Heightened fearfulness in infants is not adaptive.

Grossmann proposes the "fearful ape hypothesis," suggesting that heightened fearfulness in early life is evolutionarily adaptive. We question this claim with evidence that (1) perceived fearfulness in children is associated with negative, not positive long-term outcomes; (2) caregivers are responsive to all affective behaviors, not just those perceived as fearful; and (3) caregiver responsiveness serves to reduce perceived fearfulness.

Infants' identification of gender in biological motion displays.

Infants' knowledge of social categories, including gender-typed characteristics, is a vital aspect of social cognitive development. In the current study, we examined 9- to 12-month-old infants' understanding of the categories "male" and "female" by testing for gender matching in voices or faces with biological motion depicted in point light displays (PLDs). Infants did not show voice-PLD gender matching spontaneously (Experiment 1) or after "training" with gender-matching voice-PLD pairs (Experiment 2). In Experiment 3, however, infants were trained with gender-matching face-PLD pairs and we found that patterns of visual attention to top regions of PLD stimuli during training predicted gender matching of female faces and PLDs. Prior to the end of the first postnatal year, therefore, infants may begin to identify gender in human walk motions, and perhaps form social categories from biological motion.

Emotion Words in Early Childhood: A Language Transcript Analysis.

Children learn the abstract, challenging categories of emotions from young ages, and it has recently been suggested that language (and more specifically emotion words) may aid this learning. To examine the language that young children hear and produce as they're learning emotion categories, the present study examined nearly 2,000 transcripts from 179 children ranging from 15- to 47-months from the Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES). Results provide key descriptive, developmental, and predictive information regarding child emotion language production, including the finding that child emotion word production was predicted by mothers' emotion word production (ß=.21, p<.001), but not by child or mother language complexity (ß=.01, p=.690; ß=.00, p=.872). Frequency of specific emotion words are presented, as are developmental trends in early emotion language production and input. These results improve the understanding of children's daily emotional language environments and may inform theories of emotional development.

Toddler Word Learning is Robust to Changes in Emotional Context.

Word learning is a crucial aspect of early social and cognitive development, and previous research indicates that children's word learning is influenced by the context in which the word is spoken. However, the role of emotions as contextual cues to word learning remains less clear. The present study investigated word learning among 2.5-year-old children in angry, happy, sad, and variable emotional contexts. Fifty-six children (30 female; Mean age=2.49 years) participated in a novel noun generalization task in which children observed an experimenter labeling objects in either a consistently angry, consistently happy, consistently sad, or variable (one exemplar per emotion) context. Children were then asked to identify the label-object association. Results revealed that children's performance was above chance levels for all four conditions (all t's>3.68, all p's<.01), but performance did not significantly differ by condition (F(3,52)=0.51, p=.677). These results provide valuable information regarding potential boundaries for when contextual information may versus may not influence children's word learning.

Model of goal directed behavior for limiting Latino preschoolers' television viewing: validity and reliability.

BACKGROUND: Accurately measuring parents' attitudes and beliefs regarding limiting their children's TV viewing is important to inform the design and evaluation of effective interventions. This manuscript assesses the internal consistency reliability, test-retest reliability, convergent validity, and construct validity of the Model of Goal Directed Behavior (MGDB) scales among parents of Latino preschoolers to characterize Latino parents' attitudes and beliefs toward limiting their preschoolers' TV viewing. METHOD: Participants included parents of Latino preschoolers in the United States, 3-5 years old (n = 186). Parents completed a socio-demographic survey and the 105-item MGDB questionnaire (Attitudes, Perceived Positive/Negative Behavioral Control, Subjective Norms, Positive and Negative Anticipated Emotions, Habits, Self-Efficacy, Desires, and Intentions surrounding their child's TV viewing) which was used to measure internal consistency reliability and construct validity. A subsample of participants completed the questionnaire twice to measure test-retest reliability. Further, parents completed a 7-day TV viewing diary for their preschooler, and a TV parenting practices questionnaire as measures of convergent validity. RESULTS: Internal consistency reliability was generally acceptable for the MGDB scales (Cronbach's alphas> 0.7), except for the Desires scale, which was revealed to have two factors and the Attitudes and Perceived Behavioral Control scales. Test-retest reliability over 2 months had negligible to moderate correlations (r's = 0.28 to 0.61). Two structural equation models were conducted. One yielded acceptable model fit (x2 (97) = 113.65, p = .119) and the other had questionable model fit (x2 (97) = 125.39; p = .028). Testing convergent validity, only two MGDB scales (Habits and Self-Efficacy) were positively correlated with the TV parenting practices questionnaire (r's = 0.33 to 0.51), and none were meaningfully correlated with preschoolers' mean daily TV viewing. CONCLUSIONS: Initial reliability and validity for some of the MGDB scales appear acceptable among parents of Latino preschoolers. Refinement of the instrument and testing among larger samples is necessary to fully evaluate psychometric properties. This instrument may be useful for characterizing Latino parents' attitudes and beliefs toward limiting their preschoolers' TV viewing and informing future TV reduction interventions. TRIAL REGISTRATION: Clinical Trials NCT01216306 Registered October 6, 2010.

