Parent attributions of emotion to their children and the cues children use in perceiving their own emotions

A number of studies have demonstrated stable individual differences in the cues that generate emotions and other feeling states. These differences are assumed to arise from the cues parents use to identify their children's emotional states. As children learn about their own emotional states, they come to rely on these same cues. To test one implication of their view, the facial expressions of children (N=41) were manipulated and their feelings assessed. Some children reported emotions consistent with their expressions, while others reported emotions appropriate to the situation. In a separate procedure, their mothers were asked to identify the emotional states of children whose expressions were inconsistent with an account of their circumstances. Mothers who paid more attention to their children's expressive behavior had children who were more responsive to their own expressive behavior. In contrast, the mothers who were more responsive to situational cues had children whose emotions arose from the situational cues as well.The authors would like to thank numerous teachers and administrators of the Worcester Public School system in Worcester, Massachusetts, for their assistance.     

人类镜像系统参与音乐情绪的自动加工：来自EEG的证据

大脑中线电极诱发的μ抑制波(包括α和β频段)是人类镜像系统活动的电生理指标。尽管音乐情绪表现被认为是通过模仿个体的心理状态来实现的, 但是尚未有研究探讨人类镜像系统与音乐情绪加工的关系。本研究通过EEG技术, 采用跨通道情绪启动范式, 探究人类镜像系统是否参与和弦情绪的自动加工。愉悦或不愉悦的和弦启动情绪一致与不一致的目标面孔。行为结果显示, 被试对情绪一致面孔的反应显著快于情绪不一致面孔的反应。EEG结果显示, 在听觉刺激出现后的500~650 ms之间, 与情绪一致条件相比, 情绪不一致条件诱发了β频段的去同步化。在听觉刺激出现后的300~450 ms, 无论是情绪一致, 还是不一致条件, 都诱发了α频段的去同步化。源分析结果显示, μ抑制波主要出现在人类镜像系统的相关脑区。这些结果表明, 音乐情绪的自动加工与人类镜像系统的活动密切相关。     

情绪语音调节面孔表情的识别：ERP证据

采用事件相关电位（ERP）技术考察了情绪语音影响面孔表情识别的时间进程。通过设置效价一致或不一致的“语音-面孔”对,要求被试判断情绪语音和面孔表情的效价是否一致。行为结果显示,被试对效价一致的“语音-面孔”对的反应更快。ERP结果显示,在70-130ms和220-450ms,不一致条件下的面孔表情比一致条件诱发了更负的波形;在450-750ms,不一致条件下的面孔表情比一致条件诱发更正的后正成分。说明情绪语音对面孔表情识别的多个阶段产生了跨通道影响。     

Cross-modal integration of emotional face and voice in congruous and incongruous pairs: The P2 ERP effect

The study investigates cross-modal simultaneous processing of emotional tone of voice and emotional facial expression by event-related potentials (ERPs), using a wide range of different emotions (happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise, and disgust). Auditory emotional stimuli (a neutral word pronounced in an affective tone) and visual patterns (emotional facial expressions) were matched in congruous (the same emotion in face and voice) and incongruous (different emotions) pairs. Subjects (N=31) were required to watch and listen to the stimuli in order to comprehend them. Repeated measures ANOVAs showed a positive ERP deflection (P2), more posterior distributed. This P2 effect may represent a marker of cross-modal integration, modulated as a function of congruous/incongruous condition. Indeed, it shows an ampler peak in response to congruous stimuli than incongruous ones. It is suggested P2 can be a cognitive marker of multisensory processing, independently from the emotional content.     

Gender Differences in the Social Cost of Affective Deviance

The current study tested whether men and women receive different degrees of social punishment for violating norms of emotional expression. Participants watched videos of male and female targets (whose reactions were pre-tested to be equivalent in expressivity and valence) viewing either a positive or negative slideshow, with their emotional reaction to the slideshow manipulated to be affectively congruent, affectively incongruent, or flat. Participants then rated the target on a number of social evaluation measures. Displaying an incongruent emotional expression, relative to a congruent one, harmed judgments of women more than men. Women are expected to be more emotionally expressive than men, making an incongruent expression more deviant for women. These results highlight the importance of social norms in construing another person’s emotion displays, which can subsequently determine acceptance or rejection of that person.     

