Children’s Understanding of the Behavioral Consequences of Discrete Emotions

• In Event: Probabilistic Emotion Signals Guide Inference and Behavior

Abstract

Children’s Emotion understanding relies on appreciating facial and vocal expressions, labels, eliciting events, and behavioral consequences related to specific emotions. Particularly important for social functioning is children’s understanding of what behaviors are likely to correspond with specific emotions, or changes in action readiness (Frijda et al., 1989). It is important for children to understand that certain events are likely to lead to certain behavioral responses to adjust their interactions with their environment accordingly. However, developmental research on this important aspect of emotion understanding is limited. The present investigation used a novel task that did not require children to verbalize emotion labels to assess children’s understanding of emotion-related behaviors, as well as how this understanding compared with their general emotion labeling ability.
This study examined 3- to -6-year-olds’ (N = 34; M = 4.58 years; SD = 0.67 years) understanding of behavioral consequences for four emotions (anger, disgust, sadness, fear). Children were presented on a computer with illustrated stories of a cartoon character who encountered a specific emotion eliciting event. Each story was narrated and consisted of 3 pages setting up the event. Children were then asked to choose the final page that completed the story from two images that depicted distinct behavioral consequences (e.g., seeking revenge when wronged by another agent; see Figure 1). Importantly, no emotional expressions were present in any of the illustrations, thus requiring children to rely on the main character’s behavioral consequence. Following the storybook task, children were presented with facial expressions of each of the four emotions and asked to label the expression. This was done to assess children’s emotion labeling, as well as to provide a comparison with their ability to select the correct behavioral outcome for each emotion story.
Preliminary analyses revealed no effects of child age or gender (ps > .05). Children chose the target consequence image more often as opposed to the alternative in all emotion conditions (see Figure 2). However, only the anger condition emerged as significantly different than would be expected by chance (p = .005). Further analyses comparing children’s success in two tasks revealed interesting nuance to the findings. Specifically, children’s accuracy was significantly greater in the behavioral consequence selection task than the facial expression labeling task for disgust (p < .001), whereas accuracy was significantly greater in the facial expression labeling for sadness (p < .001) (see Figure 2).
The results suggest that young children understand the behavioral consequences of anger eliciting events, though this competency may still be developing for other emotions at this age. Furthermore, task accuracy was greater in the behavioral consequence selection than in the facial expression labeling task for disgust. This is notable given prior research suggesting that children’s understanding of disgust emerges relatively late in childhood (Widen & Russell 2010). This may be due to the picture-book lessening task demands, particularly children’s need to verbalize emotion labels. Future studies may benefit from utilizing a similar visual representation format and include a wider range of emotions to further study this topic.

Authors

• Zeynep B Ozden, University of California - Merced
  Presenting Author

• Eric A Walle, University of California - Merced