Intermodal emotion matching at 15 months, but not 9 or 21 months, predicts early childhood emotion understanding: A longitudinal investigation.

Emotion understanding is a crucial skill for early social development, yet little is known regarding longitudinal development of this skill from infancy to early childhood. To address this issue, the present longitudinal study followed 40 participants from 9 to 30 months. Intermodal emotion matching was assessed using eye tracking at 9, 15, and 21 months, and emotion understanding was measured using the Affective Knowledge Test at 30 months of age. A novelty preference on the emotion matching task at 15 months (but not at 9 or 21 months) significantly predicted emotion understanding performance at 30 months. However, linear and quadratic trajectories for emotion matching development across 9- to 21-months did not predict later emotion understanding. No gender differences were observed in emotion matching or emotion understanding. These results hold implications for better understanding how infant emotion matching may relate to later emotion understanding, and the role that infant emotion perception may play in early emotional development.

Family expressiveness relates to happy emotion matching among 9-month-old infants.

Perceiving and understanding the emotions of those around us is an imperative skill to develop early in life. An infant's family environment provides most of their emotional exemplars in early development. However, the relation between the early development of emotion perception and family expressiveness remains understudied. To investigate this potential link to early emotion perception development, we examined 38 infants at 9 months of age. We assessed infants' ability to match emotions across facial and vocal modalities using an intermodal matching paradigm for angry-neutral, happy-neutral, and sad-neutral pairings. We also attained family expressiveness information via parent report. Our results indicate a significant positive relation between emotion matching and family expressiveness specific to the happy-neutral condition. However, we found no evidence for emotion matching for the infants as a group in any of the three conditions. These results suggest that family expressiveness does relate to emotion matching for the earliest developing emotional category among 9-month-old infants and that emotion matching with multiple emotions at this age is a challenging task.

Infant perception of sex differences in biological motion displays.

We examined mechanisms underlying infants' ability to categorize human biological motion stimuli from sex-typed walk motions, focusing on how visual attention to dynamic information in point-light displays (PLDs) contributes to infants' social category formation. We tested for categorization of PLDs produced by women and men by habituating infants to a series of female or male walk motions and then recording posthabituation preferences for new PLDs from the familiar or novel category (Experiment 1). We also tested for intrinsic preferences for female or male walk motions (Experiment 2). We found that infant boys were better able to categorize PLDs than were girls and that male PLDs were preferred overall. Neither of these effects was found to change with development across the observed age range (∼4-18 months). We conclude that infants' categorization of walk motions in PLDs is constrained by intrinsic preferences for higher motion speeds and higher spans of motion and, relatedly, by differences in walk motions produced by men and women.

Effects of conflicting emotional cues on toddlers' emotion perception.

