Brief Report
The development of emotion concepts: A story superiority effect in older children and adolescents

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2014.10.009Get rights and content

Highlights

  • We examined the development of emotion concepts in 8- to 20-year-olds.

  • Participants were more likely to use the expected label for stories than for faces.

  • This Story Superiority Effect held for all ages and for four of the five emotions.

  • Emotion concepts continue to develop into adolescence, an under-studied age group.

Abstract

Contrary to traditional assumptions, young children are more likely to correctly label someone’s emotion from a story that describes the causes and consequences of the emotion than from the person’s facial expression. This story superiority effect was examined in a sample of older children and adolescents (N = 90, 8–20 years) for the emotions of fear, disgust, shame, embarrassment, and pride. Participants freely labeled the emotion they inferred from a story describing a cause and consequence of each emotion and, separately, from the corresponding facial expression. In each of five age groups, the expected emotion label was used for the emotion story significantly more than for the corresponding facial expression (except for pride). The story superiority effect is strong from childhood to early adulthood and opens the door to new accounts of how emotion concepts develop.

Introduction

From an early age, children need to recognize the emotions they experience or witness. Recognition is based on conceptual categories—fear, anger, joy, and so on—and, in turn, influences how the emotion is thought about, responded to, and remembered. The current study is part of a larger project on the nature of emotion conceptual categories and how they develop. One theory of emotion recognition assumes that human nature includes an emotion signaling system (Izard, 1971, Izard, 1994), and evidence has been offered that at birth or shortly thereafter infants recognize emotions from facial expressions (Haviland and Lelwica, 1987, Walker-Andrews, 2005). Developmental accounts of emotion understanding thus suggested that facial expressions are powerful cues, especially prior to acquisition of language, to emotion recognition and might be the initial building blocks of emotion conceptual categories (Denham, 1998, Harris, 1993, Pons et al., 2004).

We are developing an alternative—the emotion scripts view (Widen, 2014, Widen and Russell, 2004, Widen and Russell, 2010a; see also de Rosnay, Harris, & Pons, 2008). On this view, there is no innate emotion signaling system. Instead, emotion conceptual categories are scripts that, in adult form, include the various cues to emotion in a causal and temporal order. The script is acquired gradually over the course of development. One implication of the script view is that emotion understanding is not unitary but rather involves different cues at different ages. The different cues to emotion are added throughout development, and facial expression need not be the earliest or strongest cue. Instead, for some emotions, the strongest cue is information about their causes and, somewhat later, the appraisal of those causes. For other emotions, the strongest cue is information about their consequences. For yet other emotions, the strongest cue is facial expressions. For example, happiness might be initially recognized from a smile, fear from a frightening cause, and anger from aggressive behavioral consequence. In support, several recent studies found that, for young children (3–11 years), stories describing an emotion’s cause and consequence proved to be better cues to emotion categorization than facial expressions (Balconi and Carrera, 2007, Nelson et al., 2013, Russell and Widen, 2002, Smith and Walden, 1999, Widen and Russell, 2010a). The current study examined this story superiority effect in older children and adolescents.

Research on the relative power of stories has been limited to children and primarily to basic emotions. The story superiority effect may be reversed for adolescents and a wider variety of emotions. A handful of studies have assessed adolescents’ understanding of facial expressions (Herba et al., 2006, Lenti et al., 1999, Montirosso et al., 2010). The general finding is that adolescents are more likely than younger children to use the expected emotion label for facial expressions (but see Montirosso et al., 2010). No research, to our knowledge, has compared the relative influence of different cues on adolescents’ emotion recognition. The current study did so for five emotions: fear, disgust, embarrassment, shame, and pride. Because adolescents improve in labeling the emotion of faces, perhaps the story superiority effect diminishes or disappears, but no strong hypotheses are warranted by extant findings.

The current study followed in the footsteps of a prior study that found that children (4–10 years) were more likely to use the expected label for cause-and-consequence stories than for facial expressions overall (Widen & Russell, 2010a). This effect held for fear, disgust, embarrassment, shame, and compassion. The current study sought to extend the story superiority effect to older children and adolescents. Participants (8–20 years) freely labeled emotions from stories and, separately, from facial expressions of fear, disgust, shame, embarrassment, and pride.

Section snippets

Participants

A total of 90 participants (42 males; 8–20 years; 80.0% Caucasian, 6.7% Hispanic, 4.4% Asian, 1.1% Pacific Islander, 1.1% African American, and 6.7% other/did not report) were recruited from the greater Boston area in the northeastern United States. The sample was divided into five equal groups (n = 18 each): 8- and 9-year-olds (M = 8.50 years, SD = 0.51; 9 males), 10- and 11-year-olds (M = 10.56 years, SD = 0.51; 9 males), 12- to 14-year-olds (M = 12.67 years, SD = 0.70; 9 males), 15- to 17-year-olds (M = 16.17 

Photographs of facial expressions

Photographs of prototypical facial expressions posed by Caucasian females were selected from two sets. The pride, shame, and embarrassment photos were from the University of California, Davis, Set of Emotion Expressions (Tracy, Robins, & Schriber, 2009). The fear and disgust photos were from the Amsterdam Dynamic Facial Expression Set (van der Schalk, Hawk, Fischer, & Doosje, 2011). Photos in both sets were based on and coded with the Facial Action Coding System (Ekman, Friesen, & Hager, 2002).

Relative power of stories versus faces to tap emotion concepts

The stories were more powerful cues to emotion than were the faces. Support for this conclusion was found in a mixed-design analysis of variance (ANOVA) where age group (five levels: 8 and 9 years, 10 and 11 years, 12–14 years, 15–17 years, or 18–20 years) and order of presentation (four levels) were between-participants factors and mode of presentation (two levels: story or facial expression) and emotion (five levels: fear, embarrassment, disgust, shame, or pride) were within-participant factors.

Acknowledgments

We thank Ruqian Ma for her help with this study and Mahsa Ershadi for feedback on a draft of the manuscript. This study was funded by a Grant from the National Science Foundation (1025563).

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