Age-Dependent Positivity-Bias in Children’s Processing of Emotion Terms

Abstract

Emotions play an important role in human communication, and the daily-life interactions of young children often include situations that require the verbalization of emotional states with verbal means, e.g., with emotion terms. Through them, one can express own emotional states and those of others. Thus, the acquisition of emotion terms allows children to participate more intensively in social contexts – a basic requirement for learning new words and for elaborating socio-emotional skills. However, little is known about how children acquire and process this specific word category, which is positioned between concrete and abstract words. In particular, the influence of valence on emotion word processing during childhood has not been sufficiently investigated. Previous research points to an advantage of positive words over negative and neutral words in word processing. While previous studies found valence effects to be influenced by factors such as arousal, frequency, concreteness, and task, it is still unclear if and how valence effects are also modified by age. The present study compares the performance of children aged from 5 to 12 years and adults in two experimental tasks: lexical decision (word or pseudoword) and emotional categorization (positive or negative). Stimuli consisted of 48 German emotion terms (24 positive and 24 negative) matched for arousal, concreteness, age of acquisition, word class, word length, morphological complexity, frequency, and neighborhood density. Results from both tasks reveal two developmental trends: First, with increasing age children responded faster and more correctly, suggesting that emotion vocabulary gradually becomes more stable and differentiated during middle childhood. Second, the influence of valence varied with age: younger children (5- and 6-year-olds) showed significantly higher performance levels for positive emotion terms compared to negative emotion terms, whereas older children and adults did not. This age-related valence effect in emotion word processing will be discussed with respect to linguistic and methodological aspects.

Valence matters: An electrophysiological study on how emotions influence cognitive performance in children

“…Our finding that children responded more accurately to happy targets parallels previous reports of a “positivity bias” displayed by children on different cognitive tasks (Augusti et al, ; Bahn et al, ; Lewis et al, ). One possible explanation for the facilitation observed with happy emotions is that children are able to process them more efficiently (Todd et al, ).…”

“…Based on previous findings with children (Lewis et al, 2007), we hypothesized that the manner in which emotions influence cognitive performance in children would be contingent on the valence of the emotion. Specifically, we hypothesized that children would perform better on trials with happy targets than on trials with neutral or angry targets, displaying the "positivity bias" found in previous studies (Augusti et al, 2012;Bahn et al, 2017;Lewis et al, 2007). Following previous findings showing cognitive performance in children to be hampered by negative stimuli (Augusti et al, 2012;Lewis et al, 2007), as well as DCM's prediction that threatening emotions would divert resources away from the cognitive task, we also hypothesized that children would perform worse on trials with angry targets than on trials with happy or neutral targets.…”

“…The advantage for happy emotions extends beyond recognition. Several studies have found that children display a “positivity bias” on cognitive tasks with emotional stimuli, with better cognitive performance observed in the presence of happy relative to other emotional stimuli (Augusti et al, ; Bahn, Vesker, Alanis, Schwarzer, & Kauschke, ; Lewis et al, ; Tottenham, Hare, & Casey, ). At the same time, children's cognitive performance is hampered in the presence of negative emotions (Augusti et al, ; Lewis et al, ).…”

Investigating the Effects of Embodiment on Emotional Categorization of Faces and Words in Children and Adults

“…In Experiment 2, we looked for effects of embodiment on the categorization of emotion words using a similar task, since a previous study has shown developmental changes in the perception of positive versus negative words using such a task, albeit only in children up to the age of 6 years (Bahn et al, 2017b). Average values of accuracy and response time for correct trials in the congruent and incongruent conditions by children and adults in Experiments 1a and 1b.…”

“…To test whether any facial effects of embodiment changed in the course of development, we tested 6-year-old children and adults in Experiment 2 using the same straw-based face manipulation as that in Experiment 1a. The age of 6 was chosen for the children's group because it was the oldest age at which a previous study (Bahn et al, 2017b) was able to find significant effects using the same emotion word categorization task used in this experiment.…”