The communication of emotion is dynamic and occurs across multiple channels, such as facial expression and tone of voice. When cues are in conflict, interpreting emotion can become challenging. Here, we examined the effects of incongruent emotional cues on toddlers' interpretation of emotions. We presented 33 children (22-26 months, Mage = 23.8 months, 15 female) with side-by-side images of faces along with sentences spoken in a tone of voice that conflicted with semantic content. One of the two faces matched the emotional tone of the audio, whereas the other matched the semantic content. For both congruent and incongruent trials, toddlers showed no overall looking preference to either type of face stimuli. However, during the second exposure to the sentences of incongruent trials, older children tended to look longer to the face matching semantic content when listening to happy vs. angry content. Results inform our understanding of the early development of complex emotion understanding.

How do emotion words impact children's emotion learning?

Previous research suggests that the use of emotion labels helps children to learn about emotions. However, the mechanism behind this relation remains somewhat elusive. The present study examined 3-year-old children's (N = 72; Mage = 3.51 years; 42 female) ability to match faces to emotional vignettes, and the role that the use of emotion labels plays in this process. Parents identified participating children as White (N = 37), multiracial (N = 17), African American/Black (N = 5), Asian (N = 5), Hispanic (N = 3), Latino (N = 2), South Asian/Indian (N = 1), Middle Eastern (N = 1), and other (N = 1), and most children had a parent with a college degree (N = 66). After a pretest, children heard either explicit emotion labels ("she feels annoyed"), novel labels ("she feels wuggy"), or irrelevant information ("she sits down") paired with a vignette and associated facial configuration. Children were then tested again at posttest for evidence of learning. Results revealed that children only improved from pre- to posttest in the explicit label condition, demonstrating that explicit emotion labels, which are likely to be familiar to children, facilitate children's learning of emotion information. Altogether, our results suggest that familiarity with emotion words from prior daily experience may best explain how emotion words influence children's learning about emotions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

How the Emotional Environment Shapes the Emotional Life of the Child.

Emotion understanding facilitates the development of healthy social interactions. To develop emotion knowledge, infants and young children must learn to make inferences about people's dynamically changing facial and vocal expressions in the context of their everyday lives. Given that emotional information varies so widely, the emotional input that children receive might particularly shape their emotion understanding over time. This review explores how variation in children's received emotional input shapes their emotion understanding and their emotional behavior over the course of development. Variation in emotional input from caregivers shapes individual differences in infants' emotion perception and understanding, as well as older children's emotional behavior. Finally, this work can inform policy and focus interventions designed to help infants and young children with social-emotional development.

Nonverbal emotion perception and vocabulary in late infancy.

Language has been proposed as a potential mechanism for young children's developing understanding of emotion. However, much remains unknown about this relation at an individual difference level. The present study investigated 15- to 18-month-old infants' perception of emotions across multiple pairs of faces. Parents reported their child's productive vocabulary, and infants participated in a non-linguistic emotion perception task via an eye tracker. Infant vocabulary did not predict nonverbal emotion perception when accounting for infant age, gender, and general object perception ability (ß = -0.15, p = .300). However, we observed a gender difference: Only girls' vocabulary scores related to nonverbal emotion perception when controlling for age and general object perception ability (ß = 0.42, p = .024). Further, boys showed a stronger preference for the novel emotion face vs. girls (t(48) = 2.35, p = .023, d= 0.67). These data suggest that pathways of processing emotional information (e.g., using language vs visual information) may differ for girls and boys in late infancy.

Emotion words link faces to emotional scenarios in early childhood.

Recent theories have suggested that emotion words may facilitate the development of emotion concepts. The present study investigates whether emotion words affect children's performance on an emotion category learning task. Across two experiments, 72 three-year-old children (49 female) were asked to identify which emotional face best matched particular emotional scenarios during nine pretest and nine posttest trials. The scenarios in the present studies aligned with emotions typically learned among older age groups (annoyed, disgusted, and nervous). Between pretest and posttest, children participated in training in which a facial configuration (annoyed, disgusted, or nervous) was paired with an associated scenario while they heard the emotion labeled explicitly or heard irrelevant information (Experiment 1) or heard a broad emotion label versus irrelevant information (Experiment 2). Aside from the labels presented, all other information was kept the same across conditions, including the specific faces and scenarios heard during learning trials. In Experiment 1, children's emotion understanding increased more from pretest to posttest in the explicit label versus irrelevant condition, t(34) = 2.26, p = .030, d = .75, but in Experiment 2 the broad emotion labels did not provide an advantage over irrelevant information, t(34) = .72, p = .474, d = .24. These results suggest that emotion labels may be particularly helpful for young children learning about unfamiliar emotions, because specific labels may help children to aggregate disparate emotional information into meaningful categories. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Sorting out emotions: How labels influence emotion categorization.

