Development of Emotion Word Comprehension in Chinese Children from 2 to 13 Years Old: Relationships with Valence and Empathy

When Push Comes to Shove: Unravelling the Developmental and Longitudinal Dynamic Relationship between Bullying and Empathy in Chinese School Children

While bullying has significant long-term impacts on mental health, the developmental relationship between empathy and bullying behaviors remains unclear. Specifically, it is uncertain whether bullying perpetration and victimization predict changes in empathy over time or if empathy influences these behaviors. This study addresses this gap by examining the longitudinal dynamic relationship between empathy, bullying perpetration, and victimization. The sample comprised 3337 Chinese school children (Mage = 11.23 years, SD = 1.60; 47.7% female), followed over six waves across three years. Random intercept cross-lagged panel models (RI-CLPMs) were employed to separate between-person and within-person effects. Results indicated that at the between-person level, empathy, bullying perpetration, and victimization followed decreasing trajectories, with initial empathy negatively associated with both bullying perpetration and victimization. At the within-person level, fluctuations in bullying perpetration and victimization predicted subsequent declines in empathy, while empathy did not significantly predict later changes in bullying perpetration and victimization behaviors. These findings suggest that bullying experiences, whether as a perpetrator or victim, can impair empathy development and that empathy alone may not be sufficient to reduce bullying. This challenges current intervention models focused on empathy enhancement and calls for more nuanced approaches that address the complex dynamics between empathy and bullying.

CROWD-5e: A Croatian psycholinguistic database of affective norms for five discrete emotions

The present study introduces affective norms for a set of 3022 Croatian words on five discrete emotions: happiness, anger, sadness, fear, and disgust. The words were rated by 1239 Croatian native speakers. Each participant rated 251 or 252 words for one discrete emotion on a five-point Likert scale. The analyses revealed a significant relationship between discrete emotions, emotional dimensions (valence and arousal), and other psycholinguistic properties of words. In addition, small sex differences in discrete emotion ratings were found. Finally, the analysis of the distribution of words among discrete emotions allowed a distinction between "pure" words (i.e., those mostly related to a single emotion) and "mixed" words (i.e., those related to more than one emotion). The new database extends the existing Croatian affective norms collected from a dimensional conception of emotions, providing the necessary resource for future experimental investigation in Croatian within the theoretical framework of discrete emotions.

The acquisition of emotion-laden words from childhood to adolescence

Studies investigating how children acquire emotional vocabularies have mainly focused on words that describe feelings or affective states (emotion-label words, e.g., joy) trough subjective assessments of the children’s lexicon reported by their parents or teachers. In the current cross-sectional study, we objectively examined the age of acquisition of words that relate to emotions without explicitly referring to affective states (emotion-laden words, e.g., cake, tomb, rainbow) using a picture naming task. Three hundred and sixty participants belonging to 18 age groups from preschool to adolescence overtly named line drawings corresponding to positive, negative, and neutral concrete nouns. The results of regression and mixed model analyses indicated that positive emotion-laden words are learnt earlier in life. This effect was independent of the contribution of other lexical and semantic factors (familiarity, word frequency, concreteness, word length). It is proposed that the prioritized acquisition of positive emotion-laden words might be the consequence of the communicative style and contextual factors associated with the interaction between children and caregivers. We also discuss the implications of our findings for proposals that highlight the role of language in emotion perception and understanding.

Culture shapes preschoolers’ emotion recognition but not emotion comprehension: a cross-cultural study in Germany and Singapore

Contemporary approaches suggest that emotions are shaped by culture. Children growing up in different cultures experience culture-specific emotion socialization practices. As a result, children growing up in Western societies (e.g., US or UK) rely on explicit, semantic information, whereas children from East Asian cultures (e.g., China or Japan) are more sensitive towards implicit, contextual cues when confronted with others’ emotions. The aim of the present study was to investigate two aspects of preschoolers’ emotion understanding (emotion recognition and emotion comprehension) in a cross-cultural setting. To this end, Singaporean and German preschoolers were tested with an emotion recognition task employing European-American and East Asian child’s faces and the Test of Emotion Comprehension (TEC; Pons et al., 2004). In total, 129 German and Singaporean preschoolers (mean age 5.34 years) participated. Results indicate that preschoolers were able to recognize emotions of child’s faces above chance level. In line with previous findings, Singaporean preschoolers were more accurate in recognizing emotions from facial stimuli compared to German preschoolers. Accordingly, Singaporean preschoolers outperformed German preschoolers in the Recognition component of the TEC. The overall performance in TEC did not differ between the two samples. Findings of this study provide further evidence that emotion understanding is culturally shaped in accordance with culture-specific emotion socialization practices.

