Poster #27 - Emotion Category Flexibility in Physically Abused and Typically Developing Children

• In Event: 1-005 - Poster Session 01
  In Poster Session: PS 01 Section - Cognitive Processes

Integrative Statement

From infancy, faces capture human attention, and facial configurations are often represented as reflecting emotion categories (e.g., Cong et al., 2018; Diamond & Carey, 1986). These categories allow observers to respond to faces quickly by ignoring variability in facial movements to make general judgments about emotion signaling (Campanella, Quinet, Bruyer, Crommelinck, & Guerit, 2002; Etcoff & Magee, 1992). However, children encounter variability in their emotional environments. For example, physically abusive parents tend to express facial emotions that are not prototypical (Shackman et al., 2010) and may express more anger than parents of children who have not experienced abuse. Yet little is know about how such variation may affect children’s emotion categories. In this experiment (N = 32, children ages 5-11-years-old), we recruited physically abused and typically developing children to complete an emotion categorization task. Physically abused children were identified based on Child Protective Services reports obtained with parent permission and parent questionnaire data (Conflict Tactics Scale Parent-Child Version; Straus et al., 1998). In this task, participants categorized morphed expressions of emotion as “upset” or “calm.” The expressions presented ranged from 0% angry (i.e., 100% neutral) to 100% angry. During an initial assessment phase participants categorized expressions across the morph continuum without feedback in order to measure whether typically developing and abused children enter the experiment with different category boundaries, purportedly influenced by early experiences. There was a trend such that abused children had a higher threshold for categorizing faces as “upset” (χ2(1) = 2.80, p = .09; Figure 1). Next, we gave participants feedback regarding their categorization choices such that morphs greater than 50% angry were defined as “upset” and those less than 50% angry were defined as “calm” in order to train participants to a common category boundary. Both typically developing and abused children learned this explicitly taught category boundary (no difference between groups, p = .80). Finally, in order to test how experimentally manipulated exposure to certain facial expressions influences emotion categorization, we removed the feedback and exposed children to an oversampling of angry morphs (40%-100% angry morphs). Both typically developing and abused children shifted their category boundary (increasing the threshold for categorizing a face as “upset”), however, abused children shifted farther than typically developing children (χ2(1) = 3.87, p = .05; Figure 2). Taken together, this experiment demonstrates that children’s early emotional environments influences their emotion category representations as well as the flexibility of those representations in response to emotional exposure.

Authors

• Rista C Plate, University of Wisconsin-Madison
  Presenting Author

• Cassandra Windau, University of Wisconsin-Madison
  Non-Presenting Author

• Seth D Pollak, University of Wisconsin-Madison
  Non-Presenting Author