Month: June 2022

In chapter seven (7), we have learned from “The Path to Information Value” that 70% (seventy percent) of managers and executives say data are “extremely important” for creating competitive advantage.

In addition, it is implied by the authors that, “The key, of course, is knowing which data matter, who within a company needs them, and finding ways to get that data into users’ hands.”

Based on the company(Health and Medical Insurance Industry) you have identified for your Final Paper, discuss

1) the data that matters to the executives in that industry,

2) who, within that industry, needs that data, and

3) some methods for ensuring that the critical data gets into the users’ hands. Remember to respond to two other learners’ post, letting them know if they missed any data or details in their industry.

Please prepare one main discussion and two response posts substantive. A substantive post will do at least two of the following:

• Ask an interesting, thoughtful question pertaining to the topic
• Answer a question (in detail) posted by another student or the instructor
• Provide extensive additional information on the topic
• Explain, define, or analyze the topic in detail
• Share an applicable personal experience
• Provide an outside source (for example, an article from the UC Library) that applies to the topic, along with additional information about the topic or the source (please cite properly in APA)
• Make an argument concerning the topic.

At least one scholarly source should be used in the initial discussion thread. Be sure to use information from your readings and other sources from the UC Library. Use proper citations and references in your post.

Textbook: Chapter 7 – IG for Business Units

Calderaro, A., & Craig, A. J. S. (2020). Transnational governance of cybersecurity: policy challenges and global inequalities in cyber capacity building. Third World Quarterly, 41(6), 917–938. https://doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2020.1729729

Setyadi, R. (2019). Assessing Trust Variable Impact on the Information Technology Governance Using Business-IT Alignment Models: A Model Development Study. 2019 International Conference on Sustainable Engineering and Creative Computing (ICSECC), Sustainable Engineering and Creative Computing (ICSECC), 2019 International Conference On, 218–222. https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSECC.2019.8907224

I will post other two student discussions here once you are done with main discussion.

Learning Objectives

Identify major areas of concern in the draft essay during revising and editing.
Use peer reviews and editing checklists to assist revising and editing.
Revise and edit the first draft of your essay and produce a final draft.

Revising and editing are the two tasks you undertake to significantly improve your essay. Both are very important elements of the writing process. You may think that a completed first draft means little improvement is needed. However, even experienced writers need to improve their drafts and rely on peers during revising and editing. You may know that athletes miss catches, fumble balls, or overshoot goals. Dancers forget steps, turn too slowly, or miss beats. For both athletes and dancers, the more they practice, the stronger their performance will become. Web designers seek better images, a more clever design, or a more appealing background for their web pages. Writing has the same capacity to profit from improvement and revision.
Understanding the Purpose of Revising and Editing
Revising and editing allow you to examine two important aspects of your writing separately, so that you can give each task your undivided attention.

When you revise, you take a second look at your ideas. You might add, cut, move, or change information in order to make your ideas clearer, more accurate, more interesting, or more convincing.
When you edit, you take a second look at how you expressed your ideas. You add or change words. You fix any problems in grammar, punctuation, and sentence structure. You improve your writing style. You make your essay into a polished, mature piece of writing, the end product of your best efforts.

Tip
How do you get the best out of your revisions and editing? Here are some strategies that writers have developed to look at their first drafts from a fresh perspective. Try them over the course of this semester; then keep using the ones that bring results.

Take a break. You are proud of what you wrote, but you might be too close to it to make changes. Set aside your writing for a few hours or even a day until you can look at it objectively.
Ask someone you trust for feedback and constructive criticism.
Pretend you are one of your readers. Are you satisfied or dissatisfied? Why?
Use the resources that your college provides. Find out where your school’s writing lab is located and ask about the assistance they provide online and in person.

Many people hear the words critic, critical, and criticism and pick up only negative vibes that provoke feelings that make them blush, grumble, or shout. However, as a writer and a thinker, you need to learn to be critical of yourself in a positive way and have high expectations for your work. You also need to train your eye and trust your ability to fix what needs fixing. For this, you need to teach yourself where to look.
Creating Unity and Coherence
Following your outline closely offers you a reasonable guarantee that your writing will stay on purpose and not drift away from the controlling idea. However, when writers are rushed, are tired, or cannot find the right words, their writing may become less than they want it to be. Their writing may no longer be clear and concise, and they may be adding information that is not needed to develop the main idea.
When a piece of writing has unity, all the ideas in each paragraph and in the entire essay clearly belong and are arranged in an order that makes logical sense. When the writing has coherence, the ideas flow smoothly. The wording clearly indicates how one idea leads to another within a paragraph and from paragraph to paragraph.
Tip
Reading your writing aloud will often help you find problems with unity and coherence. Listen for the clarity and flow of your ideas. Identify places where you find yourself confused, and write a note to yourself about possible fixes.
Creating Unity
Sometimes writers get caught up in the moment and cannot resist a good digression. Even though you might enjoy such detours when you chat with friends, unplanned digressions usually harm a piece of writing.
Mariah stayed close to her outline when she drafted the three body paragraphs of her essay she tentatively titled “Digital Technology: The Newest and the Best at What Price?” But a recent shopping trip for an HDTV upset her enough that she digressed from the main topic of her third paragraph and included comments about the sales staff at the electronics store she visited. When she revised her essay, she deleted the off-topic sentences that affected the unity of the paragraph.
Read the following paragraph twice, the first time without Mariah’s changes, and the second time with them.
Nothing is more confusing to me than choosing among televisions. It confuses lots of people who want a new high-definition digital television (HDTV) with a large screen to watch sports and DVDs on. You could listen to the guys in the electronics store, but word has it they know little more than you do. They want to sell what they have in stock, not what best fits your needs. You face decisions you never had to make with the old, bulky picture-tube televisions. Screen resolution means the number of horizontal scan lines the screen can show. This resolution is often 1080p, or full HD, or 768p. The trouble is that if you have a smaller screen, 32 inches or 37 inches diagonal, you won’t be able to tell the difference with the naked eye. The 1080p televisions cost more, though, so those are what the salespeople want you to buy. They get bigger commissions. The other important decision you face as you walk around the sales floor is whether to get a plasma screen or an LCD screen. Now here the salespeople may finally give you decent info. Plasma flat-panel television screens can be much larger in diameter than their LCD rivals. Plasma screens show truer blacks and can be viewed at a wider angle than current LCD screens. But be careful and tell the salesperson you have budget constraints. Large flat-panel plasma screens are much more expensive than flat-screen LCD models. Don’t let someone make you by more television than you need!
Exercise 1

Answer the following two questions about Mariah’s paragraph:1. Do you agree with Mariah’s decision to make the deletions she made? Did she cut too much, too little, or just enough? Explain.2. Is the explanation of what screen resolution means a digression? Or is it audience friendly and essential to understanding the paragraph? Explain.CollaborationPlease share with a classmate and compare your answers.
Now start to revise the first draft of the essay you wrote in Section 8 “Writing Your Own First Draft”. Reread it to find any statements that affect the unity of your writing. Decide how best to revise.

