Poster #190 - Chinese Children Connect Diverse Positive Emotional Vocalizations to Their Probable Causes: an Observed Categorical Effect

• In Event: 1-061 - Poster Session 02
  In Poster Session: PS 02 Section - Social Cognition

Integrative Statement

The ability to infer how others are feeling is critical to our daily interactions with others. Previous research suggests that emotional understanding/reasoning in early childhood extends well beyond the ability to detect the valence of emotions or differentiate a few universal basic emotions. Wu, Muentener and Schulz (2017) employed a forced-choice task and found 2- to 4-year-old American children accurately identified probable causes of five distinct positive vocalizations by what adults would regard as funny, delicious, exciting, sympathetic, and adorable stimuli (pictures). No categorical effect was found, indicating American children are equally successful in identifying all five kinds of positive emotions.

In the current study, we use the same materials as Wu, Muentener and Schulz (2017) to examine whether the developmental pattern of reasoning the causes of people’s emotional vocalization is universal. Specifically, we ask: 1) whether 2- to 4-year-old Chinese children can identify probable causes of distinct positive vocalizations and 2) whether Chinese children are equally successful in identifying all five kinds of positive vocalizations, given vocalizations were generated by American women.

Two American women, blind to the study design, were asked to generate nonverbal emotional vocalizations to images from five categories: funny (children making silly faces), delicious (cakes), exciting (light-up toy), adorable (cute smiling babies) and sympathetic (crying babies). Crying baby was treated as a cause of positive emotional vocalization, as regardless the nature of the image, the adult response is positive and consoling. Four individual images were selected for each category with a matched recording of emotional vocalization, resulting in a set of 20 different images with corresponding vocalizations.

Twenty-Seven Chinese children (Range: 27-59 months, M: 39.78 months) completed 20 trials. Each trial included two images randomly selected from two distinct categories, presented on different sides of the screen. The corresponding vocalization for one of the two images was randomly selected and played. Each image was seen on exactly two test trials, once as the target, and once as the distractor. Children were told that the vocalization was made by a doll (Sally) facing the monitor and were asked “Which image do you think Sally is looking at?”

Accuracy was defined as number of correct responses divided by number of possible trials, was calculated for each emotional category, and collapsed across emotional categories. Overall, children successfully matched emotional vocalizations to their eliciting pictures [M=0.60, SD=0.12, t(26)=4.42, p<0.001; one-sample t-test, two-tailed]. Post-hoc analysis found that children succeeded in sympathy [M=0.73, SD=0.23, t(26)=5.25, p<0.001], delicious [M=0.62, SD=0.34, t(26)=1.87, p=0.073] and funny [M=0.65, SD=0.26, t(26)=2.94, p=0.007] but performed at chance in exciting and adorable (p>0.5). Results suggest that while Chinese children share a similar developmental pattern in emotional reasoning as American children, this kind of ability may be culture-specific. Null results from the cute and exciting conditions suggest that people may only correctly respond to emotional vocalizations they are regularly exposed to in their daily lives and culture. For example, in Chinese culture, ‘excited-ness’ and ‘cuteness’ are not vocally expressed in the same way as in American culture.

Authors

• Yiyu Liu, Peking University
  Presenting Author

• Yiyi Wang, Peking University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Ye Hong, Peking University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Yanjie Su, Peking University
  Non-Presenting Author