The human voice is a primary channel for emotional communication. It is often presumed that being able to recognize vocal emotions is important for everyday socio-emotional functioning, but direct empirical evidence for this remains scarce. Here, we examined relationships between vocal emotion recognition and socio- emotional adjustment in children. The sample included 6 to 8-year-old children (N = 141). The emotion tasks required them to categorize five emotions conveyed by nonverbal vocalizations (e.g., laughter, crying) and speech prosody: anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, plus neutrality. Socio-emotional adjustment was independently evaluated by the children’s teachers using a multi-dimensional questionnaire of self-regulation and social behavior. Based on frequentist and Bayesian analyses, we found that higher emotion recognition in speech prosody related to better general socio-emotional adjustment. This association remained significant even after accounting for the children’s general cognitive ability, age, sex, and parental education in multiple regressions. Follow-up analyses indicated that the advantages were particularly robust for the socio-emotional dimensions prosocial behavior and cognitive and behavioral self-regulation. For emotion recognition in nonverbal vocalizations, no associations with socio-emotional adjustment were found. Overall, these results support the close link between children’s emotional prosody recognition skills and their everyday social behavior.

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Emotion Recognition,Vocal Emotions,Speech Prosody,Socio-Emotional Adjustment,Children