Social and emotion dimensional organizations in the abstract semantic space: the neuropsychological evidence

An essential aspect of human cognition is supported by a rich reservoir of abstract concepts without tangible external referents (e.g., “honor”, “relationship”, “direction”). While decades of research showed that the neural organization of conceptual knowledge referring to concrete words respects domains of evolutionary salience and sensorimotor attributes, the organization principles of abstract word meanings are poorly understood. Here, we provide neuropsychological evidence for a domain (sociality) and attribute (emotion) structure in abstract word processing. Testing 34 brain-damaged patients on a word-semantic judgment task, we observed double dissociations between social and nonsocial words and a single dissociation of sparing of emotional (relative to non-emotional) words. The lesion profiles of patients with specific dissociations suggest potential neural correlates positively or negatively associated with each dimension. These results unravel a general domain-attribute architecture of word meanings and highlight the roles of the social domain and the emotional attribute in the non-object semantic space.

Chinese American Immigrant Parents' Socialization of Emotions in Bilingual Bicultural Preschool Children

The purpose of this study was to examine Cantonese-speaking Chinese American immigrant parents' socialization of emotions in bilingual bicultural preschool children, using a combination of a parent questionnaire and parent language samples from emotion-elicited storytelling tasks. Sixteen Cantonese-speaking parents and their children participated in this study. Children were sequential bilinguals who were exposed to Cantonese (L1) at home since birth, and then learned English (L2) at school. The Chinese parent questionnaire examined parents' emotion talk in the home, as well as the child's dual language background and language distribution. Parents' language samples in Cantonese were collected from three parent-child storytelling tasks that each elicited a different type of negative emotion (sad, angry, scared). Results from the parent questionnaire and the parent language samples were analyzed using quantitative and qualitative methods. In the parent questionnaire, correlation analysis revealed that parents' use of guilt emotions was not associated with any of the other emotion words, suggesting that parents may not talk about guilt as frequently as the other emotions. Results from the parents' language samples showed no significant differences between parents' number of emotion words and emotion explanations across the storytelling tasks, suggesting that parents used negative emotion words similarly across all three books. Further qualitative analysis between the parent questionnaire and the language samples revealed patterns in the way parents use Chinese emotion words with their children. Findings illustrate how the combined use of a parent questionnaire and parent language samples offer complementary information to provide a more comprehensive understanding about Chinese American immigrant parents' socialization of emotions.

Let's Talk About Emotions: the Development of Children's Emotion Vocabulary from 4 to 11 Years of Age

Learning to use language in an adult-like way is a long-lasting process. This may particularly apply to complex conceptual domains such as emotions. The present study examined children's and adults' patterns of emotion word usage regarding their convergence and underlying semantic dimensions, and the factors influencing the ease of emotion word learning. We assessed the production of emotion words by 4- to 11-year-old children (N = 123) and 27 adults (M = 37 years) using a vignette test. We found that the older the children, the more emotion words they produced. Moreover, with increasing age, children's pattern of emotion word usage converged with adult usage. The analysis for semantic dimensions revealed one clear criterion-the differentiation of positive versus negative emotions-for all children and adults. We further found that broad covering emotion words are produced earlier and in a more adult-like way.

Spanish affective normative data for 1,406 words rated by children and adolescents (SANDchild)

Most research on the relationship between emotion and language in children relies on the use of words whose affective properties have been assessed by adults. To overcome this limitation, in the current study we introduce SANDchild, the Spanish affective database for children. This dataset reports ratings in the valence and the arousal dimensions for a large corpus of 1406 Spanish words rated by a large sample of 1276 children and adolescents from four different age groups (7, 9, 11 and 13 years old). We observed high inter-rater reliabilities for both valence and arousal in the four age groups. However, some age differences were found. In this sense, ratings for both valence and arousal decreased with age. Furthermore, the youngest children consider more words to be positive than adolescents. We also found sex differences in valence scores since boys gave higher valence ratings than girls, while girls considered more words to be negative than boys. The norms provided in this database will allow us to further extend our knowledge on the acquisition, development and processing of emotional language from childhood to adolescence. The complete database can be downloaded from https://psico.fcep.urv.cat/exp/files/SANDchild.xlsx .

Agreement on emotion labels' frequency in eight Spanish linguistic areas

Various traditions have investigated the relationship between emotion and language. For the basic emotions view, emotional prototypes are lexically sedimented in language, evidenced in cultural convergence in emotional recognition and expression tasks. For constructionist theories, conceptual knowledge supported by language is at the core of emotions. Understanding emotion words is embedded in various interrelated constructs such as emotional intelligence, emotion knowledge or emotion differentiation, and is related to, but different from, general vocabulary. A clear advantage of Emotion Vocabulary over most emotion-related constructs is that it can be measured objectively. In two successive corpus-based studies, we tested the predictions of concordance and absolute agreement on the frequency of use of a total of 100 Spanish emotion labels in the eight main Spanish-speaking areas: Spain, Mexico-Central America, River Plate, Continental Caribbean, Andean, Antilles, Chilean, and the United States. In both studies, the intraclass correlation coefficient was statistically different from the null and very large, over .95, as was the Kendall's concordance coefficient, indicating broad consensus among the Spanish linguistic areas. From an applied perspective, our results provide supporting evidence for the similarity in frequency, and therefore cross-cultural generalizability regarding familiarity of the 100 emotion labels as item stems or as experimental stimuli without going through a process of additional adaptation. On a broader scope, these results add evidence on the role of language for emotion theories. In this regard, countries and regions compared here share the same Spanish language, but differ in several aspects in history, culture, and socio-economic structure.