Tip
When you reread your writing to find revisions to make, look for each type of problem in a separate sweep. Read it straight through once to locate any problems with unity. Read it straight through a second time to find problems with coherence. You may follow this same practice during many stages of the writing process.
Writing at Work
Many companies hire copyeditors and proofreaders to help them produce the cleanest possible final drafts of large writing projects. Copyeditors are responsible for suggesting revisions and style changes; proofreaders check documents for any errors in capitalization, spelling, and punctuation that have crept in. Many times, these tasks are done on a freelance basis, with one freelancer working for a variety of clients.
Creating Coherence
Careful writers use transitions to clarify how the ideas in their sentences and paragraphs are related. These words and phrases help the writing flow smoothly. Adding transitions is not the only way to improve coherence, but they are often useful and give a mature feel to your essays. Table 8.3 “Common Transitional Words and Phrases” groups many common transitions according to their purpose.
Table 8.3 Common Transitional Words and Phrases
Transitions That Show Sequence or Timeafterbeforelaterafterwardbefore longmeanwhileas soon asfinallynextat firstfirst, second, thirdsoonat lastin the first placethenTransitions That Show Positionaboveacrossat the bottomat the topbehindbelowbesidebeyondinsidenearnext tooppositeto the left, to the right, to the sideunderwhereTransitions That Show a Conclusionindeedhencein conclusionin the final analysisthereforethusTransitions That Continue a Line of Thoughtconsequentlyfurthermoreadditionallybecausebesides the factfollowing this idea furtherin additionin the same waymoreoverlooking furtherconsidering…, it is clear that Transitions That Change a Line of Thoughtbutyethoweverneverthelesson the contraryon the other handTransitions That Show Importanceabove allbestespeciallyin factmore importantmost importantmostworst Transitions That Introduce the Final Thoughts in a Paragraph or Essayfinallylastin conclusionmost of allleast of alllast of allAll-Purpose Transitions to Open Paragraphs or to Connect Ideas Inside Paragraphsadmittedlyat this pointcertainlygrantedit is truegenerally speakingin generalin this situationno doubtno one deniesobviouslyof courseto be sureundoubtedlyunquestionablyTransitions that Introduce Examplesfor instancefor example Transitions That Clarify the Order of Events or Stepsfirst, second, thirdgenerally, furthermore, finallyin the first place, also, lastin the first place, furthermore, finallyin the first place, likewise, lastly 
After Maria revised for unity, she next examined her paragraph about televisions to check for coherence. She looked for places where she needed to add a transition or perhaps reword the text to make the flow of ideas clear. In the version that follows, she has already deleted the sentences that were off topic.
Tip
Many writers make their revisions on a printed copy and then transfer them to the version on-screen. They conventionally use a small arrow called a caret (^) to show where to insert an addition or correction.

Exercise 2
1. Answer the following questions about Mariah’s revised paragraph.
1. Do you agree with the transitions and other changes that Mariah made to her paragraph? Which would you keep and which were unnecessary? Explain.2. What transition words or phrases did Mariah add to her paragraph? Why did she choose each one?3. What effect does adding additional sentences have on the coherence of the paragraph? Explain. When you read both versions aloud, which version has a more logical flow of ideas? Explain.
2. Now return to the first draft of the essay you wrote in Section 8 “Writing Your Own First Draft” and revise it for coherence. Add transition words and phrases where they are needed, and make any other changes that are needed to improve the flow and connection between ideas.
Being Clear and Concise
Some writers are very methodical and painstaking when they write a first draft. Other writers unleash a lot of words in order to get out all that they feel they need to say. Do either of these composing styles match your style? Or is your composing style somewhere in between? No matter which description best fits you, the first draft of almost every piece of writing, no matter its author, can be made clearer and more concise.
If you have a tendency to write too much, you will need to look for unnecessary words. If you have a tendency to be vague or imprecise in your wording, you will need to find specific words to replace any overly general language.
Identifying Wordiness
Sometimes writers use too many words when fewer words will appeal more to their audience and better fit their purpose. Here are some common examples of wordiness to look for in your draft. Eliminating wordiness helps all readers, because it makes your ideas clear, direct, and straightforward.

Sentences that begin with There is or There are.Wordy: There are two major experiments that the Biology Department sponsors.Revised: The Biology Department sponsors two major experiments.
Sentences with unnecessary modifiers.Wordy: Two extremely famous and well-known consumer advocates spoke eloquently in favor of the proposed important legislation.Revised: Two well-known consumer advocates spoke in favor of the proposed legislation.
Sentences with deadwood phrases that add little to the meaning. Be judicious when you use phrases such as in terms of, with a mind to, on the subject of, as to whether or not, more or less, as far as…is concerned, and similar expressions. You can usually find a more straightforward way to state your point.Wordy: As a world leader in the field of green technology, the company plans to focus its efforts in the area of geothermal energy.A report as to whether or not to use geysers as an energy source is in the process of preparation.Revised: As a world leader in green technology, the company plans to focus on geothermal energy.A report about using geysers as an energy source is in preparation.
Sentences in the passive voice or with forms of the verb to be. Sentences with passive-voice verbs often create confusion, because the subject of the sentence does not perform an action. Sentences are clearer when the subject of the sentence performs the action and is followed by a strong verb. Use strong active-voice verbs in place of forms of to be, which can lead to wordiness. Avoid passive voice when you can.Wordy: It might perhaps be said that using a GPS device is something that is a benefit to drivers who have a poor sense of direction.Revised: Using a GPS device benefits drivers who have a poor sense of direction.
Sentences with constructions that can be shortened.Wordy: The e-book reader, which is a recent invention, may become as commonplace as the cell phone.My over-sixty uncle bought an e-book reader, and his wife bought an e-book reader, too.Revised: The e-book reader, a recent invention, may become as commonplace as the cell phone.My over-sixty uncle and his wife both bought e-book readers.

Exercise 3
Now return once more to the first draft of the essay you have been revising. Check it for unnecessary words. Try making your sentences as concise as they can be.
Choosing Specific, Appropriate Words
Most college essays should be written in formal English suitable for an academic situation. Follow these principles to be sure that your word choice is appropriate. For more information about word choice, see Chapter 4 “Working with Words: Which Word Is Right?”.

Avoid slang. Find alternatives to bummer, kewl, and rad.
Avoid language that is overly casual. Write about “men and women” rather than “girls and guys” unless you are trying to create a specific effect. A formal tone calls for formal language.
Avoid contractions. Use do not in place of don’t, I am in place of I’m, have not in place of haven’t, and so on. Contractions are considered casual speech.
Avoid clichés. Overused expressions such as green with envy, face the music, better late than never, and similar expressions are empty of meaning and may not appeal to your audience.
Be careful when you use words that sound alike but have different meanings. Some examples are allusion/illusion, complement/compliment, council/counsel, concurrent/consecutive, founder/flounder, and historic/historical. When in doubt, check a dictionary.
Choose words with the connotations you want. Choosing a word for its connotations is as important in formal essay writing as it is in all kinds of writing. Compare the positive connotations of the word proud and the negative connotations of arrogant and conceited.
Use specific words rather than overly general words. Find synonyms for thing, people, nice, good, bad, interesting, and other vague words. Or use specific details to make your exact meaning clear.

Now read the revisions Mariah made to make her third paragraph clearer and more concise. She has already incorporated the changes she made to improve unity and coherence.

