Bad Is Stronger Than Good? Children's Understanding of Positive and Negative Valence in Sounds, Abstract Images, and Faces

• In Event: Poster Session 11
  In Poster Session: PS 11 Topic - Cognitive Processes

Abstract

Do young children wear ‘rose-colored glasses’ in their everyday perceptions? Prior work suggests children may not appreciate negative valence in the way that adults do. For example, children struggle to identify negative emotions conveyed verbally and in musical excerpts, mislabeling sad and angry pieces, yet identify happy emotions at or near the level of adults (Cunningham & Sterling, 1988; Dolgin & Adelson, 1990). Children also have been found to prefer viewing negative over positive images, suggesting negative images are not necessarily experienced as aversive (Grisanzio et al., 2020). However, in other domains the extent to which children appreciate negative valence is not clear. For example, adults identify certain features of abstract images and art as conveying positive and negative valence (e.g., Melcher & Bacci, 2013), but it’s unknown whether children do so as well. In face stimuli, younger children may have more difficulty than older ones identifying negatively-valenced expressions like sadness and anger (De Sonneville et al., 2002), but findings are inconsistent (Felleman, et al., 1983). The current study thus aims to explore the degree to which children accurately identify and prefer positively- and negatively-valenced sound, abstract-image, and face stimuli. Additionally, we explore whether children’s accuracy in identifying valence in sounds, images, and faces is related to more complex social judgments. A cross-sectional sample of 3- to 8-year-old children will rate sounds, abstract images, and expressive faces on ‘how happy’ they are and how much they like them. Children will then complete a social judgement task involving brief video clips of interpersonal interactions in which a character behaves prosocially or anti-socially towards another, and will be asked to make judgements about the characters’ intentions, likeability, and future behavior. Our confirmatory hypothesis is that age and valence will interact to predict children’s ratings of the sound, image, and face stimuli. Specifically, we expect that younger children will show a larger discrepancy in their ratings of positively- versus negatively-valenced stimuli than older children, with lower accuracy and more preference for negatively-valenced stimuli compared to positive. Analyses will be implemented as linear mixed models using the lme4 package in R. Data collection is underway. Forty-four children have participated, and the complete data set will comprise at least 180 children. We expect to have completed data collection by April 2021. Findings are expected to provide insights about children’s understanding of positive and negative valence, which may play a role in children’s engagement with the social and physical world.

Authors

• Lynn Farquhar, Bowdoin College
  Presenting Author

• Sabine Doebel, George Mason University
  Non-Presenting Author