Children adopted from public care are more likely to experience emotional and behavioural problems. We investigated two aspects of emotion recognition that may be associated with these outcomes, including discrimination accuracy of emotions and response bias, in a mixed-method, multi-informant study of 4-to-8-year old children adopted from local authority care in the UK (N = 42). We compared adopted children’s emotion recognition performance to that of a comparison group of children living with their birth families, who were matched by age, sex, and teacher-rated total difficulties on the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ, N = 42). We also examined relationships between adopted children’s emotion recognition skills and their pre-adoptive histories of early adversity (indexed by cumulative adverse childhood experiences), their parent- and teacher-rated emotional and behavioural problems, and their parents’ coded warmth during a Five Minute Speech Sample. Adopted children showed significantly worse facial emotion discrimination accuracy of sad and angry faces than non-adopted children. Adopted children’s discrimination accuracy of scared and neutral faces was negatively associated with parent-reported behavioural problems, and discrimination accuracy of angry and scared faces was associated with parent- and teacher-reported emotional problems. Contrary to expectations, children who experienced more recorded pre-adoptive early adversity were more accurate in identifying negative emotions. Warm adoptive parenting was associated with fewer behavioural problems, and a lower tendency for children to incorrectly identify faces as angry. Study limitations and implications for intervention strategies to support adopted children’s emotion recognition and psychological adjustment are discussed.

从公共机构收养的儿童更有可能出现情绪和行为问题。我们调查了可能与这些结果相关的情绪识别的两个方面，包括情绪的辨别准确性和反应偏差，在一项针对从地方当局收养的 4 至 8 岁儿童的混合方法、多线人研究中英国（N  = 42）。我们将收养儿童的情绪识别表现与与出生家庭同住的对照组儿童的情绪识别表现进行了比较，这些儿童在年龄、性别和教师评定的优势和困难问卷（SDQ，N）上的总困难相匹配 = 42). 我们还研究了被收养儿童的情绪识别技能与他们收养前的早期逆境历史（以累积的不良童年经历为索引）、他们的父母和老师评定的情绪和行为问题以及他们父母在五分钟内编码的温暖之间的关系语音样本。与非收养儿童相比，收养儿童对悲伤和愤怒面孔的面部情绪辨别准确率明显更差。收养儿童对恐惧和中性面孔的辨别准确性与父母报告的行为问题呈负相关，而愤怒和恐惧面孔的辨别准确性与父母和老师报告的情绪问题相关。与预期相反，经历过更多记录的收养前早期逆境的孩子在识别负面情绪方面更准确。温暖的收养方式与较少的行为问题相关，并且儿童错误地将面孔识别为愤怒的倾向较低。讨论了支持收养儿童情绪识别和心理调整的干预策略的研究局限性和影响。