Exercise 4
1. Answer the following questions about Mariah’s revised paragraph:
1. Read the unrevised and the revised paragraphs aloud. Explain in your own words how changes in word choice have affected Mariah’s writing.2. Do you agree with the changes that Mariah made to her paragraph? Which changes would you keep and which were unnecessary? Explain. What other changes would you have made?3. What effect does removing contractions and the pronoun you have on the tone of the paragraph? How would you characterize the tone now? Why?
2. Now return once more to your essay in progress. Read carefully for problems with word choice. Be sure that your draft is written in formal language and that your word choice is specific and appropriate.
Completing a Peer Review
After working so closely with a piece of writing, writers often need to step back and ask for a more objective reader. What writers most need is feedback from readers who can respond only to the words on the page. When they are ready, writers show their drafts to someone they respect and who can give an honest response about its strengths and weaknesses.
You, too, can ask a peer to read your draft when it is ready. After evaluating the feedback and assessing what is most helpful, the reader’s feedback will help you when you revise your draft. This process is called peer review.
You can work with a partner in your class and identify specific ways to strengthen each other’s essays. Although you may be uncomfortable sharing your writing at first, remember that each writer is working toward the same goal: a final draft that fits the audience and the purpose. Maintaining a positive attitude when providing feedback will put you and your partner at ease. The box that follows provides a useful framework for the peer review session.
Questions for Peer Review
Title of essay: ____________________________________________
Date: ____________________________________________
Writer’s name: ____________________________________________
Peer reviewer’s name: _________________________________________

This essay is about____________________________________________.
Your main points in this essay are____________________________________________.
What I most liked about this essay is____________________________________________.
These three points struck me as your strongest:a. Point: ____________________________________________Why: ____________________________________________b. Point: ____________________________________________Why: ____________________________________________c. Point: ____________________________________________Why: ____________________________________________
These places in your essay are not clear to me:a. Where: ____________________________________________Needs improvement because__________________________________________b. Where: ____________________________________________Needs improvement because ____________________________________________c. Where: ____________________________________________Needs improvement because ____________________________________________

The one additional change you could make that would improve this essay significantly is ____________________________________________.

Writing at Work
One of the reasons why word-processing programs build in a reviewing feature is that workgroups have become a common feature in many businesses. Writing is often collaborative, and the members of a workgroup and their supervisors often critique group members’ work and offer feedback that will lead to a better final product.
Exercise 5
Exchange essays with a classmate and complete a peer review of each other’s draft in progress. Remember to give positive feedback and to be courteous and polite in your responses. Focus on providing one positive comment and one question for more information to the author.
Using Feedback Objectively
The purpose of peer feedback is to receive constructive criticism of your essay. Your peer reviewer is your first real audience, and you have the opportunity to learn what confuses and delights a reader so that you can improve your work before sharing the final draft with a wider audience (or your intended audience).
It may not be necessary to incorporate every recommendation your peer reviewer makes. However, if you start to observe a pattern in the responses you receive from peer reviewers, you might want to take that feedback into consideration in future assignments. For example, if you read consistent comments about a need for more research, then you may want to consider including more research in future assignments.
Using Feedback from Multiple Sources
You might get feedback from more than one reader as you share different stages of your revised draft. In this situation, you may receive feedback from readers who do not understand the assignment or who lack your involvement with and enthusiasm for it.
You need to evaluate the responses you receive according to two important criteria:

Determine if the feedback supports the purpose of the assignment.
Determine if the suggested revisions are appropriate to the audience.

Then, using these standards, accept or reject revision feedback.
Exercise 6
Work with two partners. Go back to Note 8.81 “Exercise 4” in this lesson and compare your responses to Activity A, about Mariah’s paragraph, with your partners’. Recall Mariah’s purpose for writing and her audience. Then, working individually, list where you agree and where you disagree about revision needs.
Editing Your Draft
If you have been incorporating each set of revisions as Mariah has, you have produced multiple drafts of your writing. So far, all your changes have been content changes. Perhaps with the help of peer feedback, you have made sure that you sufficiently supported your ideas. You have checked for problems with unity and coherence. You have examined your essay for word choice, revising to cut unnecessary words and to replace weak wording with specific and appropriate wording.
The next step after revising the content is editing. When you edit, you examine the surface features of your text. You examine your spelling, grammar, usage, and punctuation. You also make sure you use the proper format when creating your finished assignment.
Tip
Editing often takes time. Budgeting time into the writing process allows you to complete additional edits after revising. Editing and proofreading your writing helps you create a finished work that represents your best efforts. Here are a few more tips to remember about your readers:

Readers do not notice correct spelling, but they do notice misspellings.
Readers look past your sentences to get to your ideas—unless the sentences are awkward, poorly constructed, and frustrating to read.
Readers notice when every sentence has the same rhythm as every other sentence, with no variety.
Readers do not cheer when you use there, their, and they’re correctly, but they notice when you do not.
Readers will notice the care with which you handled your assignment and your attention to detail in the delivery of an error-free document..

The first section of this book offers a useful review of grammar, mechanics, and usage. Use it to help you eliminate major errors in your writing and refine your understanding of the conventions of language. Do not hesitate to ask for help, too, from peer tutors in your academic department or in the college’s writing lab. In the meantime, use the checklist to help you edit your writing.
Checklist
Editing Your Writing
Grammar

Are some sentences actually sentence fragments?
Are some sentences run-on sentences? How can I correct them?
Do some sentences need conjunctions between independent clauses?
Does every verb agree with its subject?
Is every verb in the correct tense?
Are tense forms, especially for irregular verbs, written correctly?
Have I used subject, object, and possessive personal pronouns correctly?
Have I used who and whom correctly?
Is the antecedent of every pronoun clear?
Do all personal pronouns agree with their antecedents?
Have I used the correct comparative and superlative forms of adjectives and adverbs?
Is it clear which word a participial phrase modifies, or is it a dangling modifier?

Sentence Structure

Are all my sentences simple sentences, or do I vary my sentence structure?
Have I chosen the best coordinating or subordinating conjunctions to join clauses?
Have I created long, overpacked sentences that should be shortened for clarity?
Do I see any mistakes in parallel structure?

Punctuation

Does every sentence end with the correct end punctuation?
Can I justify the use of every exclamation point?
Have I used apostrophes correctly to write all singular and plural possessive forms?
Have I used quotation marks correctly?

Mechanics and Usage

Can I find any spelling errors? How can I correct them?
Have I used capital letters where they are needed?
Have I written abbreviations, where allowed, correctly?
Can I find any errors in the use of commonly confused words, such as to/too/two?

Tip
Be careful about relying too much on spelling checkers and grammar checkers. A spelling checker cannot recognize that you meant to write principle but wrote principal instead. A grammar checker often queries constructions that are perfectly correct. The program does not understand your meaning; it makes its check against a general set of formulas that might not apply in each instance. If you use a grammar checker, accept the suggestions that make sense, but consider why the suggestions came up.
Tip
Proofreading requires patience; it is very easy to read past a mistake. Set your paper aside for at least a few hours, if not a day or more, so your mind will rest. Some professional proofreaders read a text backward so they can concentrate on spelling and punctuation. Another helpful technique is to slowly read a paper aloud, paying attention to every word, letter, and punctuation mark.
If you need additional proofreading help, ask a reliable friend, a classmate, or a peer tutor to make a final pass on your paper to look for anything you missed.
Formatting
Remember to use proper format when creating your finished assignment. Sometimes an instructor, a department, or a college will require students to follow specific instructions on titles, margins, page numbers, or the location of the writer’s name. These requirements may be more detailed and rigid for research projects and term papers, which often observe the American Psychological Association (APA) or Modern Language Association (MLA) style guides, especially when citations of sources are included.
To ensure the format is correct and follows any specific instructions, make a final check before you submit an assignment.
Exercise 7
With the help of the checklist, edit and proofread your essay.
Key Takeaways

Revising and editing are the stages of the writing process in which you improve your work before producing a final draft.
During revising, you add, cut, move, or change information in order to improve content.
During editing, you take a second look at the words and sentences you used to express your ideas and fix any problems in grammar, punctuation, and sentence structure.
Unity in writing means that all the ideas in each paragraph and in the entire essay clearly belong together and are arranged in an order that makes logical sense.
Coherence in writing means that the writer’s wording clearly indicates how one idea leads to another within a paragraph and between paragraphs.
Transitional words and phrases effectively make writing more coherent.
Writing should be clear and concise, with no unnecessary words.
Effective formal writing uses specific, appropriate words and avoids slang, contractions, clichés, and overly general words.
Peer reviews, done properly, can give writers objective feedback about their writing. It is the writer’s responsibility to evaluate the results of peer reviews and incorporate only useful feedback.
Remember to budget time for careful editing and proofreading. Use all available resources, including editing checklists, peer editing, and your institution’s writing lab, to improve your editing skills.

