Scripts: Children's Understanding of Emotion

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Adultes are able to identify anger, grief, jealousy, fear, joy, or other emotions when we they it. Their knowledge about each emotion they identify then guides their thoughts and actions. This research project explores how children develop the ability to identify emotions and obtain knowledge about them. The project's central hypothesis is that concepts for anger, grief, jealousy, fear, etc. can be thought of as scripts. For example, the (adult) script for fear can be considered a sequence of elements: a danger is recognized (cause), the face and voice broadcast fear (expression), the body reacts (physiology), the person feels bad (subjective feeling) and flees (behavioral consequence). The child must build this script element by element and learn a label for it. Thus, at different ages, children have different scripts for the same emotion. For many years, the common assumption has been that children are born with, or quickly develop, concepts for at least the basic emotions tied to facial expressions. Recent research, however, has challenged this assumption. For example, preschool children interpret the facial expression of disgust as anger rather than as disgust -- even though they know the word disgust. Asked to find the angry person in a crowd, toddlers select all persons showing any negative facial expression. It is not known how emotion scripts begin, when elements enter the script, and what causes each element to enter the script. This project will study the earliest emotion categories, investigating the idea that infants and toddlers may simply divide all emotions into positive and negative. The project will then study what drives the child to divide "negative emotion" into more specific ones. A likely candidate is the difference between angry and sad facial expressions, but subsequent divisions may be based on differences in cause or behavioral consequence. For example, the distinction between anger and fear may be based on whether the person acts in a hostile way or flees. The project will also ask how children deal with a common situation: different cues to the other's emotion conflict (e.g., someone cries, but says, "I'm fine"). Emotional, social, and academic problems throughout childhood are known to be associated with deficits in understanding emotions (in "emotional intelligence"). Children, it seems, need to understand the emotions they witness and experience. Yet, the early development of this understanding is a curiously neglected area of study, making prevention and intervention difficult. Parents and teachers need basic information on what children mean by the emotion words they use and how they interpret the signs of emotion they witness. Through the Emotion Development Lab at Boston College, diverse undergraduate, graduate, and post-doctoral students will work with Dr. James Russell to investigate these questions of emotion understanding in young children. Empirically supported information about what children know and when they know it will inform parents and teachers how to guide children as they come to understand the emotions of those around them.