Emotion Understanding Correlates With Parental Emotional Expressivity in Chinese Youths With Hearing Loss and Typical Hearing

Yousong Hu; Shuyang Dong; Fang Guan; Outong Chen; Jun Chen; Shurong Xu

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.662356

Emotion Understanding Correlates With Parental Emotional Expressivity in Chinese Youths With Hearing Loss and Typical Hearing

Front Psychol. 2021 Jun 29:12:662356. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.662356. eCollection 2021.

Authors

Yousong Hu^{1

2

3

4}, Shuyang Dong⁵, Fang Guan⁶, Outong Chen⁷, Jun Chen^{1

2

3

4}, Shurong Xu⁸

Affiliations

¹ School of Psychology, South China Normal University, Guangzhou, China.
² Key Laboratory of Brain, Cognition and Education Sciences (South China Normal University), Ministry of Education, Guangzhou, China.
³ Center for Studies of Psychological Application South China Normal University, Guangzhou, China.
⁴ Guangdong Key Laboratory of Mental Health and Cognitive Science, South China Normal University, Guangzhou, China.
⁵ Department of Developmental Psychology, Utrecht University, Utrecht, Netherlands.
⁶ Department of Psychology, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China.
⁷ Department of Normal College and School of Teacher Education, Qingdao University, Qingdao, China.
⁸ Luoding Middle School, Luo Ding, China.

Abstract

This study aimed at examining the differences between Chinese youths with hearing loss (HL) and with typical hearing (TH) in emotion understanding (EU), parental emotional expressivity, and the associations between EU and parental emotional expressivity. The participants were 282 youths with HL (14.58 ± 3.42 years old) and 350 youths with TH (11.69 ± 2.49 years old). EU was measured by four visual-mode tasks, of which two involve language comprehension while the others do not. Parents reported positive and negative emotional expressivity on the Self-Expressiveness in the Family Questionnaire. Covariates were controlled for including socioeconomic status, parent gender, youth gender, age, intelligence, and teacher-reported comprehension difficulties. Results showed that the four EU tasks were more challenging for the youths with HL than for the youths with TH. The interaction effect of the two groups × 4 tasks was not significant, suggesting that the differences between the two groups of youths in EU were generally similar across the four tasks. The parents of the youths with HL did not differ from the parents of the youths with TH in how often they displayed positive and negative emotional expressivity. Multigroup regression analyses revealed that negative emotional expressivity was negatively related to EU in the youths with HL but not in the youths with TH. However, these two regression coefficients were not significantly different. Positive emotional expressivity was not related to EU in either group. In conclusion, this study extends the knowledge about the EU of Chinese youths with HL and emotion-related socialization of the parents of these youths.

Keywords: emotion understanding; hearing loss; negative emotional expressivity; positive emotional expressivity; typical hearing.