This is a derivative of WRITING FOR SUCCESS by a publisher who has requested that they and the original author not receive attribution, originally released and is used under CC BY-NC-SA. This work, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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Journal of Experimental Psychology: General
2015, Vol. 144, No. 3, 528 –533
© 2015 American Psychological Association
0096-3445/15/$12.00 http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/xge0000072
BRIEF REPORT
A Self-Serving Bias in Children’s Memories?
Arber Tasimi and Marcia K. Johnson
This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.
This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.
Yale University
Although children’s initial perceptions and judgments about sociomoral situations are being actively
explored, little is known about what children remember about them. In four experiments testing over 400
children, we investigated children’s memories for small acts of giving and taking. When asked to recall
their own giving and taking, children were relatively accurate following a number of delays. In contrast,
when asked to recall a child’s giving or taking, children exaggerated the child’s taking after a 1-day or
1-week delay. Notably, this pattern of misremembering occurred only when children recalled the actions
of a child but not an adult. We consider the idea that children spontaneously engage in social comparison,
which colors their memories of the social world.
Keywords: memory, social cognition, cognitive development, morality
Although initial perceptions and judgments are important, our
views of the social world are also determined by what we remember. Do children’s memories also reflect a parallel sensitivity to
social comparison? When asked to report on past conflicts, children seem to shade the truth in self-serving ways (McGuire,
Manke, Eftekhari, & Dunn, 2000; Ross, Smith, Spielmacher, &
Recchia, 2004). For example, children asked to describe past
family disputes claim more innocence for themselves and more
harm done by their siblings (Wilson, Smith, Ross, & Ross, 2004).
These findings demonstrate that children “remember” the past in
ways that make them appear more favorably to others. However,
studies investigating children’s reports of past conflicts have not
clarified whether this pattern of remembering reflects misremembering or conscious shading of the truth in the interests of selfpresentation when one’s actions may be under scrutiny.
When asked to recall others, children, like adults, seem to
show a memory advantage for negative information (Baumeister, Bratslavsky, Finkenaurer, & Vohs, 2001). After learning
about individuals who engaged in nice (e.g., sharing) and mean
(e.g., stealing) behaviors, children show better memory for
mean people (Kinzler & Shutts, 2008). Children not only show
enhanced face recognition of wrongdoers, but they also better
remember the details of their mean behaviors compared to the
details of their nice behaviors (Baltazar, Shutts, & Kinzler, 2012).
One explanation for these findings is that children find it surprising
when people do not behave well; if children think that other people
are good, then individuals who behave in unusual (negative) ways
may be noticed and remembered. Another possibility relates to the
proposal that cognitive systems have evolved to detect and remember wrongdoers (Cosmides, Tooby, Fiddick, & Bryant, 2005).
According to this idea, children’s memory advantage for negative
information serves useful purposes because remembering individuals who have wronged in the past could reduce the possibility of
being wronged in the future. However, children’s superior memory
for bad over good may serve other purposes beyond knowing who
to avoid. In particular, this pattern of remembering may reflect a
When asked various kinds of questions, children appear to
interpret the world through a positive lens (Boseovski, 2010). As
early as kindergarten, children evaluate themselves very positively
(Stipek & Mac Iver, 1989) and continue to do so until the late
elementary school years (Benenson & Dweck, 1986). Children’s
evaluations of others are also positive. For example, children
consider an individual to be good even after hearing of a single
positive behavior followed by numerous negative behaviors performed by this individual (Rholes & Ruble, 1986). By age 5,
children think a character’s negative traits will become positive
later in life (Lockhart, Chang, & Story, 2002), a belief that has
been found cross-culturally (Lockhart, Nakashima, Inagaki, &
Keil, 2009). As late as age 8, children consider another’s goodness
to be more stable than their badness (Heyman & Dweck, 1998).
When placed in situations that evoke social comparisons, however, children become less positive toward their peers. For example, between the ages of 7 and 13, children are more satisfied with
their performance on a task after learning that another child failed
compared to when they succeeded (Steinbeis & Singer, 2013).
Indeed, 5- and 6-year-olds willingly incur a personal cost to ensure
that another child receives less than themselves, thus putting them
at a relative advantage (Sheskin, Bloom, & Wynn, 2014). Such
findings show that children want to fare better relative to their
peers and are consistent with the well-known feature of adult
social cognition of comparing oneself to others (Festinger, 1954;
Fiske, 2011).
Arber Tasimi and Marcia K. Johnson, Department of Psychology, Yale
University.
We thank the children, families, and staffs of the following elementary
schools: Frisbie, Kelley, Middlebury, Plantsville, Pomperaug, Strong, and
Thalberg. We also thank Andrei Cimpian, Chaz Firestone, Susan Gelman,
Joshua Knobe, Mara Mather, and Liane Young for feedback on this work.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Arber
Tasimi, Department of Psychology, Yale University, P.O. Box 208205,
New Haven, CT 06520. E-mail: arber.tasimi@yale.edu
528
SELF-SERVING MEMORIES
This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.
This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.
self-serving bias that extends beyond previous conflicts that children themselves were engaged in.
The present investigation tested this idea. Four experiments
examined children’s memory for small acts of giving and taking
that they, another child, or an adult engaged in. We focused on
children between the ages of 5 and 8 given previous findings
showing that children of this age are (a) remarkably positive when
reasoning about themselves and others and (b) likely to engage in
social comparison. Our primary question was whether children’s
memories reflect a self-serving bias even for unobtrusive events
that do not place children in competitive or explicitly comparative
contexts.
Experiment 1
Participants
The Human Subjects Committee at Yale University approved all
study procedures used in Experiments 1– 4. Children were recruited from the greater New Haven, Connecticut area. Parents of
participating children gave written informed consent; children also
provided oral assent. Sample size for all experiments was determined by how many parents provided consent and how many
children participating on the first day returned on the second day
(Experiments 1, 3, and 4). Children were tested individually in a
quiet room at their elementary school, and all sessions were
audio-recorded. Experiment 1 included 139 children (68 girls;
mean age ⫽ 6.80 years; range ⫽ 5.14 – 8.38 years). An additional
13 children were tested but excluded because they were absent on
the second day of testing.
Procedure
Children were told that they would play a short game. Children
were then randomly assigned to one of the following four transaction conditions, each involving photos of smiling White male
children (from LoBue & Thrasher, 2014): (a) to give stickers to a
child, in which the participant was handed five stickers and provided with the opportunity to place any number in front of a child’s
photo (e.g., “For coming in today, you get 5 stickers. This is Jack.
