Findings on positivity and negativity biases in emotion perception have been challenged due to the frequent use of static, unimodal stimuli featuring young adult faces, which overlook the dynamic and diverse nature of emotional expressions. We addressed these limitations by using a stimulus database that incorporates naturalistic features of emotional expressions (dynamic, uni- and bimodal, age-varied faces). Accuracy and response times of 75 participants across three age groups (children, younger and older adults) were measured in a positive-negative emotion categorization task. Children showed a positivity bias and a reduced efficiency when integrating negative bimodal information. There were no clear biases in younger adults, while older adults benefitted from bimodal cues only when categorizing negative but not positive emotions. Overall, our findings suggest a more nuanced pattern of biases across lifespan than previously reported, potentially influenced by redundancy effects, cognitive load, and age-dependent motivational goals.

Background/Objectives: Developmental language disorders (DLD) are often associated with co-occurring neurodevelopmental difficulties, including attentional or social-emotional problems. Another nonverbal domain, i.e., visual cognition and its relationship to DLD, is virtually unexplored. However, learning visuospatial regularities-a scene-grammar-is crucial for navigating our daily environment. These regularities show certain similarities to the structure of language and there is preliminary evidence for a relationship between scene processing and language competence in preschoolers with and without DLD. This study compared implicit and explicit visuospatial knowledge of everyday indoor scenes in older children, aged 6 to 10 years, of both groups. Methods: We measured 'dwell times' on semantic and syntactic object-scene inconsistencies via eye-tracking and performance in an object-placement task, and their associations with children's language, visual, and cognitive skills. Results: Visual attention towards object-scene inconsistencies was highly comparable between groups, but children with DLD scored lower in a visual perception test and higher language skills were associated with higher visuo-cognitive performance in both tasks. In the explicit scene-grammar measurement, this relationship only existed for children with DLD and disappeared when nonverbal cognitive performance was controlled. Conclusions: Our study suggests the existence of mild problems in visuospatial processing co-occurring with DLD, which is partly influenced by age and nonverbal cognitive ability. The acquisition of visual cognition and linguistic knowledge is an interactive, multimodal process where the perception of objects in scenes might affect how the words for these objects are learned and vice versa. A better understanding of this interplay could eventually have impact on the diagnosis and treatment of DLD.

The development of emotion perception has predominantly been studied using static, unimodal stimuli featuring the faces of young adults. Most findings indicate a processing advantage for positive emotions in children (positivity bias) and a negativity bias in adults, although these results are usually task-dependent. We created a new stimulus database comprising digital avatars from four age groups, dynamically expressing happiness, happy-surprise, anger, and sadness in visual (face only) and visual-verbal (face and voice) conditions. To determine whether previously found biases would re-emerge with this new database, we tested the arousal and valence perception of positive and negative emotions in 6- and 7-year-old children and young adults. Our results revealed high correlations between children's and adults' responses but also significant differences: children rated negative expressions as more arousing compared to adults and positive emotions as more positive than adults. Additionally, visual-verbal presentations were perceived as more arousing than visual across both age groups. In terms of valence, all participants found positive emotions as more positive in the visual condition, whereas negative emotions were perceived as more negative in the visual-verbal condition. As one of the first studies to employ dynamically multimodal emotional expressions, our findings underscore the relevance of studying developmental differences in emotion perception using naturalistic stimuli.

