Poster #190 - Discrete or Dimensional: How do children understand emotion labels and facial expressions

• In Event: 1-005 - Poster Session 01
  In Poster Session: PS 01 Section - Social Cognition

Integrative Statement

The circumplex model of emotion characterizes emotion experience in terms of two dimensions: valence and arousal (Russell, 1980). Children can use a scale of either pleasure or arousal to respond to both facial expressions and emotion labels (Widen & Russell, 2016; Russell & Paris, 1994). Although children's initial, implicit understanding of emotion may be in terms of valence and arousal (Widen, 2013), they categorize emotions based on (discrete) emotion labels (e.g., sad, angry) than on the corresponding (dimensional) facial expressions (Russell & Widen 2002). Studies using discrete tasks also suggest that children understand the dimensional nature of emotion. That is, children were more likely to include facial expressions with similar level of pleasure and arousal to the target category than faces with very different levels (e.g., including fear and disgust faces in an anger category but not happiness or sadness) (Bullock & Russell, 1984, 1985). However, scales including both dimensions have not previously been used to investigate children’s interpretation of emotional stimuli. Two-dimensional scales provide the opportunity to report a wider range of emotions (Cella & Perry, 1986) than traditional unidimensional or discrete categorization scales and children’s ability to use them has been understudied.

Children's (4-9 years; N = 86) and adults’ (N = 60) categorization of emotion labels (happy, sad, scared, calm, joyful, miserable, frightened, and relaxed) and facial expressions (happy, sad, scared, and calm) was directly compared using two tasks. Participants were asked to use a two-dimensional (valence and arousal) emotion understanding assessment tool and a discrete categorization task to assign emotion labels and prototypical facial expressions. As shown in Figure 1, children were more likely to select the expected response on the discrete task than on the dimensional task (t(85) = -6.35, p < .001, Cohen’s d = .84), while adults performed equally well on both tasks (t(55) = -.37, p = .71). Accuracy on both tasks improved with age.

Children were able to use the dimensional tool but had higher accuracy scores with facial expressions and easier emotion labels (happy, sad, scared, and calm) than with more complex labels (joyful, miserable, frightened, and relaxed). There were significant category-level differences in emotion understanding scores, such that the happy category stimuli were more often included in the expected category for both the emotion labels and facial expressions, while the scared category was most difficult for children across all age groups.

This is the first study to directly compare children’s emotion understanding using both dimensional and discrete categorization tasks and the first to use a two-dimensional task with children. Children under 10 years of age can categorize emotion labels and facial expressions better when given discrete categories rather than dimensional ones, but are capable of comprehending the dimensional nature of emotion when considering both dimensions simultaneously.

Authors

• Marina Bazhydai, Lancaster University
  Presenting Author

• Yarrow Dunham, Yale
  Non-Presenting Author

• Sherri Widen, Committee for Children
  Non-Presenting Author