The Test of Emotion Comprehension (TEC) for children aged 3 to 10: Factorial structure, normative scores and use in typical and atypical assessment

Journal title RICERCHE DI PSICOLOGIA
Author/s Ilaria Grazzani, Valeria Cavioni , Veronica Ornaghi, Alessandro Pepe
Publishing Year 2020 Issue 2020/3
Language Italian Pages 21 P. 907-927 File size 313 KB
DOI 10.3280/RIP2020-003006
DOI is like a bar code for intellectual property: to have more infomation click here

Below, you can see the article first page

If you want to buy this article in PDF format, you can do it, following the instructions to buy download credits

Article preview

FrancoAngeli is member of Publishers International Linking Association, Inc (PILA), a not-for-profit association which run the CrossRef service enabling links to and from online scholarly content.

This paper is aimed at providing further psychometric robustness to the Test of Emotion Comprehension (TEC), a standardized tool for assessing emotion comprehension in childhood. The study explores the factorial structure, gender and age invariance in a large sample of children from Northern and Central Italy (N = 1,478, M = 755; F = 723) aged 3 to 10 years, identifying the pattern of age-normative development across six-month intervals. The confirmatory factorial analysis supports the original psychometric structure of the TEC. Implications for typical and atypical assessment and for research purpose are discussed.

Keywords: Test of Emotion Comprehension, structural equation model, normative scores, gender invariance, typical and atypical assessment