Theoretical background: Narratives require not only a certain structure but also contain an affective dimension. In addition to the global organization of events, the internal states of the story characters also have to be reported. Speakers differ in how finely grained they verbalize emotions. Objective: This study investigated the development of granularity in the verbalization of emotional and internal states in storytelling across different age groups. It involved 18 preschool children (3 - 6 years, M = 5;2, SD = 0;10, 11 f), 15 elementary school-aged children (7 - 11 years, M = 9;3, SD = 1;6, 10 f), and 20 adults (20 - 62 years, M = 33, SD = 14, 10 f). Method: Participants watched emotionally toned silent films and had to retell the stories, answering questions about the emotional aspects of the story. We transcribed and analyzed the narratives and responses in terms of the vocabulary used, which we categorized into nine internal state categories. We then arranged the emotion-related words they produced in a circumplex model based on item-specific values for valence and arousal. Results: The narration length differed significantly between preschool children and school-aged children as well as between preschool and school-aged children and adults. However, the proportion of words used for various internal states remained stable across the groups. Fine-grained semantic analyses showed that school-aged children and adults produced a higher proportion of specific and unspecific evaluations than preschool children. In addition, adults used a higher proportion of emotion words than school-aged children. Furthermore, school-aged children responded to questions about emotions more confidently than preschool children, whereas the groups did not differ in inferring the causes of emotions displayed. Discussion and conclusion: The findings suggest that preschool and school-aged children can recognize the causes and consequences of emotional processes and express them verbally. However, the differentiation of emotion categories increases with development, as evidenced by the higher granularity in school-aged children and adults. The emotion vocabulary of children was less diverse than that of adults, but it was structured similarly in terms of valence and arousal, as visualized by the circumplex model. According to constructivist emotion theories, narratives provide a framework for acquiring and elaborating emotion concepts. Children not only gain emotional input from their communicative partners, they also constantly refine these concepts by using their vocabulary to express emotional events. In conclusion, this study provides evidence for the development of granularity in the verbalization of emotional events from childhood to adulthood. The findings highlight the importance of narratives for constructing emotion concepts and their potential for promoting children's linguistic and socioemotional skills.

Zusammenfassung: Theoretischer Hintergrund: Erzählungen erfordern neben der strukturellen auch eine affektive Gestaltung. Wie feinkörnig Gefühlszustände verbalisiert werden, variiert individuell und wird als emotionale Granularität (EG) bezeichnet. Fragestellung: Die Studie gibt Einblick in die Entwicklung der EG vom Kindes- bis zum Erwachsenenalter. Methode:18 VorschülerInnen (3 – 6 J., 11w), 15 SchülerInnen (7 – 10 J., 10w) und 20 Erwachsene (20 – 62 J.,10w) erzählten die Handlung emotionsgeladener Zeichentrickstummfilme. Ausdrücke für innere Zustände (AIZ) wurden kategorisiert und in einem Circumplex-Modell angeordnet. Ergebnisse: Alle Gruppen unterschieden sich in der Erzähllänge und der kategorienspezifischen Verwendung, jedoch nicht im Gesamtanteil der AIZ. Diskussion und Schlussfolgerung: Das kindliche Vokabular wies zwar eine geringere EG auf, war aber ab dem Vorschulalter ähnlich strukturiert. Die Ergebnisse unterstreichen die Bedeutung von Erzählungen für den Erwerb und die Verfeinerung von Emotionskonzepten.

Dataset of the article "The Relationship between Crawling and Emotion Discrimination in 9- to 10-Month-Old Infants" published in Brain Sciences.

The present study examined whether infants’ crawling experience is related to their sensitivity to fearful emotional expressions. Twenty-nine 9- to 10-month-old infants were tested in a preferential looking task, in which they were presented with different pairs of animated faces on a screen displaying a 100% happy facial expression and morphed facial expressions containing varying degrees of fear and happiness. Regardless of their crawling experiences, all infants looked longer at more fearful faces. Additionally, infants with at least 6 weeks of crawling experience needed lower levels of fearfulness in the morphs in order to detect a change from a happy to a fearful face compared to those with less crawling experience. Thus, the crawling experience seems to increase infants’ sensitivity to fearfulness in faces.

