Developing a Coding System for Sulking Behavior in Young Children

Children’s sulking behavior is a salient yet understudied emotional phenomenon. It has been hypothesized to result from hurt feelings, humiliation, and anger, and might thus function as a nonverbal measure in the behavioral studies of these emotions. We conducted three studies that served to develop a comprehensive coding system for children’s sulking behavior. The first study explored sulking features in an online survey that used parental and teacher reports. In an event-based parental diary study, we reevaluated the importance of each feature based on its frequency across episodes of sulking behavior and analyzed the time course of sulking episodes. Finally, we analyzed YouTube videos and demonstrated that the coding system could be reliably applied. We also determined a minimal number of necessary features as a classification threshold. The resulting coding system includes the following features: becoming silent, distancing, turning away, gaze avoidance, crossing arms, lowering head, pouting lips, lowered eyebrows, and, probably, utterances of illegitimate devaluation, and relational distancing. Thus, all varieties of sulking seem to have withdrawal from an ongoing interaction in common.