  1. Albanese, O., & Molina, P. (2008, Eds.). Lo sviluppo della comprensione delle emozioni e la sua valutazione. La standardizzazione italiana del Test di Comprensione delle Emozioni (TEC). Milano: Unicopli.
  2. American Psychiatric Association (2014). DSM-5. Manuale diagnostico e statistico dei disturbi mentali (5th ed.). Milano: Raffaello Cortina.
  3. Ashwin, C., Chapman, E., Colle, L., & Baron-Cohen, S. (2006). Impaired recognition of negative basic emotions in autism: A test of the amygdala theory. Social Neuroscience, 1(3-4), 349-363. DOI: 10.1080/17470910601040772
  4. Astington, J.W., Harris, P. L., & Olson, D.R. (1988). Developing theories of mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  5. Bender, P. K., Pons, F., Harris, P. L., Esbjørn, B. H., & Reinholdt-Dunne, M. L. (2015). Emotion understanding in clinically anxious children: A preliminary investigation. Frontiers in Psychology, 6, 1916.
  6. Browne, M.W., & Cudeck, R. (1993). Alternative ways of assessing model fit. In K.A Bollen & J.S. Long (Eds.), Testing structural equation models (pp. 136-162). Newbury Park, CA: Sage.
  7. Byrne, B.M. (2004). Testing for multi-group invariance using AMOS Graphics: A road less traveled. Structural Equation Modeling, 11(2), 272-300.
  8. Chen, F.F. (2007). Sensitivity of goodness of fit indexes to lack of measurement invariance. Structural Equation Modeling, 14(3), 464-504. DOI: 10.1080/10705510701301834
  9. Conte, E., Ornaghi, V., Grazzani, I., Pepe, A., & Cavioni, V. (2019). Emotion knowledge, theory of mind, and language in young children: Testing a comprehensive conceptual model. Frontiers in Psychology, 10, 2144.
  10. Denham, S.A., Ferrier, D.E., Howarth, G.Z., Herndon, K.J., & Bassett, H.H. (2016). Key considerations in assessing young children’s emotional competence. Cambridge Journal of Education, 46(3), 299-317. DOI: 10.1080/0305764X.2016.1146659
  11. Edwards, J. R., & Bagozzi, R. P. (2000). On the nature and direction of relationships between constructs and measures. Psychological Methods, 5(2), 155–174. DOI: 10.1037/1082-989X.5.2.155
  12. Fabrigar, L.R., Wegener, D.T., MacCallum, R.C., & Strahan, E.J. (1999). Evaluating the use of exploratory factor analysis in psychological research. Psychological Methods, 4(3), 272-299. DOI: 10.1037/1082-989X.4.3.272
  13. Fidalgo, A.M., Tenenbaum, H.R., & Aznar, A. (2018). Are there gender differences in emotion comprehension? Analysis of the test of emotion comprehension. Journal of Child and Family Studies, 27(4), 1065-1074.
  14. French, B.F., & Finch, W.H. (2008). Multigroup confirmatory factor analysis: Locating the invariant referent sets. Structural Equation Modeling: A Multidisciplinary Journal, 15(1), 96-113. DOI: 10.1080/10705510701758349
  15. Göbel, A., Henning, A., Möller, C., & Aschersleb, G. (2016). The relationship between emotion comprehension and internalizing and externalizing behavior in 7- to 10-year-old children. Frontiers in Psychology, 7:1917.
  16. Grazzani, I. (2014). Psicologia dello sviluppo emotivo. Bologna: Il Mulino.
  17. Grazzani, I., Ornaghi, V., & Brockmeier, J. (2016). Conversation on mental states at nursery: promoting social cognition in early childhood. European Journal of Developmental Psychology, 13(5), 563-581. DOI: 10.1080/17405629.2015.1127803
  18. Grazzani, I., Ornaghi, V., & Riva Crugnola, C. (2015). Emotion comprehension and attachment: A conversational intervention with school-aged children. Revue Européenne de Psychologies Appliquée. 65(6), 267-274. DOI: 10.1016/j.erap.2015.10.004.
  19. Grazzani, I., Ornaghi, V., Conte, E., Pepe, A., & Caprin, C. (2018). The relation between emotion understanding and theory of mind in children aged 3 to 8: The key role of language. Frontiers in Psychology, 9:724.
  20. Hair, J.F., Black, W.C., Babin, B.J., & Anderson, R.E. (2010). Multivariate data analysis, 7th Edition. London: Pearson.
  21. Harris, P.L. (1989). Children and emotion: The development of psychological understanding. Oxford, England: Blackwell.
  22. Harris, P.L. (2008). Children's understanding of emotion. In M. Lewis, J. M. Haviland-Jones & L. F. Barrett (Eds.), Handbook of emotions (pp. 320-331). New York, NY: The Guilford Press.
  23. Harris, P.L., de Rosnay, M., & Pons, F. (2016). Understanding emotions. In L. Feldman Barrett, M. Lewis & J. M. Haviland-Jones (Eds.), Handbook of emotions (4th ed., pp. 293-306). New York, NY: The Guilford Press.
  24. Harris, P.L., de Rosnay, M., Pons, F. (2005). Language and children’s understanding of mental state. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 14(2), 69-73.
  25. Homer, B.D., & Tamis-LeMonda, C. S. (2005, Eds.). The development of social cognition and communication. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers.
  26. Horn, J.L. (1991). Discussion of the issues of factorial invariance. In L. M. Collins & J. L. Horn (Eds.), Best methods for the analysis of change (pp. 114-125). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
  27. Horn, J.L., & McArdle, J.J. (1992). A practical and theoretical guide to measurement invariance in aging research. Experimental Aging Research, 18(3-4), 117-144. DOI: 10.1080/03610739208253916
  28. Hu, L., & Bentler, P.M. (1999). Cutoff criteria for fit indexes in covariance structure analysis: Conventional criteria versus new alternatives. Structural Equation Modeling, 6(1), 1-55. DOI: 10.1080/10705519909540118
  29. Kasari, C., Freeman, S., & Hughes, M. (2001). Emotion recognition by children with Down syndrome. American Journal on Mental Retardation, 106(1), 59-72. DOI: 10.1352/0895-8017
