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 em… Show more
“…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.…”
Section: Supplementary Materialsmentioning
confidence: 86%
“…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.…”
Section: Infants Track the Statistics Of Emotion Transitions In The Homementioning
confidence: 94%
“…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.…”
Section: Infants Track the Statistics Of Emotion Transitions In The Homementioning
confidence: 99%
“…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.…”
Predicting others' feelings is a superpower that enables efficient social interactions. How do infants learn which emotions precede and follow each other? We propose that infants develop this ability by tuning into the dynamics of their socio-emotional environment. If so, we expect that the way in which infants process emotion transitions will reflect both general patterns seen in adults as well as local statistics of observed emotion transitions. We measured 4-10-month-old U.S. infants' (N=70) pupillary responses to emotion transitions and surveyed primary caregivers on the frequency of their own emotion transitions. As expected, infants were attuned to adult patterns of emotion transitions, showing greater pupillary synchrony for frequent transitions. They were also sensitive to their caregiver’s specific transition frequencies, exhibiting similar pupillary responses to infants whose caregivers show similar patterns. These findings suggest that infants learn about emotion dynamics by observing statistical patterns in the people around them.
“…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.…”
Section: Supplementary Materialsmentioning
confidence: 86%
“…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.…”
Section: Infants Track the Statistics Of Emotion Transitions In The Homementioning
confidence: 94%
“…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.…”
Section: Infants Track the Statistics Of Emotion Transitions In The Homementioning
confidence: 99%
“…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.…”
Predicting others' feelings is a superpower that enables efficient social interactions. How do infants learn which emotions precede and follow each other? We propose that infants develop this ability by tuning into the dynamics of their socio-emotional environment. If so, we expect that the way in which infants process emotion transitions will reflect both general patterns seen in adults as well as local statistics of observed emotion transitions. We measured 4-10-month-old U.S. infants' (N=70) pupillary responses to emotion transitions and surveyed primary caregivers on the frequency of their own emotion transitions. As expected, infants were attuned to adult patterns of emotion transitions, showing greater pupillary synchrony for frequent transitions. They were also sensitive to their caregiver’s specific transition frequencies, exhibiting similar pupillary responses to infants whose caregivers show similar patterns. These findings suggest that infants learn about emotion dynamics by observing statistical patterns in the people around them.
“…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).…”
Learning about emotions is an important part of children's social and communicative development. How does children's emotion-related vocabulary emerge over development? How may emotion-related information in caregiver input support learning of emotion labels and other emotion-related words? This investigation examined language production and input among English-speaking toddlers (16-30 months) using two datasets: Wordbank (N = 5520; 36% female, 38% male, and 26% unknown gender; 1% Asian, 4% Black, 2% Hispanic, 40% White, 2% others, and 50% unknown ethnicity; collected in North America; dates of data collection unknown) and Child Language Data Exchange System (N = 587; 46% female, 44% male, 9% unknown gender, all unknown ethnicity; collected in North America and the UK; data collection dates, were available between 1962 and 2009). First, we show that toddlers develop the vocabulary to express increasingly wide ranges of emotional information during the first 2 years of life. Computational measures of word valence showed that emotion labels are embedded in a rich network of words with related valence. Second, we show that caregivers leverage these semantic connections in ways that may scaffold children's learning of emotion and mental state labels. This research suggests that young children use the dynamics of language input to construct emotion word meanings, and provides new techniques for defining the quality of infant-directed speech.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.