Jack has no stickers. Would you like to give Jack any of your
stickers?”); (b) to take away stickers from a child, in which five
stickers were placed in front of a child’s photo and the participant
was provided with the opportunity to take any number (e.g., “This
is Jack. Jack has 5 stickers. Would you like to take away any of
Jack’s stickers?”); (c) to observe a child give another child stickers, in which the experimenter manipulated a transfer from one
child’s photo to another child’s photo (e.g., “This is John. John has
5 stickers. This is Jack. Jack has no stickers. John gave Jack 3
stickers.”); or (d) to observe a child take away stickers from
another child, in which the experimenter manipulated a transfer
from one child’s photo to another child’s photo (e.g., “This is John.
John has no stickers. This is Jack. Jack has 5 stickers. John took
away 3 stickers from Jack.”). The design was wholly betweensubjects, and we matched the number of stickers given or taken in
the “self” and “other” conditions. For example, if a child gave
three stickers, then the next child observed a character give three
stickers. Similarly, if a child took no stickers, then the next child
observed a character take no stickers. Because we framed our
529
study as a game, all materials remained in the testing room, so no
child left with stickers.
The following day, the experimenter returned to the school and
asked children how many stickers were given or taken (e.g., “Do
you remember Jack? How many stickers did you take away from
Jack?”).
Results
Our primary measure was the difference between the number of
stickers given or taken compared to what children reported as
being given or taken (e.g., number recalled as given minus number
actually given; see Table 1). An analysis of variance (ANOVA) on
these difference scores, including Condition (self, other) ⫻ Behavior (giving, taking), revealed an interaction between condition
and behavior, F(1, 135) ⫽ 5.66, p ⫽ .019, ␩p2 ⫽ .04. Children’s
reports did not differ between another child’s giving (M ⫽ 0) and
their own giving (M ⫽ ⫺0.03), t(67) ⫽ 0.09, p ⫽ .93, d ⫽ .02. In
contrast, children overestimated another child’s taking (M ⫽ 1.00)
in comparison to their own (M ⫽ ⫺0.09), t(68) ⫽ 3.56, p ⬍ .001,
d ⫽ .85. There was no correlation between age and difference
scores in the Other-Take condition, Pearson r ⫽ ⫺.26, p ⫽ .13.
Thus, children remembered the actions of another child relative to
their own in a way that exaggerated how much another child took.
Experiment 2
Experiment 2 addressed the possibility that children in Experiment 1 misremembered another child’s behavior simply because
they did not attend to their actions. The procedure was identical to
Experiment 1 with one exception: here, the delay was 1 min,
during which children were asked to list as many fruits and
vegetables (30 s) and animals (30 s) as they knew.
Participants
Experiment 2 included 54 children (21 girls; mean age ⫽ 7.04
years; range ⫽ 5.50 – 8.80 years).
Table 1
Children’s Reports of What Was Given or Taken by Themselves
or a Child in Experiments 1–3, M (SD)
1-min delay
(Experiment 2)
Self-give
Reported
Actual
Difference
Self-take
Reported
Actual
Difference
Child-give
Reported
Actual
Difference
Child-take
Reported
Actual
Difference
1-day delay
(Experiment 1)
1-week delay
(Experiment 3)
1.93 (1.00)
1.93 (1.00)
0.00 (0.00)
2.11 (1.05)
2.14 (1.06)
⫺0.03 (0.62)
2.92 (1.21)
2.75 (1.15)
0.17 (0.48)
1.54 (1.66)
1.54 (1.66)
0.00 (0.00)
1.71 (1.67)
1.80 (1.68)
⫺0.09 (0.28)
1.27 (1.46)
1.35 (1.65)
⫺0.08 (0.48)
1.86 (1.03)
1.93 (1.00)
⫺0.07 (0.27)
2.18 (1.57)
2.18 (1.19)
0.00 (1.81)
2.53 (1.20)
2.71 (1.08)
⫺0.18 (0.82)
1.54 (1.66)
1.54 (1.66)
0.00 (0.00)
2.77 (1.96)
1.77 (1.66)
1.00 (1.78)
3.04 (1.87)
1.17 (1.53)
1.87 (2.07)
TASIMI AND JOHNSON
530
Results
Remembered-Actual difference scores are shown in Table 1. Of
the 54 children, 53 reported the correct number of stickers that was
given or taken (one child reduced another child’s giving by one).
These findings demonstrate that children in Experiment 1 likely
paid sufficient attention to the stimuli to encode the relevant
information about the giving and taking by themselves and another
child.
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Experiment 3
The difference in outcomes between Experiment 1 and Experiment 2 suggests that the tendency to inflate how much another
child took increases with time. To confirm that children’s memories exaggerate another child’s taking with time and assess whether
the effect grows over time, Experiment 3 replicated Experiments 1
and 2 with a longer delay of 1 week.
Participants
Experiment 3 included 101 children (51 girls; mean age ⫽ 6.97
years; range ⫽ 5.40 – 8.55 years). An additional 15 children were
tested but excluded because they were absent on the second day of
testing.
Results
Remembered-Actual difference scores are shown in Table 1. An
ANOVA including Condition (self, other) ⫻ Behavior (giving,
taking) revealed an interaction between condition and behavior,
F(1, 97) ⫽ 25.81, p ⬍ .001, ␩p2 ⫽ .21. Children slightly minimized
another child’s giving (M ⫽ ⫺0.18) relative to their own (M ⫽
0.17), t(50) ⫽ 1.81, p ⫽ .076, d ⫽ .50, and, as in Experiment 1,
overestimated another child’s taking (M ⫽ 1.87) in comparison to
their own (M ⫽ ⫺0.08), t(47) ⫽ 4.65, p ⬍ .001, d ⫽ 1.33. There
was no correlation between age and difference scores in the
Other-Take condition, Pearson r ⫽ ⫺.01, p ⫽ .95. We also
conducted a linear trend on children’s reports of another’s taking
over the three delays (1 min, 1 day, 1 week), which confirmed the
impression that the tendency to inflate how much another child
took increased with time, F(1, 68) ⫽ 9.74, p ⫽ .003.
Experiment 4
Does children’s pattern of misremembering in the previous
experiments reflect an implicit comparative self-serving bias? Because people seek social comparisons with individuals who are
similar to themselves (Goethals & Darley, 1977; Suls, Martin, &
Wheeler, 2002; Wood, 1989)—and age is an important dimension
by which children engage in social comparison (Dijkstra, Kuyper,
van der Werf, Buunk, & van der Zee, 2008; Suls, Gastorf, &
Lawhon, 1978)—Experiment 4 tested whether children differentially remember the giving and taking behaviors of a child versus
an adult.
Participants
Experiment 4 included 104 children (50 girls; mean age ⫽ 6.33
years; range ⫽ 5.01– 8.32 years). An additional three children were
tested but excluded because they were absent on the second day of
testing.
Procedure
The procedure was identical to Experiment 3, with one exception: here, children were randomly assigned to observe the giving
or taking of a child or an adult (photos of smiling White male
young adults were taken from Tottenham et al., 2009), and their
memory was tested 1 week later. We matched “child” and “adult”
conditions by using the distributions of another child’s giving or
taking in Experiment 3.
Results
Remembered-Actual difference scores are shown in Table 2. An
ANOVA including Character (adult, child) ⫻ Behavior (giving,
taking) revealed an interaction between character and behavior,
F(1, 100) ⫽ 7.46, p ⫽ .007, ␩p2 ⫽ .07. Children’s reports did not
differ between an adult’s giving (M ⫽ ⫺0.23) and a child’s giving
(M ⫽ ⫺0.20), t(50) ⫽ 0.10, p ⫽ .92, d ⫽ .03. In contrast, children
overestimated a child’s taking (M ⫽ 1.41) in comparison to an
adult’s taking (M ⫽ 0.16), t(50) ⫽ 3.21, p ⫽ .002, d ⫽ .89. There
was no correlation between age and difference scores in the
Other-Take condition, Pearson r ⫽ ⫺.24, p ⫽ .23. Thus, children’s
pattern of misremembering in the present investigation occurred
when children recalled the actions of another child but not an adult.
Discussion
These experiments provide strong evidence that children remember other children as having taken more than they actually
took. In contrast, children were quite accurate in remembering
their own giving and taking, as well as the giving and taking of an
adult. Taking is a canonical moral violation in childhood (e.g.,
