The emergence of organized emotion dynamics in childhood

Abstract

Emotions change from one moment to the next. They have a duration from seconds to hours, and then transition to other emotions. Here we describe the early ontology of these key aspects of emotion dynamics. In five cross-sectional studies that combine parent surveys and ecological momentary assessment, we characterize how emotion duration and transitions change over the first five years of life, and how they relate to children’s language development. Over this developmental period, the duration of children’s emotions increased, and emotion transitions became increasingly organized by valence, such that children were more likely to transition between similarly valenced emotions. Children with these more mature emotion profiles also had larger vocabularies and produced labels for the tested emotions. These findings advance our understanding of emotion and communication by highlighting their intertwined nature in development and by charting how dynamic features of emotional experiences change over the first years of life.

Infants track the statistics of emotion transitions in the home

“…We tested this with a mixed-effects regression predicting the likelihood of the transition from the type of transition (same vs. cross valence), with random intercepts and slopes by participant and random intercepts by the second emotion in the transition. Replicating prior research (Nencheva et al, 2023;Thornton & Tamir, 2017), caregivers reported that they (𝛽 = 0.54, t(70.03) = 14.69, p = 4.53×10 -23 ) and their infants (𝛽 = 0.42, t(70) = 10.48, p = 5.44×10 -16 ) were more likely to transition between emotions with similar valence (e.g., between sad and angry) than between emotions with different valence (e.g., between sad and happy). This was very consistent across participants, with 66 (out of 70) of the adults reporting higher transition likelihoods for within vs. across valence transitions for themselves and 64 (out of 70) doing so for their child.…”

“…However, it is unknown how their fine-tuned knowledge of real-world emotion transition probabilities develops. Although young infants' transitions start out as more variable and idiosyncratic, they already follow this pattern of valence-driven transitions to an extent, as assessed by both caregiver reports and ecological-momentary assessment (Nencheva et al, 2023). Children converge to the adult-like pattern of valence-driven transitions by the age of five.…”

“…Most adults show similar emotion transitions (Nencheva et al, 2023;Prasetio et al, 2020;Thornton & Tamir, 2017). Namely, transitions are more likely between emotions that are similar, and less likely between emotions that are very different from one another.…”

“…First, we tested whether adults are more likely to transition between emotions with similar than dissimilar valence (Thornton & Tamir, 2017). Second, we compared adults and infants to see if this trend is less pronounced for infants, as in prior research on this topic (Nencheva et al, 2023). We analyzed caregiver reports of how likely they and their child were to experience each of the 12 emotion transitions in the study.…”

Caregiver speech predicts the emergence of children's emotion vocabulary

“…Early childhood may be an especially important time for young children's development of valence‐based representations. Valence gradually emerges in the first 5 years of life as a dimension that organizes children's representations of nonlinguistic emotion cues and emotional experiences, in tandem with children's expanding vocabularies (Nencheva et al, 2021; Woodard et al, 2021). Children's ability to label emotions with specificity emerges during this same span in early childhood (Widen, 2013; Wu et al, 2022).…”