Children need to understand the emotions they feel in themselves and witness in others. Too little is known about what children understand about the meaning of emotion words they hear such as anger, surprise, sad or shame; what they take to be the meaning of frowns, grimaces, pouts, and other facial expressions; or, more generally, how they steadily acquire the ability to anticipate and influence emotions. The proposed research seeks to describe age-related changes in emotion understanding in preschoolers. Children are interviewed individually with different tasks, such as finding the surprised person in a set of facial expressions, labeling each of the facial expressions, guessing what made another child angry or what the child will do next, anticipating what a child would feel in a certain situation, and grouping together all the people who feel a certain emotion, such as fear. This research will provide a better descriptive model of children's emotion understanding, which is important in their early school readiness and social skills and is the foundation for their later understanding of emotion. If successful, the proposed research can inform caregivers, teachers, and peers about possible miscommunication, such as a child thinking that a worried frown means anger, or that the words sad and angry mean the same thing. It should help tell us how to nurture emotional intelligence. This grant will help establish an Emotion Development Lab at Boston College, which will provide a research infrastructure for undergraduate (many volunteer), graduate and postdoctoral students, embedded in a network of local researchers. The Lab will become part of an Affective Science Center, one focus of which is planned to be public education through schools, museums, journalism, etc.
