Can You Tell Me About It? Descriptions of Discrete Emotions in Early Childhood

• In Event: 3-004 - The Development of Emotion Understanding From Infancy Through Early Childhood

Integrative Statement

Emotion understanding involves appreciating the relational significance of the discrete emotion context. Accurately attending to relevant aspects of the context is a crucial aspect of such understanding. Prior research indicates that parents converse with their children differently as a function of the emotional valence (Lagattuta & Wellman, 2002). Furthermore, parents have been found to talk about the emoter (e.g., the person expressing the emotion) more when describing anger and sadness contexts and emphasized the referent (e.g., the object, situation, or person towards which the emotion is directed) more when describing disgust, fear, and joy contexts (Knothe & Walle, 2017). However, whether children’s verbal descriptions of emotional contexts mirror parent descriptions remains unstudied. This investigation examined how children described relational elements across 5 discrete emotions (anger, sadness, disgust, fear, and joy).

Children aged 3.5 years (n = 22; 13 female) and 4.5 years (n = 23; 11 female) described 10 emotion context images (2 images per emotion; half female emoters) during a picture book task. Researchers coded words indicating the emoter (e.g., he, she, boy, girl) and the referent (e.g., homework, broccoli, puppy, ice cream). Children’s frequency of mentioning the emoter and referent were analyzed in separate generalized mixed linear models for each age group. Each model controlled for child gender, trial number, on task child words, and the size of the emoter or referent, respectively, in the image. Significant main effects of emotion were further examined with Bonferroni-corrected pairwise comparisons.

We predicted that children would reference the emoter more when describing anger, sadness, and joy contexts than disgust and fear contexts. Conversely, we predicted that children would talk more about the referent when describing disgust, fear, and joy contexts than anger and sadness contexts. We also predicted that 4.5-year-olds would demonstrate more pronounced differences in emphasizing these relational elements between discrete emotions than the younger children.

Analysis of 4.5-year-old children mentioning of the emoter revealed a significant main effect of picture emotion, F(4, 218) = 4.30, p = .002, eta-squared = 0.07. Results indicated that 4.5-year-old children emphasized the emoter more in anger, sadness, and joy contexts than those of fear and disgust. Highlighting of the referent revealed a significant main effect of picture emotion, F(4, 218) = 5.34, p < .001, eta-squared = 0.09. Older children mentioned the referent more in disgust, fear, and joy contexts than contexts of anger and sadness (see Table 1). However, such differential emphasis of the relational elements was absent for 3.5-year-old children (see Table 2).

These findings highlight important developmental differences in children’s understanding of the relational elements of discrete emotion contexts. The 4.5-year-olds differential highlighting of the emoter and referent across discrete emotion contexts was consistent with parents’ descriptions of emotional contexts to their infants (Knothe & Walle, 2017). However, 3.5-year-olds did not show such differences in their descriptions of emotion contexts. Additional avenues to investigate this question with other research methodologies will be discussed, including an ongoing follow-up study employing a behavioral paradigm to examine the generalizability of discrete emotion communication.

Authors

• Jennifer Knothe, University of California, Merced
  Presenting Author

• Eric A Walle, University of California, Merced
  Non-Presenting Author