CAN CHILDREN GAIN EMOTION KNOWLEDGE USING AFFECTIVE CUES?

Abstract

Emotion knowledge involves the understanding of the causes and consequences of emotion expressions. Children with high emotion knowledge tend to have better social skills and academic competence. This study investigated what minimal affective cues are necessary for children to determine the emotional valence of affective words. A female actress was videotaped while reading happy and sad word lists. The actress displayed slight affective cues based on the emotional valence of the word. Children then participated in all three conditions: (1) Video Only (VO), during which they watched only the video track of the recording; (2) Audio Only (AO), during which they heard the audio track of the recording but did not see the video track, or (3) Audio-visual (AV), during which they were presented with both the audio and video tracks. Study found that children were able to judge the emotional valence of the words significantly more often in the VO and AV conditions compared to the AO condition. These results show that children use facial affect/nonverbal behavior more than verbal expressions when making determinations of affective words.