The current study investigated the developmental course of how young children label
various facial expressions of emotion. 160 children (2 to 5 years) freely produced labels for six
prototypical facial expressions of emotion and six animals. Even 2-year-olds were able to
correctly label 5 of 6 animals, but the proportion of correct specific emotion category responses
for this age group was < .30 for each of the six facial expressions. The 5-year-olds' proportion
of correct specific emotion category labels was at ceiling for the happy and angry faces, but
significantly lower for each of the other four facial expressions, and at floor level for the
disgust face. The type of errors in labeling facial expressions changed with age: when
incorrect, the youngest children produced any emotion label; older children produced labels of
the correct valence; and the majority of the 5-year-olds' responses were of the correct specific
emotion category. These results indicate that the free-labeling task per se is not too difficult
even for 2-year-olds, but that children's use of emotion terms is not initially linked to facial
expressions. Thus, the children's production of emotion terms far exceeded their proportion of
correct specific emotion category labels. With age, children's implicit definition of emotion
terms develops to include the associated facial expression, though this process is not complete
for all expressions before the age of 6 years.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:BVAU.2429/9807 |
| Date | 11 1900 |
| Creators | Widen, Sherrilea E. |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Relation | UBC Retrospective Theses Digitization Project [http://www.library.ubc.ca/archives/retro_theses/] |
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