Task and sex modulate the brain response to emotional incongruity in Asian listeners

In order to recognize banter or sarcasm in social interactions, listeners must integrate verbal and vocal emotional expressions. Here, we investigated event-related potential correlates of this integration in Asian listeners. We presented emotional words spoken with congruous or incongruous emotional prosody. When listeners classified word meaning as positive or negative and ignored prosody, incongruous trials elicited a larger late positivity than congruous trials in women but not in men. Sex differences were absent when listeners evaluated the congruence between word meaning and emotional prosody. The similarity of these results to those obtained in Western listeners suggests that sex differences in emotional speech processing depend on attentional focus and may reflect culturally independent mechanisms.     

A hierarchy of information sources for inferring emotional reactions

The ability of children and adults to infer emotional reactions from different sources of information was investigated. Preschoolers (mean age, 4–9), second graders (mean age, 4–9), and college students were asked to infer emotional reactions from verbally presented stories in which sources of information occurred either singly, in conflict, or in congruence. The sources investigated were situational (the protagonist's social or physical situation), normative (the dispositions of a group to which the protagonist belongs), and personal (the dispositions of the protagonist in particular). Subjects indicated the protagonist's emotional reaction to an event in the story by choosing one of three facial expressions, representing happy, upset, and afraid. A hierarchy of sources for making emotional inferences was found at all three grade levels: personal information was preferred over normative information, and both were dominant over situational information. The relevance of present methods and findings to the study of the development of “empathy” is discussed.     

Children's low affective perspective-taking ability is associated with low self-initiated pro-sociality

Children's affective perspective-taking (APT) may provide a basis for efficient social interaction. The APT abilities of 83 children from 46 same-sex sibling pairs (ages 36 to 72 months, M = 52.8; SD = 12.6) were assessed through their reactions to affectively loaded story situations, and children whose APT ability (but not general cognitive abilities) was low relative to other children of their age were designated as Low-APT children. These children were not less pro-social when specific social cues or requests for pro-social behavior were given by experimenters. However, low APT may hinder children's ability to infer the need for pro-social action from relatively subtle social cues. Although 46.9% of nonlow APT children behaved pro-socially in at least two of three opportunities they were given to perform a self-initiated pro-social behavior, none of the children who were low on APT did.     

What do you want? How perceivers use cues to make goal inferences about others

Variables influencing inferences about a stranger's goal during an unsolicited social interaction were explored. Experiment 1 developed a procedure for identifying cues. Experiments 2 and 3 assessed the relative importance of various cues (space, time, characteristics of oneself, characteristics of the stranger, and the stranger's behavior) for goal judgments. Results indicated that situational context cues informed goal judgments in ways that were consistent with diagnosticity ratings and typicality ratings of those cues. Stranger characteristics and stranger behaviors affected goal judgments more than would be expected from these quantitative measures of their informativeness. Nonetheless, the results are consistent with a mental model view that assumes perceivers monitor situational cues present during interactions and that goal inferences are guided by the informativeness of these cues.     

Age differences in response to conformity pressure for emotional and nonemotional material

Most theories of social influence do not consider adult development. Theoretical and empirical work in life span developmental psychology, however, suggests that age may reduce susceptibility to social influence. The present study examined age differences in social conformity for 2 classes of stimuli: judgments of geometric shapes and emotional facial expressions. As predicted, older people, compared with their younger counterparts, displayed lower rates of social conformity, and this age difference was most evident when judging emotional facial expressions.     