Smetana, Killen, & Turiel, 1991), and the present findings suggest
that even this very mild negative action is subject to systematic
memory distortion.
Table 2
Children’s Reports of What Was Given or Taken by an Adult or
a Child in Experiment 4, M (SD)
M (SD)
Adult-give
Reported
Actual
Difference
Adult-take
Reported
Actual
Difference
Child-give
Reported
Actual
Difference
Child-take
Reported
Actual
Difference
2.44 (1.12)
2.67 (1.07)
⫺0.23 (0.80)
1.36 (1.44)
1.20 (1.47)
0.16 (0.55)
2.48 (1.08)
2.68 (1.11)
⫺0.20 (0.82)
2.56 (1.89)
1.15 (1.43)
1.41 (1.86)
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SELF-SERVING MEMORIES
What might account for our findings? One possibility is that
people remember exceptional information (Hunt, 2006); if children
believe that others are good, then negative information may be
noticed and remembered. It is possible that findings showing a
negativity bias in children’s memories (Baltazar et al., 2012;
Kinzler & Shutts, 2008) reflect a memory advantage for unusual
information about others. If so, children in our experiments should
have been more, not less, accurate in remembering the surprising—taking— behavior.
Another possibility is that children’s memory reflects their
initial interpretation of a situation and/or the schemas invoked
during remembering (Bransford & Johnson, 1973). Introducing
negative information about an individual can distort memory for
specific behaviors, resulting in an exaggeration of their wrongdoing after a delay (Pizarro, Laney, Morris, & Loftus, 2006). Perhaps
children in the present study created their own explanations for
why the character gave or took and “remembered” consistent with
the explanation they generated (an interpretive narrative account).
For example, children observing a character that took stickers
might have judged this character as “bad” and thus, in remembering, exaggerated the number of stickers taken. Indeed, children
make behavior-to-trait inferences about the niceness and meanness
of others from an early age (Liu, Gelman, & Wellman, 2007).
However, several children reported a child taking one or more
stickers when no stickers were taken, suggesting the influence of
a factor that needs little evidence to get started. One possibility is
that children interpreted the situation as “sharing,” assuming it was
“fair” to take stickers and thus misremembered that stickers were
taken even when they were not. Again, children did not misremember that they or an adult had taken stickers when they had not.
What else, then, could explain our findings? Perhaps observing
another child giving or taking invokes implicit social comparison;
indeed, similarity in age influences whether children compare
themselves with others (Dijkstra et al., 2008; Suls et al., 1978).
Thus, children’s memory in this situation may reflect a self-serving
bias, suggesting that other children take more than they themselves
would. Although a self-serving bias is well documented among
adults (Pronin, 2007; Pronin, Gilovich, & Ross, 2004), little is
known about its developmental origins and its role in remembering. For example, previous work indicates that self-serving judgments are rooted in adults’ overly charitable view of themselves
(Epley & Dunning, 2000); might their self-serving memories be
based on an overly cynical view of others? One possibility is that
self-serving memories occur more often for negative than positive
behaviors in mild situations such as ours. For example, taking little
may imply generosity in a sharing situation; hence, taking may
need to be exaggerated in order to achieve a self-serving effect. If
someone gave little to begin with, it may not seem necessary to
minimize their giving further (i.e., their selfishness is self-evident).
If so, we would expect that another’s giving would be minimized
in situations where their generosity challenges one’s self-image.
Thus, the current findings highlight potential motivational factors that may influence memory. According to the sourcemonitoring framework (Johnson, Hashtroudi, & Lindsay, 1993),
memories are judgments about our subjective experience during
remembering that may reflect source misattributions contaminated
by information from other events or from prior schemas and
motives. For example, adults misremember past events based on
desired outcomes (Barber, Gordon, & Franklin, 2009; Gordon,
531
Franklin, & Beck, 2005), engage in choice-supportive memory
distortion about past decisions (Mather, Shafir, & Johnson, 2000),
and selectively recall positive information to regulate their mood
(Mather & Carstensen, 2005) or maintain a desirable self-view
(Sanitioso, Kunda, & Fong, 1990). However, relatively little work
has been done on such motivational factors in children’s memories.
Although children are sometimes motivated to derogate individuals—for example, out-group members (Buttelmann & Böhm,
2014)— children in the current study received no additional information beyond the giving or taking of another child. Unlike
previous studies that have put children in comparative contexts
(e.g., Steinbeis & Singer, 2013), each child in our study either
engaged in a behavior or observed another child engage in a
behavior. Thus, whatever motives were activated were relatively
implicit. Of course, it is possible that children purposefully exaggerated the taking of another child; children may have misreported
(i.e., lied) rather than misremembered, which is still consistent
with the idea that children spontaneously engage in social comparison. If so, future studies may find that fabricated responses are
later misremembered as what actually happened (e.g., Ackil &
Zaragoza, 1998).
In contrast to the few studies exploring the influence of motives
in children’s memory, many have shown that children’s memories
can be distorted by extra-event information, including stereotypes
and suggestions (Bruck & Ceci, 1999; Leichtman & Ceci, 1995;
Lindsay, 2002). Critically, our questioning was not suggestive;
children were not induced to generate inaccurate reports by exposing them to misleading or confusable additional information.
However, children were tested in schools, raising the question of
whether they exchanged information following their individual
sessions. For example, if a child heard from the experimenter that
John took one sticker and heard during the retention interval from
another participant that John took three stickers, then this child
might misremember “three stickers.” However, if there is no
self-serving bias operating, then a child who heard from the
experimenter that John took three stickers and heard during the
retention interval from another participant that John took one
sticker should sometimes misremember “one sticker,” which
should not produce an overall bias to exaggerate another child’s
taking. On the other hand, if negative behaviors are more salient
than positive ones (Baumeister et al., 2001; Rozin & Royzman,
2001), another child’s taking may be more likely to be passed
along to others than their giving. This gossip account could help
explain why children distorted only the taking, but not the giving,
of another child. Note, however, that children did not also distort
an adult’s taking; social group membership may not only induce
spontaneous comparison of self to another group member but also
prompt conversation that becomes a potential source of memory
distortion. Thus, understanding the ways in which self-serving
biases arise spontaneously from viewing others’ behaviors or may
prompt asymmetric communications presents many questions, especially when considering the ways in which these two factors
may or may not interact.
Taken together, these studies highlight the importance of memory in elucidating early social cognition. Studying what children
remember should contribute to a more complete understanding of
what, and how, they think about the everyday social world and the
mechanisms that contribute to their evolving views.
TASIMI AND JOHNSON
532
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SELF-SERVING MEMORIES
