Staying positive in stressful situations is a sign of resilience in young children — and it protects against mental health problems.
An examination of how young children reacted to challenging and stressful situations by the Arizona State University Department of Psychology has found that those who were able to maintain positive emotions during an argument with their parents experienced fewer mental health problems, such as anxiety, depressive symptoms, behavioral outbursts and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder behaviors.
Because the study participants were identical and fraternal twins, the researchers were able to test for genetic contributions to experiencing positive or negative emotions during the conflict. There was no genetic influence on maintaining positive emotions.
“This works suggests that being able to sustain positive affect, even during difficult interactions, may be an important part of psychological resilience in children,” said Mary Davis, professor of psychology and co-leader of the Arizona Twin Project.
“Parents can give their children the structure they need to learn how to cope by setting consistent boundaries and routines, giving them positive reinforcement and respect, and being responsive to their needs. And parents’ own emotion regulation and coping skills give children models of how to deal with tough times.”
The work, which was published in Child Development, also used a novel artificial intelligence-based method to identify positive and negative emotions based on facial expressions.
Nature vs. nurture
The 560 children and parents who participated in this research are part of the Arizona Twin Project, a statewide, long-term study of risk and resilience factors for children’s mental and physical health co-led by Davis, Kathryn Lemery-Chalfant, professor of psychology, and Leah Doane, professor and chair of the Department of Psychology.
The Arizona Twin Project researchers, including Kathryn Lemery-Chalfant, professor of psychology (back row, second from left), Mary Davis, professor of psychology (back row, third from left), and Sierra Clifford, research specialist in psychology (back row, fourth from left). Photo by Laura Fields/ASU
Identical twins share all of their genes, and fraternal twins share, on average, 50% of their genes. The daily life experiences of both types of twins are very similar, but not identical: They have the same parents, live in the same neighborhood and more, but might be in different classes at school or have unique hobbies. Comparing similarities between identical twins to similarities between fraternal twins lets the researchers identify the influence of genes, and everything else.
The twins in this study were 9 years old when each of them and one of their parents were filmed having a friendly chat and an argument.
The identical and fraternal twin pairs were equally similar to each other in how often they showed positive emotions during the argument, suggesting that genetic influences were not a big driver of the ability to stay positive during stressful situations.
The ability to remain positive during the conflict with their parents was also associated with those children having less anxiety, depressive symptoms, behavioral outbursts and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder behaviors. This protective effect of positive emotions was stronger than the influence that negative emotional reactions during the argument had on children’s mental health.
However, when the researchers examined negative emotions more closely, they found a different pattern: a genetic component to showing negative emotions during the conflict.
“Identical twins in a pair were more similar to each other than fraternal twins in how often they showed negative emotions, which points to genetic influences,” said Sierra Clifford, research specialist in the psychology department and first author on the paper.
The Arizona Twin Project is actively recruiting families with twins who are 14–18 years of age through August 2026. More information is available at https://arizonatwinproject.org/contact-us.
“Though the children’s negative affect was genetically influenced, that does not mean it cannot be changed. It also does not mean that the environmental influences — such as harsh or sensitive parenting styles — are unimportant for how those genetic influences will manifest,” Clifford added.
Digging deeper with AI
Lemery-Chalfant, senior author on the paper and director of the ASU Child Emotion Center, said that the research team would not have been able to identify the relationship between the children’s emotions and their mental health without the assistance of an AI-based program.
A common way that scientists study emotions is by filming the face and then closely examining facial expressions, focusing on which individual muscles in the face are moving and how intense that movement is. This used to be done by a scientist who had undergone many hours of training that let them recognize how each of the more than 40 muscles in the face move and create different expressions for feeling happiness, joy, sadness, anger, shame, fear, contempt, disgust and more.
Because this process is incredibly time intensive, researchers typically focused their analysis on about five seconds of video that happened after something important, such as a child reacting to a parent having an outburst. The videos of the parent-child conflict used in this study were seven minutes long, and there were 560 of them, one for each individual twin. This study is among the first time researchers have used AI-based software to classify facial expressions — and the program analyzed the facial expressions in every single frame of the entire video.
“It did this in a matter of seconds,” said Lemery-Chalfant. “Focusing on just five seconds like we used to have to do would not have been enough time to understand the children’s negative and positive emotion expressions across the course of the interactions with their parents.”
This work was supported by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (R01 HD086085).