3-004 - The Development of Emotion Understanding From Infancy Through Early Childhood

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

Emotion understanding, or the ability to identify and interpret emotional expressions and reactions, is an important aspect of children’s social development. The ability to successfully understand emotions requires the integration of multiple cognitive and perceptual skills (e.g., identifying emotions across modalities and verbally describing emotional situations), yet how these skills fit together across development remains unclear. This symposium highlights four papers from international laboratories exploring key aspects of the development of emotion understanding. Collectively, these papers present data from over 500 participants ranging from 9 months to 6 years of age.

In this symposium, multiple distinct, yet related, methodologies (including behavioral tasks, eye tracking, and naturalistic observation) are used to investigate early emotion understanding skills. Paper 1 explores how maternal emotion talk relates to the emotion vocabulary of their 12-24-month-old infants. Paper 2 assesses how infant performance on the intermodal emotion matching paradigm at 9, 15, and 21 months predicts emotion understanding at 30 months. Paper 3 demonstrates differences in how 3.5- and 4.5-year-olds verbally describe emotion context images. Paper 4 reveals that 5- and 6-year-olds (but not 4-year-olds) can infer a person’s degree of happiness about an experienced outcome based on the prior probability of that outcome occurring.

Together, these papers provide novel insights into how emotion understanding matures in increasing complexity from infancy through early childhood. This symposium emphasizes the diverse array of methodologies that can be used during different developmental periods, with the broader goals of improving how we operationalize and identify developmental changes in emotion understanding.

Sub Unit

• Social, Emotional, Personality

Chair

• Marissa Ogren, University of California, Los Angeles

Individual Presentations

• Emotion Vocabulary Development Over the Second Year of Life: The Impact of Maternal Emotion Talk - Presenting Author: Ashley Ruba, University of Washington; Non-Presenting Author: Vrinda Kalia, Miami University; Non-Presenting Author: Makeba Parramore Wilbourn, Duke University

• Infant Emotion Matching and Preschool Emotion Understanding: Distinct Developmental Skills - Presenting Author: Marissa Ogren, University of California, Los Angeles; Non-Presenting Author: Scott Johnson, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)

• Can You Tell Me About It? Descriptions of Discrete Emotions in Early Childhood - Presenting Author: Jennifer Knothe, University of California, Merced; Non-Presenting Author: Eric A Walle, University of California, Merced

• Children use Probability to Make Quality Judgments Before Happiness Judgments - Presenting Author: Tiffany Doan, University of Waterloo; Non-Presenting Author: Ori Friedman, University of Waterloo; Non-Presenting Author: Stephanie Denison, University of Waterloo