  30. Kline, R. (2013). Exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis. In Y. Petscher, C. Schatschneider & D. L. Compton (Eds.), Applied quantitative analysis in education and the social sciences (pp. 183-217). New York: Routledge.
  31. Laugen, J.N., Jacobsen, K.H., Rieffe, C., & Wichstrøm, L. (2017). Emotion understanding in preschool children with mild-to-severe hearing loss. Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education, 22(2), 155-163.
  32. Mancini, P., Giallini, I., Prosperini, L., D’alessandro, H.D., Guerzoni, L., Murri, A., Cuda, D., Ruoppolo, G., De Vincentiis, M., & Nicastri, M., (2016). Level of emotion comprehension in children with mid to long term cochlear implant use: How basic and more complex emotion recognition relates to language and age at implantation. International Journal of Pediatric Otorhinolaryngology, 87, 219-232.
  33. Mardia, K.V. (1970). Measures of multivariate skewness and kurtosis with applications. Biometrika, 57(3), 519-530. DOI: 10.2307/2334770
  34. Marino, F., Chilà, P., Trusso Sfrazzetto, S., Carrozza, C., Crimi, I., Failla, C., Busà, M., Bernava, G., Tartarisco, G., Vagni, D., Rutal L., & Pioggia, G. (2019). Outcomes of a robot-assisted social-emotional understanding. Intervention for young children with autism spectrum disorders. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders.
  35. Mokken, R. J. (1971). A theory and procedure of scale analysis. Paris: Mouton The Hague.
  36. Morin, A.J.S., Marsh, H.W., & Nagengast, B. (2013). Exploratory structural equation modeling. In G. R. Hancock & O. M. Mueller (Eds.), Structural equation modeling: A second course (pp. 395-436). Charlotte, CN: Information Age Publishing.
  37. Ornaghi, V., Grazzani, I., & Brockmeier, J. (2014). Enhancing social cognition by training children in emotion understanding: a primary school study. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 119, 26-39.
  38. Ornaghi, V., Pepe, A., Agliati, A. & Grazzani, I. (2019). The contribution of emotion knowledge, language ability, and maternal emotion socialization style to explaining toddlers’ emotion regulation. Social Development, 28(3), 581-598.
  39. Penny, K.I. (1996). Appropriate critical values when testing for a single multivariate outlier by using the Mahalanobis distance. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series C, 45(1), 73-81. DOI: 10.2307/2986224
  40. Pepe, A., Addimando, L., & Veronese, G. (2017). Measuring teacher job satisfaction: Assessing invariance in the teacher job satisfaction scale (TJSS) across six countries. Europe’s Journal of Psychology, 13(3), 396-416.
  41. Pochon, R., & Declercq, C. (2014). Emotional Lexicon Understanding and Emotion Recognition: A Longitudinal Study in Children with Down Syndrome, Journal of Developmental and Physical Disabilities, 26, 549-563. DOI 10.1007/s10882-014-9380-6.
  42. Pons, F., & Harris, P. L. (2019). Children’s understanding of emotions or the “error” of Pascal. In V. LoBue, K. Perez-Edgar & K. Buss (Eds.), Handbook of emotional development (pp. 431-449). Cham, Switzerland: Springer.
  43. Pons, F., & Harris, P.L. (2000). Test of Emotion Comprehension - TEC. Oxford, United Kingdom: University of Oxford.
  44. Pons, F., de Rosnay, M., Bender, P.K., Doudin, P., Harris, P. L., & Giménez-Dasì, M. (2014). The impact of abuse and learning difficulties on emotion understanding in late childhood and early adolescence. The Journal of Genetic Psychology, 175(4), 301-317. DOI: 10.1080/00221325.2014.903224
  45. Pons, F., Harris, P.L., & de Rosnay, M. (2004). Emotion comprehension between 3 and 11 years: Developmental periods and hierarchical organization. European Journal of Developmental Psychology, 1(2), 127-152. DOI: 10.1080/17405620344000022
  46. Rump, K. M., Giovannelli, J.L., Minshew, N.J., & Strauss, M.S. (2009). The development of emotion recognition in individuals with autism. Child Development, 80(5): 1434-1447.
  47. Salomone, E., Bulgarelli, D., Thommen, E., Rossini, E., & Molina P. (2019). Role of age and IQ in emotion understanding in Autism Spectrum Disorder: implications for educational interventions. European Journal of Special Needs Education, 34(3), 383-392. DOI: 10.1080/08856257.2018.1451292
  48. Uljarevic, M., & Hamilton, A. (2012). Recognition of emotions in autism: a formal meta-analysis. Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 43(7),1517-1526.
  49. Woolfe, T., Want, S.C., & Siegal, M. (2002). Signposts to development: theory of mind in deaf children. Child Development, 73(3), 768-778. DOI: 10.1111/1467-8624.00437
  50. Yuill, N., & Little, S. (2018). Thinking or feeling? An exploratory study of maternal scaffolding, child mental state talk, and emotion understanding in language-impaired and typically developing school-aged children. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 88(2) 261–283.

  • Validation of Italian students’ self-ratings on the SSIS SEL brief scales Valeria Cavioni, Elisabetta Conte, Ilaria Grazzani, Veronica Ornaghi, Carmel Cefai, Christopher Anthony, Stephen N. Elliott, Alessandro Pepe, in Frontiers in Psychology 1229653/2023
    DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1229653

Ilaria Grazzani, Valeria Cavioni , Veronica Ornaghi, Alessandro Pepe, Il Test of Emotion Comprehension (TEC): per bambini dai 3 ai 10 anni proprietà psicometriche, punteggi di riferimento e utilizzo in ambito tipico e atipico in "RICERCHE DI PSICOLOGIA " 3/2020, pp 907-927, DOI: 10.3280/RIP2020-003006