The ability to categorize emotions has long-term implications for children's social and emotional development. Therefore, identifying factors that influence early emotion categorization is of great importance. Yet, whether and how language impacts emotion category development is still widely debated. The present study aimed to assess how labels influence young children's ability to group faces into emotion categories for both earliest-learned and later-learned emotion categories. Across two studies, 128 two- and 3-year-olds (77 female; Mean age = 3.04 years; 35.9% White, 12.5% Multiple ethnicities or races, 6.3% Asian, 3.1% Black, and 42.2% not reported) were presented with three emotion categories (Study 1 = happy, sad, angry; Study 2 = surprised, disgusted, afraid). Children sorted 30 images of adults posing stereotypical facial expressions into one of the three categories. Children were randomly assigned to either hear the emotion labels before sorting (e.g., "happy faces go here") or were not given labels (e.g., "faces like this go here"). Study 1 results indicated no significant effects of labels for earlier-learned emotion categories, F(1, 60) = .94, p = .337, ηp² = .013. However, the Study 2 results revealed that labels improved emotion categorization for later-learned categories, F(1, 60) = 8.15, p = .006, ηp² = .024. Taken together, these results suggest that labels are important for emotion categorization, but the impact of labels may depend on children's familiarity with the emotion category. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Primary caregiver emotional expressiveness relates to toddler emotion understanding.

The present study examined the impact of emotional expressiveness in toddlers' environments on their emotion understanding. Primary caregivers of 35 toddlers completed two surveys regarding the family's emotional expressiveness and the primary caregiver's expressivity. Toddlers participated in the Affective Knowledge Test to measure emotion understanding. Toddler emotion understanding related to primary caregiver expressivity, but not family expressiveness. Further, toddler emotion understanding related to primary caregiver Impulse Strength, but not Negative or Positive Emotionality. This suggests that primary caregivers with more impulsive emotional response tendencies may help their children to identify associations between emotional events and reactions.

Factors Facilitating Early Emotion Understanding Development: Contributions to Individual Differences.

Children's emotion understanding is crucial for healthy social and academic development. The behaviors influenced by emotion understanding in childhood have received much attention, but less focus has been placed on factors that may predict individual differences in emotion understanding, the principle issue addressed in the current review. A more thorough understanding of the developmental underpinnings of this skill may allow for better prediction of emotion understanding, and for interventions to improve emotion understanding early in development. Here, we present theoretical arguments for the substantial roles of three aspects of children's environments in development of emotion understanding: family expressiveness, discussions about emotions, and language development, and we discuss how these are interrelated. Ultimately, this may aid in predicting the effects of environmental influences on development of emotion understanding more broadly, and the mechanisms by which they do so.

Motion or emotion: Infants discriminate emotional biological motion based on low-level visual information.

Infants' ability to discriminate emotional facial expressions and tones of voice is well-established, yet little is known about infant discrimination of emotional body movements. Here, we asked if 10-20-month-old infants rely on high-level emotional cues or low-level motion related cues when discriminating between emotional point-light displays (PLDs). In Study 1, infants viewed 18 pairs of angry, happy, sad, or neutral PLDs. Infants looked more at angry vs. neutral, happy vs. neutral, and neutral vs. sad. Motion analyses revealed that infants preferred the PLD with more total body movement in each pairing. Study 2, in which infants viewed inverted versions of the same pairings, yielded similar findings except for sad-neutral. Study 3 directly paired all three emotional stimuli in both orientations. The angry and happy stimuli did not significantly differ in terms of total motion, but both had more motion than the sad stimuli. Infants looked more at angry vs. sad, more at happy vs. sad, and about equally to angry vs. happy in both orientations. Again, therefore, infants preferred PLDs with more total body movement. Overall, the results indicate that a low-level motion preference may drive infants' discrimination of emotional human walking motions.