The Assessment of Children’s Emotional Skills (ACES)

The Assessment of Children’s Emotion Skills (ACES) contains three subtests—facial expressions, behavioral descriptions, and situational vignettes–that examine children’s ability to recognize emotion arousal. In addition to prototypic facial expressions and behavioral/situational descriptions, some items contain ambiguous emotion arousal, particularly containing a mixture of sad and angry cues. In multiple studies Dr. Schultz has shown that aggressive children tend to view ambiguous negative emotion arousal as indicating anger. The facial expressions subtest comes in Powerpoint format, and the behavioral and situational vignettes are read aloud. ACES materials can be downloaded for free. For more information, please contact Dr. Schultz at dschultz@umbc.edu.