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Received January 8, 2015
Revision received February 24, 2015
Accepted March 1, 2015 䡲
Call for Papers: Behavioral Neuroscience
Special Issue on Behavioral Neuroscience of Sleep
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Journal of Experimental Psychology:
General
How Do Children Learn Novel Emotion Words? A Study of
Emotion Concept Acquisition in Preschoolers
Holly Shablack, Misha Becker, and Kristen A. Lindquist
Online First Publication, December 30, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/xge0000727
CITATION
Shablack, H., Becker, M., & Lindquist, K. A. (2019, December 30). How Do Children Learn Novel
Emotion Words? A Study of Emotion Concept Acquisition in Preschoolers. Journal of
Experimental Psychology: General. Advance online publication.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/xge0000727
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General
© 2019 American Psychological Association
ISSN: 0096-3445
2019, Vol. 1, No. 999, 000
http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/xge0000727
How Do Children Learn Novel Emotion Words? A Study of Emotion
Concept Acquisition in Preschoolers
Holly Shablack, Misha Becker, and Kristen A. Lindquist
This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.
This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Understanding emotion words is vital to understanding, regulating, and communicating one’s emotions.
Yet, little work examines how emotion words are acquired by children. Previous research in linguistics
suggests that children use the sentence frame in which a novel word is presented to home in on the
meaning of that word, in conjunction with situational cues from the environment. No research has
examined how children integrate these cues to learn the meaning of emotion adjectives (e.g., “happy,”
“sad,” “mad”). We conducted 2 studies examining the role of sentence frame and situational context in
children’s (ages 3–5) understanding of the meanings of novel words denoting emotions. In Study 1 (N ⫽
135) children viewed a conversation wherein a novel “alien” word was presented in 1 of 3 sentence
frames that varied in how likely the word was to denote an emotion (i.e., is daxy, feels daxy, or feels daxy
about). Children selected the image that represented the meaning of the word in a picture-pointing task.
Images depicted aliens experiencing an emotion, a physical state, or performing an action. In Study 2
(N ⫽ 113) situational context was added via cartoons depicting an emotional scenario. Findings suggest
that children are more likely to associate emotion images with a novel word with increasing age, more
informative sentence frames, and when the situational context implies that an emotion is present. This
provides important insight on how educational and clinical settings can use language and situational
context to aide in emotion understanding.
Keywords: emotion development, language, syntax, emotion concepts, concept acquisition
Supplemental materials: http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/xge0000727.supp
Understanding one’s own and others’ emotions is crucial to
social communication, interpersonal relationships, emotion regulation, and well-being (Eisenberg, Sadovsky, & Spinrad, 2005;
Hagelskamp, Brackett, Rivers, & Salovey, 2013; Kashdan, Barrett,
& McKnight, 2015; Lindquist & Barrett, 2008; Lindquist, Satpute,
& Gendron, 2015; Twenge, Catanese, & Baumeister, 2003).
Greater understanding of emotions in childhood predicts later
academic and interpersonal success (for reviews see Lindquist,
Gendron, & Satpute, 2016; Shablack & Lindquist, in press). Moreover, multiple forms of psychopathology are characterized by
difficulties in understanding emotions, such as autism (BaronCohen & Wheelwright, 2004; Baron-Cohen, 1991; Dapretto et al.,
2006; Wang, Dapretto, Hariri, Sigman, & Bookheimer, 2004),
depression (Berenbaum & Oltmanns, 1992; Joormann, 2010; Murphy et al., 1999; Phillips, Drevets, Rauch, & Lane, 2003), and
anxiety (Etkin & Wager, 2007; Mennin, McLaughlin, & Flanagan,
2009; Salters-Pedneault, Roemer, Tull, Rucker, & Mennin, 2006).
It is thus important to understand the mechanisms by which some
people gain a complex understanding of emotions, whereas others
fail to.
One hypothesis is that a complex understanding of emotions is
learned, primarily during early development via discourse with
caregivers (Castro, Halberstadt, Lozada, & Craig, 2015; Dunsmore
& Halberstadt, 1997; Garrett-Peters, Castro, & Halberstadt, 2017;
Halberstadt & Lozada, 2011; Shablack & Lindquist, in press.;
Weinberg, Tronick, Cohn, & Olson, 1999). In this view, interactions with caregivers, but particularly emotion word use by caregivers, helps children to acquire a rich cache of knowledge about
the emotion concepts most relevant to their culture (Campos,
Frankel, & Camras, 2004; Denham, Zoller, & Couchoud, 1994;
Editor’s Note. Cathie Tamis-LeMonda served as the action editor for this
article.—NC
Holly Shablack, Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Misha Becker, Department of
Linguistics, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; X Kristen A.
Lindquist, Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
This research was supported by a grant from the Fostering Interdisciplinary Research Explorations program at UNC Chapel Hill, awarded to
Kristen A. Lindquist and Misha Becker. We also thank all of the research
assistants who helped finalize study materials and run participants. A
subset of these findings was presented at the Society for Affective Science
Conference in 2018 and Cognitive Development Society in 2019. This
research was supported by a grant from the Fostering Interdisciplinary
Research Explorations program at UNC Chapel Hill. Findings were presented at the Society for Affective Science Conference in 2018 and
Cognitive Development Society in 2019.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Holly
Shablack, Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 235 East Cameron Avenue, Chapel Hill, NC
27599. E-mail: hshab@live.unc.edu
1
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2
SHABLACK, BECKER, AND LINDQUIST
Ellis, Alisic, Reiss, Dishion, & Fisher, 2014; Fivush, Brotman,
Buckner, & Goodman, 2000; Fivush, Haden, & Reese, 2006; Fogel
et al., 1992; Halberstadt, Denham, & Dunsmore, 2001; Pons,
Harris, & de Rosnay, 2004). Indeed, research in cognitive science
suggests that words help infants, children, and adults acquire and
use concepts of all kinds (Lupyan, 2012a, 2012b; Xu & Kushnir,
2013). In particular, words facilitate the acquisition of socially
shared concepts such as emotions (Doyle & Lindquist, 2018),
color (Steels & Belpaeme, 2005), and spatial relations (Casasanto,
2008; Casasanto & Bottini, 2014) in adults. Yet the mechanisms
by which children learn emotion concepts and their labels remains
relatively unknown. Unlike object concepts (e.g., tiger, table),
which are concrete, stable, and typically labeled by nouns, emotion
concepts are abstract, transient, and typically labeled by adjectives,
which makes them a difficult class of concepts to learn labels for
(Gentner, 1982; Pinker, 1984). By combining research in the
development of emotion and psycholinguistics, the present studies
assess for the first time how children might learn to associate novel
words with emotion concepts. We hypothesize that like certain
other lexical categories, children use the syntactic structure of
language to infer the meanings of novel adjectives labeling emotion concepts. In addition, based on prior research on emotion
concept understanding (Kayyal, Widen, & Russell, 2015; Widen &
Russell, 2010, 2011) we hypothesize that situational cues from the
environment will be needed to understand that novel adjectives
denote emotion concepts.
The Role of Language in Emotion Development
Many psychological models of emotional development argue
that the ability to experience, perceive, and ultimately understand
specific emotion concepts follows a developmental trajectory and
