1-064 - Emotion in the Voice: Leveraging Automated Assessment to Study Communication and Regulation in Early Childhood

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

Children and adults convey emotion in the voice through non-linguistic acoustic variations (Juslin & Scherer, 2005). This symposium highlights the promise of automated processing tools to study vocal emotion— studied far less than facial emotion— in adult-child communication in early childhood, when children are rapidly developing expressive language.

The three presentations, developed by groups of interdisciplinary investigators, leverage automated assessment of vocal emotion to study and dynamically analyze aspects of communication and regulatory processes in early childhood. The first two presentations employ Language Environment Analysis (LENA; Xu, Yapanel, & Gray, 2009), a wearable automated processing tool, to investigate young children’s cries. The first paper examines temporal features of cries in a preschool classroom. Findings indicate that cries tended to occur in clusters and exhibited more temporal dependency than did non-cries, suggesting that cries are less flexible. The second paper examines sequences in parent-toddler emotional and verbal communication assessed during day-long recordings. Results showed that parental responsiveness is both influenced by toddler cries and influences whether toddlers cry or verbalize next. The third presentation examines mothers’ emotional prosody assessed via acoustic properties of speech during mother-child interaction. Findings suggest unique associations between maternal emotional prosody and preschool-age children’s self-regulation (physiological, attention, emotion).

Our discussant, an expert in family interactions and child development, also uses automated recordings of emotion in family interaction. He will bring his substantive and methodological expertise to integrate findings across papers and suggest future directions for capturing everyday emotions in the lives of young children and their families.

Sub Unit

• Social, Emotional, Personality

Chair

• Margaret A Fields-Olivieri, The Pennsylvania State University

Discussant

• Christopher Trentacosta, Wayne State University

Individual Presentations

• Classroom Cries Exhibit More Temporal Structure than Non-Cries at One Year - Presenting Author: Daniel Messinger, University of Miami; Non-Presenting Author: Stephanie Custode, University of Miami; Non-Presenting Author: Lynn K Perry, University of Miami; Non-Presenting Author: Samantha Mitsven, University of Miami; Non-Presenting Author: Mary Anne Ullery, University of Miami; Non-Presenting Author: Lynne F Katz, University of Miami; Non-Presenting Author: Laura Vitale, University of Miami; Non-Presenting Author: Emily Barbara Prince, University of Miami; Non-Presenting Author: Adriana Valtierra, University of Miami; Non-Presenting Author: Neil Johnson, George Washington University

• Sequential Patterns of Toddler Negative Emotions within Everyday Parent-Toddler Communication - Presenting Author: Margaret A Fields-Olivieri, The Pennsylvania State University; Non-Presenting Author: Pamela M. Cole, The Pennsylvania State University

• Fluctuations in Maternal Speech Prosody and Preschool-Aged Children’s Behavioral and Physiological Regulation During a Challenge - Presenting Author: Nancy McElwain, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Non-Presenting Author: Dan Berry, University of Minnesota; Non-Presenting Author: Jennifer Cole, Northwestern University; Non-Presenting Author: Niyantri Ravindran, The Pennsylvania State University