Purpose Current research has demonstrated that behavioral, emotional, and/or social difficulties often accompany developmental language disorder (DLD). It is an open question to what degrees such difficulties arise as consequence of impaired language and communicative skills, or whether they might also be driven by deficits in verbal and nonverbal emotion processing (e.g., the reduced ability to infer and verbalize emotional states from facial expressions). Regarding the existence of nonverbal deficits, previous research has yielded inconsistent findings. This study was aimed at gaining deeper knowledge of the basic aspects of emotion understanding in children with DLD by comparing their performance on nonverbal and verbal emotion categorization tasks to that of typically developing children. Method Two verbal tasks (Lexical Decision and Valence Decision With Emotion Terms) and two nonverbal tasks (Face Decision and Valence Decision With Facial Expressions) were designed to parallel each other as much as possible, and conducted with twenty-six 6- to 10-year-old children diagnosed with DLD. The same number of typically developed children, carefully matched by age and gender, served as a control group. Results The children with DLD showed lower performance in both verbal tasks and exhibited noticeable problems in the nonverbal emotion processing task. In particular, they achieved lower accuracy scores when they categorized faces by their valence (positive or negative), but did not differ in their ability to distinguish these faces from pictures displaying animals. Conclusions This study provides evidence for the hypothesis that problems in emotion processing in children with DLD might be multimodal. Therefore, the results support the idea of mutual influences in the development of language and emotion skills and contribute to the current debate about the domain specificity of DLD (formerly referred to as specific language impairment).

Social interactions often require the simultaneous processing of emotions from facial expressions and speech. However, the development of the gaze behavior used for emotion recognition, and the effects of speech perception on the visual encoding of facial expressions is less understood. We therefore conducted a word-primed face categorization experiment, where participants from multiple age groups (six-year-olds, 12-year-olds, and adults) categorized target facial expressions as positive or negative after priming with valence-congruent or -incongruent auditory emotion words, or no words at all. We recorded our participants' gaze behavior during this task using an eye-tracker, and analyzed the data with respect to the fixation time toward the eyes and mouth regions of faces, as well as the time until participants made the first fixation within those regions (time to first fixation, TTFF). We found that the six-year-olds showed significantly higher accuracy in categorizing congruently primed faces compared to the other conditions. The six-year-olds also showed faster response times, shorter total fixation durations, and faster TTFF measures in all primed trials, regardless of congruency, as compared to unprimed trials. We also found that while adults looked first, and longer, at the eyes as compared to the mouth regions of target faces, children did not exhibit this gaze behavior. Our results thus indicate that young children are more sensitive than adults or older children to auditory emotion word primes during the perception of emotional faces, and that the distribution of gaze across the regions of the face changes significantly from childhood to adulthood.

The facial feedback hypothesis (FFH) indicates that besides being involved in the production of facial expressions, the musculature of the face also influences one’s perception of emotional stimuli. Recently, this effect has been the focus of increased scrutiny as efforts to replicate a key study with adult participants supporting this hypothesis, using the so-called “pen-in-the-mouth” task, have not been successful at several labs. Our series of experiments attempted to investigate whether the assumed embodiment effect can be reproduced in a simplified emotional categorization task for emotional faces and words. We also wanted to test whether the embodiment effect can be detected in children because it is assumed that their bodily processes are especially closely linked with their sensory and cognitive processes. Our experiments involved child and adult participants categorizing faces and words as positive or negative as quickly as possible, while inducing a positive or negative facial or bodily state (holding a straw in the mouth such that a smile or a frown was generated, or creating a positive or negative body posture). The positive or negative facial and bodily states could therefore be either congruent or incongruent with the valence of the target face and word stimuli. Our results did not show any significant differences between the congruent and incongruent conditions in either children or adults. This suggests that embodiment effects either do not significantly impact valence-based categorization or are not strong enough to be detected by our approach considering the sample size in the present study.

Emotional valence is predominately conveyed in social interactions by words and facial expressions. The existence of broad biases which favor more efficient processing of positive or negative emotions is still a controversial matter. While so far this question has been investigated separately for each modality, in this narrative review of the literature we focus on valence effects in processing both words and facial expressions. In order to identify the factors underlying positivity and negativity effects, and to uncover whether these effects depend on modality and age, we present and analyze three representative overviews of the literature concerning valence effects in word processing, face processing, and combinations of word and face processing. Our analysis of word processing studies points to a positivity bias or a balanced processing of positive and negative words, whereas the analysis of face processing studies showed the existence of separate positivity and negativity biases depending on the experimental paradigm. The mixed results seem to be a product of the different methods and types of stimuli being used. Interestingly, we found that children exhibit a clear positivity advantage for both word and face processing, indicating similar processing biases in both modalities. Over the course of development, the initial positivity advantage gradually disappears, and in some face processing studies even reverses into a negativity bias. We therefore conclude that there is a need for future research that systematically analyses the impact of age and modality on the emergence of these valence effects. Finally, we discuss possible explanations for the presence of the early positivity advantage and its subsequent decrease.

