Emotion words link faces to emotional scenarios in early childhood.

Abstract

Recent theories have suggested that emotion words may facilitate the development of emotion concepts. The present study investigates whether emotion words affect children's performance on an emotion category learning task. Across two experiments, 72 three-year-old children (49 female) were asked to identify which emotional face best matched particular emotional scenarios during nine pretest and nine posttest trials. The scenarios in the present studies aligned with emotions typically learned among older age groups (annoyed, disgusted, and nervous). Between pretest and posttest, children participated in training in which a facial configuration (annoyed, disgusted, or nervous) was paired with an associated scenario while they heard the emotion labeled explicitly or heard irrelevant information (Experiment 1) or heard a broad emotion label versus irrelevant information (Experiment 2). Aside from the labels presented, all other information was kept the same across conditions, including the specific faces and scenarios heard during learning trials. In Experiment 1, children's emotion understanding increased more from pretest to posttest in the explicit label versus irrelevant condition, t(34) = 2.26, p = .030, d = .75, but in Experiment 2 the broad emotion labels did not provide an advantage over irrelevant information, t(34) = .72, p = .474, d = .24. These results suggest that emotion labels may be particularly helpful for young children learning about unfamiliar emotions, because specific labels may help children to aggregate disparate emotional information into meaningful categories.

The emergence of organized emotion dynamics in childhood

“…Thus, emotion labels may help children extract statistical regularities in emotion. Indeed, children learn emotion categories more easily when presented with verbal labels (Ogren & Sandhofer, 2022;, verbal abilities relate to the emergence of emotion understanding from childhood to adulthood (Nook et al, 2017), and children begin to correctly match labels and facial expressions at around the same age that they produce emotion labels (i.e., 2 years of age; Frank et al, 2017;Wu et al, 2022). Research has also shown a tight connection between how people think about the similarities of emotion words and how emotion transitions typically unfold (Barrett, 2006;Thornton et al, 2020;Thornton & Tamir, 2017).…”

Objective measurement of Spanish emotion vocabulary

“…Future studies could evaluate how experts in language and emotional knowledge, such as a selected sample of psychotherapists, score on the MOVE. On the other hand, the result that a considerable proportion of items had low difficulty may be useful with participants such as children or adolescents, who are still learning about emotions (Ogren & Sandhofer, 2022), patients with semantic dementia (Lindquist et al, 2014) or persons affected by primary progressive aphasia (Bertoux et al, 2020). Since the RM is an invariant measurement model with the formal property of specific objectivity, item calibration is independent of the sample when data‐model fit is adequate enough, as it is the case.…”

“…Theories of constructed emotion (Barrett, 2017; Brooks et al, 2017; Siegel et al, 2018) give language an outstanding role in human emotion science by postulating that changes in the natural world become mental states when they are categorised using prior conceptual knowledge. Emotion labels facilitate the learning of emotion concepts in children (Ogren & Sandhofer, 2022). Deficits in emotion recognition have been documented in semantic dementia patients (Lindquist et al, 2014); recent research on the semantic variant of primary progressive aphasia suggests that semantic knowledge guides not only emotion recognition but also valence processing (Bertoux et al, 2020).…”

Abstractness emerges progressively over the second year of life

“…We considered labels for locations as intermediate because they do not have a single, spatially bounded object as referent and coded spatial and time terms as intermediate in line with previous evidence showing that spatio-temporal elements are the most concrete among abstract concepts 29 . Labels for perceptual and physiological inner states were taken as intermediate, in line with the idea that bodily states, and at a higher level of abstractness emotions, represent the first concepts children acquire that do not have a concrete referent 69 , 70 . Finally, we coded as high in abstractness words that are considered as such according to the current literature 26 , as words referring to numbers, emotions, and mental states terms, together with verbs and pronouns, typically considered as more abstract than nouns 71 – 73 , and words for routines that are considered as abstract in recent studies 31 .…”