Comment: A role of Language in Infant Emotion Concept Acquisition

Abstract

Ruba and Repacholi (2019) review an important debate in the emotion development literature: whether infants can perceive and understand facial configurations as instances of discrete emotion categories. Consistent with a psychological constructionist account (Lindquist & Gendron, 2013; Shablack & Lindquist, 2019), they conclude that infants can perceive valence on faces, but argue the evidence is far from clear that infants perceive and understand discrete emotions. Ruba and Repacholi outline a novel developmental trajectory of emotion perception and understanding in which early emotion concept learning may be language-independent. In this comment, we argue that language may play a role in emotion concept acquisition even prior to children’s ability to produce emotion labels. We look forward to future research addressing this hypothesis.

Beyond Language in Infant Emotion Concept Development

“…We agree with and Shablack et al (2020) that emotion concepts are learned, rather than innately specified. However, the process by which emotion concepts are learned is largely unexplored.…”

“…Are you sad?”) are thought to “tag” various eliciting events (e.g., falling down), expressive behaviors (e.g., crying), and goal-based functions (e.g., to receive comfort) as members of a category (e.g., “sadness”). As Shablack et al (2020) highlight, labels might serve this function in both implicit statistical learning and explicit learning/teaching. Further, not every occurrence of an emotion need be labeled, as infants can form categories with intermittently labeled exemplars (i.e., semisupervised learning ; LaTourrette & Waxman, 2019).…”

“…Both commentaries (Hoemann et al, 2020; Shablack et al, 2020) argue that unsupervised learning of emotion concepts is perhaps impossible given the complexity and irregularity of emotions. However, such unsupervised learning feats exist in other developmental domains.…”

Examining Preverbal Infants’ Ability to Map Labels to Facial Configurations

“…These findings also provide insights to current debates in affective science regarding the role of language in emotion concept development. While some have hypothesized that learning emotion labels is necessary for infants to develop concepts of within-valence emotions (e.g., anger v. disgust) (Hoemann et al, 2019;Shablack, Stein, & Lindquist, 2020), others have argued that infants begin to develop these concepts prior to learning emotion labels . Emerging empirical evidence appears to support the latter interpretation, showing that infants may have some conceptual knowledge of within-valence emotions prior to 18 months of age (Ruba, Meltzoff, & Repacholi, 2019, 2020aWu, Muentener, & Schulz, 2017).…”

Developing Emotion Research: Insights From Emotional Development

“…This is also the case when considering how individuals may form emotion concepts using the statistical regularities of emotional events, expressions, and outcomes. If one's definition of emotion emphasizes the expression of emotion (e.g., the face, actions, events), then the lack of statistical regularity in the signal is problematic (see Shablack et al, 2020). However, a more flexible conceptualization of emotions as relations with one's environment on matters of personal significance allows for consistency across what could otherwise be viewed as noisy and discrepant incidents (see Hoemann et al, 2020).…”