The representation of emotion knowledge across development

Woodard, Kristina; Zettersten, Martin; Pollak, Seth D.

doi:10.1111/cdev.13716

Cited by 19 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 104 publications

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“…However, whether language shapes the development of dynamic features of emotions remains unknown. Valence is indeed a key dimension of how children perceive and think of emotion and emotion language (Bullock & Russell, 1984;Nook et al, 2017;Ponari et al, 2018Ponari et al, , 2020, but children's understanding of valence still shows protracted development over early childhood (Widen & Russell, 2003, 2008Woodard et al, 2022;Wu et al, 2022). If emotion language indeed supports children's developing emotion dynamics, we would predict that as children learn more emotion-related words, their emotion dynamics will more closely match those of adults.…”

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confidence: 96%

The emergence of organized emotion dynamics in childhood

Nencheva¹,

Nook²,

Thornton³

et al. 2023

Preprint

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Emotions change from one moment to the next. They have a duration from seconds to hours, and then transition to other emotions. Here we describe the early ontology of these key aspects of emotion dynamics. In five cross-sectional studies that combine parent surveys and ecological momentary assessment, we characterize how emotion duration and transitions change over the first five years of life, and how they relate to children’s language development. Over this developmental period, the duration of children’s emotions increased, and emotion transitions became increasingly organized by valence, such that children were more likely to transition between similarly valenced emotions. Children with these more mature emotion profiles also had larger vocabularies and produced labels for the tested emotions. These findings advance our understanding of emotion and communication by highlighting their intertwined nature in development and by charting how dynamic features of emotional experiences change over the first years of life.

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confidence: 96%

The emergence of organized emotion dynamics in childhood

Nencheva¹,

Nook²,

Thornton³

et al. 2023

Preprint

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“…Most studies show that by age 5-6 years, most children accurately recognize and label static images of facial configurations on tasks similar to the one used here similarly to adults [39]. However, on the broader issue of how humans construe and understand emotions, there are significant changes in conceptual understanding between 6 year olds and adults [40]. The earlier research, using the same data that in this study, showed that for each year child became older, the odds of correctly identifying an emotion became 1.05 times larger [30].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 81%

The role of maternal trauma and discipline types in emotional processing among Syrian refugee children

Peltonen

Gredebäck

Pollak

et al. 2022

Eur Child Adolesc Psychiatry

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Stressful experiences in armed conflict incur intergenerational effects through parental behaviors with their children. A recent study reported that among Syrian refugee families, mothers’ (but not fathers’) post-traumatic stress (PTS) impacted children’s emotional processing. In this study, we aim to shed further light on this phenomenon by analyzing how the parenting practices in the context of post-traumatic stress confers protection or risk for children’s emotional processing. Participants were 6–18-year-old children (n = 212) and their mothers (n = 94), who fled from Syria and were residing in Turkish communities. We used the computer-based emotional processing task including photos of facial movements typically associated with different emotions to measure children’s capacity for emotional processing. Mothers reported their PTS and the discipline types they use, as well as the contextual factors related to their refugee background. Linear mixed effect models were constructed first, to find out the discipline types that are most strongly associated with emotional processing of the child, and second, to examine whether these discipline types moderate the effect of maternal PTS on children's emotional processing. Finally, generalized linear models were constructed to examine which contextual factors are associated with the use of these discipline types by mothers. We found that spanking as a discipline type was associated with poorer child emotional processing, whereas withholding of media access was associated with better emotional processing. Younger and less religious mothers were more prone to use spanking. The study underlines the need for parenting programs alongside with efforts to address mental health issues among mothers living under armed conflict.

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“…Early childhood may be an especially important time for young children's development of valence‐based representations. Valence gradually emerges in the first 5 years of life as a dimension that organizes children's representations of nonlinguistic emotion cues and emotional experiences, in tandem with children's expanding vocabularies (Nencheva et al, 2021; Woodard et al, 2021). Children's ability to label emotions with specificity emerges during this same span in early childhood (Widen, 2013; Wu et al, 2022).…”

Section: Emotion Labels In Contextmentioning

confidence: 99%

Caregiver speech predicts the emergence of children's emotion vocabulary

2023

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Learning about emotions is an important part of children's social and communicative development. How does children's emotion-related vocabulary emerge over development? How may emotion-related information in caregiver input support learning of emotion labels and other emotion-related words? This investigation examined language production and input among English-speaking toddlers (16-30 months) using two datasets: Wordbank (N = 5520; 36% female, 38% male, and 26% unknown gender; 1% Asian, 4% Black, 2% Hispanic, 40% White, 2% others, and 50% unknown ethnicity; collected in North America; dates of data collection unknown) and Child Language Data Exchange System (N = 587; 46% female, 44% male, 9% unknown gender, all unknown ethnicity; collected in North America and the UK; data collection dates, were available between 1962 and 2009). First, we show that toddlers develop the vocabulary to express increasingly wide ranges of emotional information during the first 2 years of life. Computational measures of word valence showed that emotion labels are embedded in a rich network of words with related valence. Second, we show that caregivers leverage these semantic connections in ways that may scaffold children's learning of emotion and mental state labels. This research suggests that young children use the dynamics of language input to construct emotion word meanings, and provides new techniques for defining the quality of infant-directed speech.

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The representation of emotion knowledge across development

Cited by 19 publications

References 104 publications

The emergence of organized emotion dynamics in childhood

The emergence of organized emotion dynamics in childhood

The role of maternal trauma and discipline types in emotional processing among Syrian refugee children

Caregiver speech predicts the emergence of children's emotion vocabulary

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