
the influence of verbal ability on prosocial behaviour. What aspects of childrens
everyday experiences might explain this mediatory role? Detailed observational studies
of young children and their families, such as those conducted by Dunn and colleagues
(Dunn & Brown, 1993; Dunn et al., 1991; Slomkowski & Dunn, 1996) highlight the
importance of family talk about feelings. Specifically, the growing importance of social
interactions in the toddler years provides a genuine motivation for children to apply
their understanding of others emotions in order to engage in both positive interactions
such as comforting and cooperating, and negative interactions such as teasing and
provocation. Social interactions involving toddlers are often emotionally charged; and
this in turn can motivate young childrens talk about feelings.
In turn, family discussions about feelings provide an opportunity for adults to explain
the consequences of transgressions in a way that capitalizes on childrens empathic
capacities (Hoffman, 1975a, 1975b). Such inductive strategies are linked with
internalization of social demands for prosocial behaviour (Kuczynski & Kochanska,
1995) and are generally associated with prosocial responding (Krevans & Gibbs, 1996).
Interestingly, the affective intensity with which mothers deliver these explanations
moderates the strength of this association, with affectively charged explanations
showing especially strong associations with prosocial behaviour in 2-year-olds (Zahn
Waxler, Radke Yarrow, & King, 1979). Our findings in this present study support these
conclusions, and confirm that it is likely to be changes in childrens emotion
understanding (rather than general verbal ability) that lead to increased prosocial
behaviour.
Conclusions and caveats
Taken together, the findings from this study contribute in three ways to the existing
literature. The first strength of this study is its focus on toddler-hood, a period that has
been described as the dark ages for developmental cognitive psychology (Meltzoff,
Gopnik, & Repacholi, 1999). Our findings add to the small but growing literature on
socio-cognitive skills in toddlerhood (Meltzoff et al., 1999; Repacholi & Gopnik, 1997).
These studies challenge early notions of a watershed period of development between
the ages of 3 and 5, by demonstrating that the fundamentals of social understanding are
apparent and measurable in toddlerhood. The second strength of the study lies in its
combination of task assessments with detailed observational measures; providing
a bridge between the too often separate strands of research into young childrens

Toddlers positive social behaviour

359

cognitive and social development. In particular, our findings are a first step in
documenting how emotion understanding contributes to the emergence of positive
behaviour in the toddler years. The third strength of this study comes from the
demonstration that emotion understanding mediates the association between verbal
ability and prosocial behaviour in toddler-hood. While numerous studies of preschoolers
have provided ample evidence for associations between verbal ability and positive
behaviour, very few have included formal tests of what mechanisms might explain these
associations. Here, our findings were surprisingly strong in that emotion understanding
emerged not as a partial mediator, but as a strong mediator of the relation between
verbal ability and prosocial behaviour in toddlers.
At the same time, limitations to the study should be acknowledged. First, the
generalizability of our results is limited by the relatively small size leading to reduced
statistical power, and so replication with a larger and a more diverse sample is needed.
Second, our results highlight the need for multiple observations in the home as well as
the laboratory, coupled with coding schemes that focus directly on toddlers talk about
inner states. Third, while our results showed that verbal ability and emotion
understanding jointly explained over half the variance in prosocial behaviour, factors
beyond these socio-cognitive influences, such as temperament, are also likely to
contribute to individual differences in positive behaviour (Fabes & Eisenberg, 1996).
Future studies of the early origins of positive behaviour should therefore combine sociocognitive assessments with behavioural ratings of temperament in young children.
Together, these methodological advances should increase our understanding of the
origins of positive behaviour, and so provide a valuable counterpart to the expanding
literature on behavioural problems and their early origins. Toddlers are all too often
described in terms of the terrible twos; exploring their positive social behaviour and
socio-cognitive competencies may put the occasional tantrum into perspective.

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Appendix
Definition of the binomial coefficient and binomial probabilities
Across N independent trials with two possible outcomes (e.g. Pass/Fail) the probabilities
associated with x outcomes of one type, and N 2 x outcomes of another type is given by:
pX x N xp x q N2x
where X is the discrete variable associated with the number of outcomes of a certain
kind (e.g. passes) and x is the number of outcomes (passes) that actually occur; p is
the probability of passing a given trial, q 1 2 p is the probability of failing a given
trial and N x is the number of permutations giving rise to x Passes and N 2 x Fails
and equals N!=x!N 2 x!
These formulae can be illustrated with worked examples for the tasks in this study.
Thus the probability of passing seven of eight trials in the photos task is:
p7 8!=7!1!0:57 0:51
8 0:0078 0:5
0:031
The probability of five out of six puppet stories answered completely correctly is
p5 6!=5!1!0:335 0:671
6 0:0041 0:67
0:017
Finally, calculating the probability of three consecutive completely correct trials on
the faces tasks was much simpler: p 0:3333 0:037