Collecting data over the internet is an approach that allows researchers to vastly expand the possible sample sizes of their studies, and enables the study of populations that may otherwise be difficult to access. However, to ensure that data collected over the internet is of the same level of quality as data collected in a lab, the comparability of internet-collected data with lab-collected data must first be assessed for individual areas of research and experimental approaches. To answer the question of whether internet data collection is suitable for experiments involving facial expressions, we conducted a deliberately difficult facial emotion-identification experiment where participants completed the same task either under supervision in our lab, or at an unsupervised location over the internet. Stimuli consisted of sad faces that participants were asked to identify as resembling either anger, fear, or disgust. Regardless of belonging to either the group tested in the lab or over the internet, participants showed highly similar response distributions, while differences between the groups were non-significant and of very low magnitude. We can therefore conclude from our findings that internet data collection is a viable method for experiments requiring the identification of emotional facial expressions, being able to produce similar results to those which can be obtained in a lab.

In order to assess how the perception of audible speech and facial expressions influence one another for the perception of emotions, and how this influence might change over the course of development, we conducted two cross-modal priming experiments with three age groups of children (6-, 9-, and 12-years old), as well as college-aged adults. In Experiment 1, 74 children and 24 adult participants were tasked with categorizing photographs of emotional faces as positive or negative as quickly as possible after being primed with emotion words presented via audio in valence-congruent and valence-incongruent trials. In Experiment 2, 67 children and 24 adult participants carried out a similar categorization task, but with faces acting as visual primes, and emotion words acting as auditory targets. The results of Experiment 1 showed that participants made more errors when categorizing positive faces primed by negative words versus positive words, and that 6-year-old children are particularly sensitive to positive word primes, giving faster correct responses regardless of target valence. Meanwhile, the results of Experiment 2 did not show any congruency effects for priming by facial expressions. Thus, audible emotion words seem to exert an influence on the emotional categorization of faces, while faces do not seem to influence the categorization of emotion words in a significant way.

ABSTRACTTwo major semantic features of emotion concepts have been shown to impact performance in emotion perception tasks: valence and arousal. To design psycholinguistic experiments with emotion terms as stimuli, norms are required that indicate valence and arousal values for individual words. Although such norms are usually obtained from ratings of adults, they are often also used in developmental studies. This procedure raises the question of whether children and adults perceive emotional valence and arousal of words in the same way, and consequently, whether adults’ ratings are adequate when constructing stimulus sets for children. The present study obtained valence and arousal ratings for 48 German emotion terms from three different groups: 9-year-old children and adults tested in a controlled laboratory setting, and adults tested via online survey. Results demonstrate high correlations for valence and arousal across settings. The comparison between children and adults also revealed high correlations, suggesting that children at the age of 9 already display adultlike behavior in their evaluation of emotion terms. A small difference was found for absolute rating values of arousal, with children rating words less arousing than adults. Overall, 9-year-olds and adults are sufficiently similar in their perception of emotion to warrant the use of adult valence and arousal ratings in the analysis of children data.

Categorical biases in the processing of emotional facial expression have been the subject of much debate in the literature. Opposing views on this topic claim either that positive or negative facial expressions enjoy improved processing in the human brain. The developmental changes in the processing advantages of positive and negative facial expressions are also disputed, with studies using varying paradigms showing seemingly contradictory results. Therefore, to further investigate the development of categorical processing and extraction of emotional information from faces, we tested 6-, 9-, and 12-year-old children, as well as adults, on their ability to categorize various facial expressions as positive or negative as quickly as possible. This was a simplified paradigm designed to explicitly contrast the processing efficiency of positive and negative facial expressions on the broader level of those emotional valence categories, rather than specific single emotional expressions. Our results show an early age processing advantage for positive facial expressions, which disappears in adults who show no such differences in the case of response time measures. In the case of accuracy measures, the early advantage for positive facial expressions gradually disappears and is reversed into a negativity advantage in adults. These findings demonstrate that category-based positive and negative processing advantages are strongly modulated by age over the course of development, and can exhibit opposite effects depending on the developmental stage of the participant.