不同线索下 3～9岁儿童的情绪认知、助人意向和助人行为

本研究通过个别施测,考察了600名3～9岁儿童在不同线索下的情绪认知、助人意向和助人行为。结果表明,情绪认知成绩随年龄的增长而提高,对情境和表情线索一致任务的认知优于对矛盾线索的认知,情绪认知利用线索随年龄的增长统合型逐渐取代表情依存型和情境依存型而占优势;不同难度的线索任务制约了儿童的助人意向和助人行为,情绪认知对助人意向和助人行为有不同的作用模式。     

Judging trustworthiness from faces: Emotion cues modulate trustworthiness judgments in young children

By adulthood, people judge trustworthiness from appearances rapidly and reliably. However, we know little about these judgments in children. This novel study investigates the developmental trajectory of explicit trust judgments from faces, and the contribution made by emotion cues across age groups. Five‐, 7‐, 10‐year‐olds, and adults rated the trustworthiness of trustworthy and untrustworthy faces with neutral expressions. The same participants also rated faces displaying overt happy and angry expressions, allowing us to investigate whether emotion cues modulate trustworthiness judgments similarly in children and adults. Results revealed that the ability to evaluate the trustworthiness of faces emerges in childhood, but may not be adult like until 10 years of age. Moreover, we show that emotion cues modulate trust judgments in young children, as well as adults. Anger cues diminished the appearance of trustworthiness for participants from 5 years of age and happy cues increased it, although this effect did not consistently emerge until later in childhood, that is, 10 years of age. These associations also extended to more subtle emotion cues present in neutral faces. Our results indicate that young children are sensitive to facial trustworthiness, and suggest that similar expression cues modulate these judgments in children and adults.     

儿童2岁时情绪调节策略预测4岁时社会行为

考察儿童情绪调节的早期发展对以后社会行为的预测。对 176名儿童进行 2年追踪 :2岁时 ,观察他们在陌生情境和延迟满足情境下的情绪调节策略。 4岁时 ,对他们在陌生同伴情境中的自由游戏活动进行观察 ,评价其社会交往能力和社会退缩性。在儿童完成分车票任务和收拾玩具过程中对其任务坚持性进行评价。通过回归分析我们发现在预测 4岁时社会行为上早期情绪调节策略的主效应显著。这表明 2岁时的情绪调节策略能显著地预测儿童 4岁时的社会行为     

The automatic and co-occurring activation of multiple social inferences

People make a variety of automatic inferences when observing others' actions. These include inferences about stable dispositions as well as transitory goal states and social situations. However, models of social inference have rarely considered whether different types of automatic inferences can co-occur. We present three experiments in which participants were incidentally exposed to texts depicting behaviors that afforded inferences about actors' traits and the social situations these actors were experiencing. Results from lexical decision and probe-recognition tasks revealed heightened activation of both trait and situational inferences; furthermore, this co-occurring activation was spontaneous, unconscious, and independent of processing resources or specific impression-formation goals. A fourth experiment extended these findings by showing that when participants were asked to make deliberate attributional judgments of the same set of behaviors, typical goal-directed biases reflecting the selection of either trait or situational interpretations emerged. Implications for social inference processes are discussed.     

White lie-telling in children for politeness purposes

Prosocial lie-telling behavior in children between 3 and 11 years of age was examined using an undesirable gift paradigm. In the first condition, children received an undesirable gift and were questioned by the gift-giver about whether they liked the gift. In the second condition, children were also given an undesirable gift but received parental encouragement to tell a white lie prior to being questioned by the gift-giver. In the third condition, the child's parent received an undesirable gift and the child was encouraged to lie on behalf of their parent. In all conditions, the majority of children told a white lie and this tendency increased with age. Coding of children's facial expressions using Ekman and Friesen's (1978) Facial Action Coding System revealed significant but small differences between lie-tellers and control children in terms of both positive and negative facial expressions. Detailed parental instruction facilitated children's display of appropriate verbal and nonverbal expressive behaviors when they received an undesirable gift.     

Morphed facial expressions elicited a N400 ERP effect: A domain‐specific semantic module?

