The development of emotion organization from infancy to adolescence

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Abstract

Adults’ emotional worlds are surprisingly organized. We are consistent in how we think about emotion-related concepts, facial cues, and transitions from one emotion to another.
Several common dimensions organize these processes, such as positivity-negativity (valence) and intensity (arousal). This dimensional organization enables us to understand, communicate, and predict our own and others’ emotional states. However, little is known about the development of emotion organization.

This symposium integrates emerging evidence on how emotion organization develops in multiple domains alongside other cognitive processes. Presentation 1 uses children’s perceptions of emotion facial cues to examine the increasing organization of emotions by valence. Presentation 2 describes a developmental change in the organization of young children’s emotion transitions and its interaction with two important sources of statistical information in the social environment: language input and observed emotion transitions. Presentations 3 and 4 explore how emotion organization emerges in relation to children’s broader learning of abstract information. Presentation 3 shows how children transition from concrete, valence-based to abstract multidimensional representations of emotion – a transition statistically explained by vocabulary growth from childhood through young adulthood. Presentation 4 extends the symposium by examining how typically and atypically developing children use knowledge about valence to scaffold learning of new abstract words.

Together, the four presentations advance our understanding of the emergence of emotion organization from infancy to adolescence using the frameworks of multiple subfields. Discussion will explore how perception, processing, and environmental experience set the stage for children to navigate (and benefit from) the complex organization of human emotion.

Sub Unit

• Social, Emotional, Personality

Chair

• Mira Nencheva, Princeton University

Individual Presentations

• How is Emotion Knowledge Represented Across Development - Presenting Author: Kristina Woodard, University of Wisconsin - Madison; Non-Presenting Author: Martin Zettersten, Princeton University; Non-Presenting Author: Seth David Pollak, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• The structure of emotion dynamics across early childhood - Presenting Author: Mira Nencheva, Princeton University; Non-Presenting Author: Mark A. Thornton, Dartmouth College; Non-Presenting Author: Casey Lew-Williams, Princeton University; Non-Presenting Author: Diana I. Tamir, Princeton University

• The role of language in developing abstract, multidimensional emotion concepts - Presenting Author: Erik C. Nook, Princeton University; Non-Presenting Author: Caitlin M. Stavish, University of Washington; Non-Presenting Author: Stephanie F. Sasse; Non-Presenting Author: Hilary Lambert, University Of Washington; Non-Presenting Author: Patrick Mair, Harvard University; Non-Presenting Author: Katie McLaughlin, Harvard University; Non-Presenting Author: Leah H. Somerville, Harvard University

• The role of emotional valence in the acquisition of abstract concepts - Presenting Author: Marta Ponari, University of Kent; Non-Presenting Author: Courtenay Norbury, University College London; Non-Presenting Author: Gabriella Vigliocco, University College London