Charting the development of emotion comprehension and abstraction from childhood to adulthood using observer-rated and linguistic measures

This study examined two facets of emotion development: emotion word comprehension (knowing the meaning of emotion words such as "anger" or "excitement") and emotion concept abstraction (representing emotions in terms of internal psychological states that generalize across situations). Using a novel emotion vocabulary assessment, we captured how a cross-sectional sample of participants aged 4-25 (N = 196) defined 24 emotions. Smoothing spline regression models suggested that emotion comprehension followed an emergent shape: Knowledge of emotion words increased across childhood and plateaued around age 11. Human coders rated the abstractness of participants' responses, and these ratings also followed an emergent shape but plateaued significantly later than comprehension, around age 18. An automated linguistic analysis of abstractness supported coders' perceptions of increased abstractness across age. Finally, coders assessed the definitional strategies participants used to describe emotions. Young children tended to describe emotions using concrete strategies such as providing example situations that evoked those emotions or by referring to physiological markers of emotional experiences. Whereas use of these concrete strategies decreased with age, the tendency to use more abstract strategies such as providing general definitions that delineated the causes and characteristics of emotions or by providing synonyms of emotion words increased with age. Overall, this work (a) provides a tool for assessing definitions of emotion terms, (b) demonstrates that emotion concept abstraction increases across age, and (c) suggests that adolescence is a period in which emotion words are comprehended but their level of abstraction continues to mature. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Learning and Processing Abstract Words and Concepts: Insights From Typical and Atypical Development

The paper describes two plausible hypotheses concerning the learning of abstract words and concepts. According to a first hypothesis, children would learn abstract words by extracting co-occurrences among words in linguistic input, using, for example, mechanisms as described by models of Distributional Semantics. According to a second hypothesis, children would exploit the fact that abstract words tend to have more emotional associations than concrete words to infer that they refer to internal/mental states. Each hypothesis makes specific predictions with regards to when and which abstract words are more likely to be learned; also they make different predictions concerning the impact of developmental disorders. We start by providing a review of work characterizing how abstract words and concepts are learned in development, especially between the ages of 6 and 12. Second, we review some work from our group that tests the two hypotheses above. This work investigates typically developing (TD) children and children with atypical development (developmental language disorders [DLD] and autism spectrum disorder [ASD] with and without language deficits). We conclude that the use of strategies based on emotional information, or on co-occurrences in language, may play a role at different developmental stages.

The Relationship between Emotional Content and Word Processing in Normal Persian Speaking Children

OBJECTIVES

Emotion is a key component in language processing, but emotional words processing in children is still controversial. We aimed to investigate the relationship between emotional dimensions, arousal and valence, word familiarity, comprehension, use, and emotional content recognition. Eventually, a list of emotional content words for this age was prepared in Persian.

MATERIALS&METHODS

The study was conducted in selected elementary schools in Tehran, Iran from April to June 2017. Emotional words, from adult emotional words list, were categorized into 5 groups according to their arousal and valence scores, including neutral, happy, calm, anxious and sad. Evaluation of familiarity, use, comprehension and emotional content recognition of the list was conducted with a checklist in 60 first grade children by speech and language pathologist.

RESULTS

Neutral words gained the highest score in familiarity, use, comprehension and emotional content recognition (the mean=0.74). Afterward, there were the emotional words with high valence, calm (the mean=0.64) and happy (the mean=0.52). Finally, it was found the low score for valence emotional words, sad (the mean=0.46) anxious (the mean =0.43) in end of score rating. There was a significant difference between all word groups in four aspects (P-value<0.001). There were no significant differences between boys and girls in four aspects.

CONCLUSION

Neutral words are better comprehended and expressed than emotional words. Valence is more effective than arousal in emotional words. Gender was not a determinant factor in all of the aspects. An emotional word list which is comprehensible for children in Persian language was prepared.

Acquisition of abstract concepts is influenced by emotional valence

There is considerable lack of evidence concerning the linguistic and cognitive skills underpinning abstract vocabulary acquisition. The present study considers the role of emotional valence in providing an embodied learning experience in which to anchor abstract meanings. First, analyses of adult ratings of age-of-acquisition, concreteness and valence demonstrate that abstract words acquired early tend to be emotionally valenced. Second, auditory Lexical Decision accuracies of children aged 6-7, 8-9, and 10-11 years (n = 20 per group) complement these analyses, demonstrating that emotional valence facilitates processing of abstract words, but not concrete. These findings provide the first evidence that young, school-aged children are sensitive to emotional valence and that this facilitates acquisition of abstract words.