Previous studies have revealed that decoding of facial expressions is a specific component of face comprehension and that semantic information might be processed separately from the basic stage of face perception. In order to explore event-related potentials (ERPs) related to recognition of facial expressions and the effect of the semantic content of the stimulus, we analyzed 20 normal subjects. Faces with three prototypical emotional expressions (fear, happiness, and sadness) and with three morphed expressions were presented in random order. The neutral stimuli represented the control condition. Whereas ERP profiles were similar with respect to an early negative ERP (N170), differences in peak amplitude were observed later between incongruous (morphed) expressions and congruous (prototypical) ones. In fact, the results demonstrated that the emotional morphed faces elicited a negative peak at about 360 ms, mainly distributed over the posterior site. The electrophysiological activity observed may represent a specific cognitive process underlying decoding of facial expressions in case of semantic anomaly detection. The evidence is in favor of the similarity of this negative deflection with the N400 ERP effect elicited in linguistic tasks. A domain-specific semantic module is proposed to explain these results.     

The influence of postural emotion cues on implicit trait judgements

Perceptions of others’ traits (e.g., trustworthiness or dominance) are influenced by the emotion displayed on their face. For instance, the same individual appears more trustworthy when they express happiness than when they express anger. This overextension of emotional expressions has been shown with facial expression but whether this phenomenon also occurs when viewing postural expressions was unknown. We sought to examine how expressive behaviour of the body would influence judgements of traits and how sensitivity to this cue develops. In the context of a storybook, adults (N?=?35) and children (5 to 8 years old; N?=?60) selected one of two partners to help face a challenge. The challenges required either a trustworthy or dominant partner. Participants chose between a partner with an emotional (happy/angry) face and neutral body or one with a neutral face and emotional body. As predicted, happy facial expressions were preferred over neutral ones when selecting a trustworthy partner and angry postural expressions were preferred over neutral ones when selecting a dominant partner. Children’s performance was not adult-like on most tasks. The results demonstrate that emotional postural expressions can also influence judgments of others’ traits, but that postural influence on trait judgments develops throughout childhood.

     

Television Exposure and Children's Decoding of Nonverbal Behavior1

Two studies considered the way in which the magnitude of exposure to television relates to children's understanding and interpretation of others' nonverbal behavior. In the first study, 6th graders made judgments regarding other children whose nonverbal facial behavior did not match their internal emotional state. Results showed that heavier television viewers held a less differentiated, more simplistic view of the consequences of nonverbal self-presentation strategies. In the second study, children in Grades 2 through 6 made judgments of others' nonverbal expressions of emotion. As predicted, heavier television viewers were better at decoding others' nonverbal expressions than lighter viewers, presumably because of their greater exposure to nonverbal displays of emotion on television. In addition, nonverbal decoding skills improved with age.     

Continuity in Emotion Knowledge from Preschool to Middle-Childhood and Relation to Emotion Socialization

This longitudinal study examined the preschool correlates of middle school children's knowledge of emotional display rules. Participants included 50 children (29 girls) who were seen at preschoolage and again 4 years later. A total of 91% of the children were Caucasian, 4.5% were Mexican American, and 4.5% were Asian American. During the preschool period, measures included children's knowledge of facial expressions, knowledge of emotion-eliciting situations, and emotional role-taking ability. In addition, the rate at which their mothers explained the causes of emotions was assessed. Four years later, the children's knowledge of emotional display rules was assessed. The display rule measures included expression regulation knowledge (i.e., whether the children altered the facial expression relative to the internal feeling without providing a motive), self-protective display rules, and prosocial display rules. Results revealed that preschoolers' situation knowledge was a negative predictor of expression regulation knowledge and that emotional role-taking was inversely related to knowledge of self-protective display rules. The results also demonstrated that the rate at which mothers' explained emotions to their children as preschoolers was positively associated with expression regulation knowledge and knowledge of prosocial display rules.