A number of factors may increase the vulnerability of a child to be victimized by other children. One risk factor is child genotype, acting indirectly through temperament or other behaviors that may evoke bullying from others (DiLalla, L.F., & John, S.G., 2014, Genetic influences on victimization during preschool play with unfamiliar peers. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, 60, 168-192). A possible set of evocative behaviors might be child emotion skills, including the ability to accurately portray emotions as well as to accurately read others’ emotions. In this study of multiples aged 6 to 16 years old, children were assessed for accuracy of expressed emotion (EE) by being photographed while being told to display certain emotions (happy, sad, fearful, or angry). Six different unbiased raters viewed the photographs in random order and rated which emotion they thought was being portrayed. Children also were assessed for accuracy of emotion recognition (ER) on the DANVA (Nowicki, S.J., 2005, The manual for the Diagnostic Analyses of Nonverbal Accuracy (DANVA) tests. Atlanta, GA: Emory University) by watching children’s faces on a computer and rating each for happy, sad, fearful, or angry. Genetic risk scores for angry and fearful EE and ER errors were calculated as a function of co-twin’s errors (top 33%) and zygosity (if co-twin scored in the bottom 33% for accuracy and was an MZ, risk = 4; if co-twin scored in the bottom 33% for accuracy and was a DZ, risk = 3; if co-twin scored in the top 67% and was DZ, risk = 2; if co-twin scored in the top 67% and was MZ, risk = 1). Children completed a victimization questionnaire administered by a tester in the lab. Mixed model multilevel linear regression results showed that children who were poor at making recognizably angry faces were less likely to be victimized (p=.029), but this relationship was an effect of between-family factors (p = .040) and causality could not be determined. Also, children who were poor at recognizing fearful faces were more likely to be victimized (p = .021), and this was due to a significant interaction between ER and zygosity (p = .002) and therefore shared genes. Finally, a significant gene-environment correlation was evident; children with a genetic risk for not recognizing other children’s faces as angry when those children were intending to convey that emotion were significantly more likely to be in an environment characterized by peer bullying (r = .27, p = .026). These results suggest that girls who do not realize that their peers are feeling angry are likely to elicit bullying from their peers, perhaps because by mis-interpreting their peers' expressions they are responding incorrectly and inappropriately to negative situations. Interestingly, this did not hold for boys, suggesting that facial expressions may be less important as eliciting stimuli for them in social situations.
Psychopathology (e.g., Internalizing, Externalizing, Psychosis) , Development
