The Development of Emotion Recognition

Abstract

At all ages, children interpret and respond to the emotions of others. Traditionally, it has been assumed that children’s emotion knowledge was based on an early understanding of facial expressions in terms of specific, discrete emotions. More recent evidence suggests that this assumption is incorrect. As described by the broad-to-differentiated hypothesis, children’s initial emotion concepts are broad and valence based. Gradually, children differentiate within these initial concepts by linking the different components of an emotion together (e.g., the cause to the consequence, etc.) until their concepts resemble adults’ emotion concepts. Contrary to traditional assumptions, facial expressions are neither the starting point for most emotion concepts nor are they the strongest cue to emotions. Instead, just like any other component of an emotion concept, facial expressions must be differentiated from the valence-based concepts and linked to the other components of the specific emotion concept.