Emotions play an important role in human communication, and the daily-life interactions of young children often include situations that require the verbalization of emotional states with verbal means, e.g., with emotion terms. Through them, one can express own emotional states and those of others. Thus, the acquisition of emotion terms allows children to participate more intensively in social contexts – a basic requirement for learning new words and for elaborating socio-emotional skills. However, little is known about how children acquire and process this specific word category, which is positioned between concrete and abstract words. In particular, the influence of valence on emotion word processing during childhood has not been sufficiently investigated. Previous research points to an advantage of positive words over negative and neutral words in word processing. While previous studies found valence effects to be influenced by factors such as arousal, frequency, concreteness, and task, it is still unclear if and how valence effects are also modified by age. The present study compares the performance of children aged from 5 to 12 years and adults in two experimental tasks: lexical decision (word or pseudoword) and emotional categorization (positive or negative). Stimuli consisted of 48 German emotion terms (24 positive and 24 negative) matched for arousal, concreteness, age of acquisition, word class, word length, morphological complexity, frequency, and neighborhood density. Results from both tasks reveal two developmental trends: First, with increasing age children responded faster and more correctly, suggesting that emotion vocabulary gradually becomes more stable and differentiated during middle childhood. Second, the influence of valence varied with age: younger children (5- and 6-year-olds) showed significantly higher performance levels for positive emotion terms compared to negative emotion terms, whereas older children and adults did not. This age-related valence effect in emotion word processing will be discussed with respect to linguistic and methodological aspects.

Zusammenfassung. Dem Erwerb von Emotionsbegriffen kommt eine besondere Bedeutung im kindlichen Lexikonerwerb zu. Zum einen ermöglicht das Emotionsvokabular den zwischenmenschlichen Austausch über Gefühle, zum anderen erfüllen Emotionsbegriffe aufgrund ihrer besonderen semantischen Eigenschaften eine Brückenfunktion für den Erwerb abstrakter Wortbedeutungen. Die vorliegende Studie untersucht die Wortverarbeitung bei 86 Kindern zwischen sechs und neun Jahren an einer Auswahl von 24 Emotionsbegriffen. Vier Aufgaben mit unterschiedlichem Schwierigkeitsgrad und unterschiedlichen Anforderungen an die semantische Verarbeitung wurden eingesetzt: lexikalisches Entscheiden (Wort-Pseudowort), emotionales Kategorisieren (positiv-negativ), Wortverstehen (Wortauswahl aus Ablenkermenge) und Wortproduktion (Satzvervollständigung). In allen Aufgabentypen zeigten sich Verbesserungen mit zunehmendem Alter, wobei sich die Leistungen in Abhängigkeit vom Aufgabentyp unterschieden. Die Ergebnisse zu Korrektheit, Reaktionszeit und Fehlertypen verdeutlichen, wie Kinder ihr Wissen über die Bedeutung von Emotionsbegriffen im Laufe des Grundschulalters ausdifferenzieren.

Arousal and valence have long been studied as the two primary dimensions for the perception of emotional stimuli such as facial expressions. Prior correlational studies that tested emotion perception along these dimensions found broad similarities between adults and children. However, few studies looked for direct differences between children and adults in these dimensions beyond correlation. We tested 9-year-old children and adults on rating positive and negative facial stimuli based on emotional arousal and valence. Despite high significant correlations between children's and adults' ratings, our findings also showed significant differences between children and adults in terms of rating values: Children rated all expressions as significantly more positive than adults in valence. Children also rated positive emotions as more arousing than adults. Our results show that although perception of facial emotions along arousal and valence follows similar patterns in children and adults, some differences in ratings persist, and vary by emotion type.