Infant Emotion Matching and Preschool Emotion Understanding: Distinct Developmental Skills

• In Event: 3-004 - The Development of Emotion Understanding From Infancy Through Early Childhood

Integrative Statement

Emotion understanding, the ability to identify and interpret emotional expressions and reactions in others, is an important skill to develop early in life. Emotion understanding in preschool is predictive of later peer relationships (Denham et al., 2003) and academic success (Denham et al., 2012). Importantly, the development of emotion understanding from age 3 to 6 follows a stable trajectory (Brown & Dunn, 1996). Thus, investigating the development of this skill among younger age groups is imperative. Here, we hypothesized that infants’ emotion matching- identification of emotional expressions across faces and voices- would be positively associated with preschoolers’ emotion understanding. To examine emotion matching in infants, we used the intermodal matching paradigm (Figure 1), a frequently used method to assess infant emotion matching from looking times (Walker, 1982). To examine emotion understanding in preschoolers, we used Denham’s Affective Knowledge Test (AKT; Denham, 1986) is a commonly used measure of emotion understanding requiring children to identify the emotional face that matches various words and scenarios. It remains unclear how such looking time measures relate to preschool emotion understanding tasks, the question addressed by the present longitudinal study.

Forty infants (20 male) participated in this study at 9, 15, 21, and 30 months of age. At the 9, 15, and 21-month visits, infants took part in an intermodal matching task, similar to the design used by Walker (1982). Infants first viewed six silent side-by-side pairs of video clips, in which a woman visually conveyed happiness, sadness, anger, or a neutral expression for 10-s each. Infants then viewed 12 pairs of such video clips with asynchronous audio, in which the audio always matched the emotional tone of one of the videos on the screen (but not its temporal synchrony). Emotion matching was operationalized as an increase in looking time from the silent condition to the condition with the matching emotional tone. At the 30-month time point, toddlers participated in Denham’s AKT (Denham, 1986).

Contrary to our expectations, results revealed that only the 15-month emotion matching performance predicted total performance on the AKT, and the relation was negative (ρ=-.464, p=.010) (Figure 2). Relations between the AKT and 9-month (ρ=-.002, p=.991) and 21-month (ρ=-.097, p=.624) emotion matching performance were non-significant. Our results also revealed that there was no significant improvement in emotion matching performance over time except for marginally significant improvement from 15 months to 21 months in the angry trials (t(27)=2.022, p=.053). Overall, our results suggest that performance on the intermodal emotion matching paradigm in infancy does not consistently predict emotion understanding performance during the early preschool years. Infant performance at 15 months shows an inverse relation between the two tasks, suggesting that there may be factors independent of audiovisual emotion perception which contribute to developing emotion understanding in the first two years after birth. The role of early language development and theory of mind, which are largely independent of audiovisual emotion perception, may be important to consider in future research on emotion understanding development.

Authors

• Marissa Ogren, University of California, Los Angeles
  Presenting Author

• Scott Johnson, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)
  Non-Presenting Author