is learned through social relationships and verbal communication
between children and caregivers (Castro et al., 2015; Dunsmore &
Halberstadt, 1997; Garrett-Peters et al., 2017; Halberstadt & Lozada, 2011; Shablack & Lindquist, in press; Weinberg et al., 1999).
In this view, infants start life with the ability to experience in their
own bodies and perceive in others very basic feelings such as
agitation and excitement (Bridges, 1932) or pleasantness and unpleasantness (Camras, 1992; La Barbera, Izard, Vietze, & Parisi,
1976; Lewis & Brooks, 1978; Russell & Bullock, 1985, 1986;
Widen, 2013). It is hypothesized that over time, infants and children learn to make more fine-grained discriminations among these
basic feelings. According to psychological constructionist approaches, concept knowledge about emotions is what ultimately
helps children to learn to differentiate between different types of
unpleasantness (e.g., fear vs. anger) or different types of pleasantness (e.g., joy vs. pride; Barrett, 2006, 2013; Barrett & Russell,
2015; Lindquist, 2013; Russell, 2003).
One perspective is that language helps children to acquire emotion concept knowledge because words serve as “essence placeholders” that cohere together instances (e.g., feeling aggressive,
feeling like one’s goals are blocked, feeling one’s heart beating
more quickly) as members of the same emotion category (e.g.,
anger; for a review, see Lindquist, MacCormack, & Shablack,
2015). This hypothesis shares much in common with hypotheses
about the role of language in the acquisition of other concept types
(Lindquist, MacCormack et al., 2015; Lupyan, 2012a, 2012b; Xu
& Kushnir, 2013). It suggests that as children develop a larger
emotion vocabulary, they develop more nuanced emotion concept
knowledge and are thus able to perceive, express and experience a
wider range of emotions.1
There is ample evidence to suggest that discourse with parents
about emotions predicts children’s greater emotional perception
and understanding. For instance, correlational evidence suggests
that as children age, emotion word knowledge increases (Bretherton & Beeghly, 1982; Ridgeway, Waters, & Kuczaj, 1985; Wellman, Harris, Banerjee, & Sinclair, 1995) as does performance in
emotion perception tasks (Astington & Jenkins, 1999; Cutting &
Dunn, 1999; Harris, De Rosnay, & Pons, 2005; Wellman et al.,
1995). Furthermore, in 3- to 6-year-olds, general verbal ability
(when controlling for age, attachment security, and gender) is an
important predictor of children’s ability to understand the emotions of others (de Rosnay & Harris, 2002; de Rosnay, Pons,
Harris, & Morrell, 2004; Pons, Lawson, Harris, & De Rosnay,
2003). When using emotion words more specifically, toddlers
initially describe their own feelings and the feelings of others in
broad valenced terms by using general words such as happy and
sad or mad. Yet by age 5 they additionally use words such as
afraid, surprised, and disgust to describe a more nuanced range of
emotional states (Widen & Russell, 2003). This effect appears to
go beyond mere labeling, as children’s ability to perceptually
identify emotional facial expressions in a nuanced manner increases as emotion labeling ability increases. For instance, early in
toddlerhood, children tend to use the words happy and sad2 in
daily discourse, and correspondingly can only reliably differentiate
pleasant and unpleasant facial expressions from one another. Yet,
around the time that children begin to use the words anger and fear
in daily discourse to differentiate between different negative states,
they also become able to perceive these negative emotions on faces
(i.e., distinguish anger from fear) in perceptual sorting tasks
(Widen & Russell, 2008). Importantly, asking children to match
emotional facial expressions to words, as opposed to other facial
expression exemplars, facilitates children’s performance, even
1
Psychological constructionist models of emotion stand in contrast to
“basic emotion” approaches that assume that certain emotions are innate,
such that children are able to experience in their own bodies and perceive
in others discrete emotion concepts such as anger, disgust, fear, happiness,
sadness, and surprise from birth (Ekman, 1992; Ekman & Cordaro, 2011;
Izard, 2007; Panksepp, 1998). Although a prominent view, there is relatively little empirical support for the idea that infants and young children
reliably perceive these emotions in others or themselves; the evidence is
more consistent with the hypothesis that infants and children can differentiate between dimensions such as valence and develop an understanding
of different emotion categories over early childhood (Ruba & Repacholi, in
press; Shablack & Lindquist, in press; Widen, 2013). Although some basic
emotion views acknowledge a role for learning in emotion understanding
and experience, they stipulate that language itself is unrelated to emotion
save for communication (Ekman & Cordaro, 2011). Nonetheless, these
approaches would require that children need to learn how to communicate
about emotions with words, a task which requires mapping experienced
concepts to word forms during early development.
2
Whereas some children use the word sad to label negative states, others
use the word mad instead (Widen, 2013). Nonetheless, most children at this
age only reliably use two words for emotion, meaning that if they use
happy and sad, they do not also use mad (and vice versa). It is unknown
why this idiolectal difference in use of sad versus mad occurs, but one
possibility is that this difference could be a product of socialized gender
stereotypes (Plant, Hyde, Keltner, & Devine, 2000), whereby parents use
the term sad more with girls and mad more with boys when explaining
emotions (Fivush, 1991; Fivush et al., 2000).
CHILDREN’S EMOTION ACQUISITION
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among children as young as 2-years-old (Russell & Widen, 2002a,
2002b).
These findings suggest that caregivers help children to label
their own emotional states and the emotional states of others in an
effort to scaffold their acquisition of knowledge about the emotion
concepts relevant to the present context (Campos et al., 2004;
Denham et al., 1994; Ellis et al., 2014; Fivush et al., 2000, 2006;
Fogel et al., 1992; Halberstadt et al., 2001; Pons et al., 2004).
However, very little research has assessed how children learn that
a word denotes an emotion concept in the first place. This is an
important next step in understanding the relationship between
language and emotion and is the purpose of the present studies.
The Role of Linguistic Cues in Word Learning
Much of the experimental work on children’s vocabulary development focuses on how children acquire words for object concepts, which are primarily labeled by nouns (Bloom, 2000; Gentner, 1982; Huttenlocher & Smiley, 1987; Markman, 1990). This
emphasis is logical, as children’s earliest vocabulary items are
largely nouns that label people and basic objects (Bates et al.,
1994). However, words of different lexical categories (verbs, adjectives, etc.) tend to have very different kinds of meanings and are
learned in very different ways. For instance, verbs often label
actions and events, and adjectives, which modify nouns, typically
label properties or attributes. Emotions are internal states that are
most frequently labeled by adjectives in everyday speech
(Shablack, 2017), and verbs and adjectives are conceptually more
complex than nouns (Gentner, 1982). Moreover, while caregivers
may label salient objects for children ostensively (e.g., “Look!
That’s a dog!”), caregivers do this only rarely (if at all) with
properties and states of being (Gleitman, 1990).
As a product of their abstract and complex nature and lack of
ostensive instruction, verb and adjective meanings are less
straightforward than noun meanings for children to learn, and they
are learned later (Gentner, 1982). An influential approach called
the syntactic bootstrapping hypothesis (Fisher, Gleitman, & Gleitman, 1991; Gleitman, 1990; Gleitman, Cassidy, Nappa, Papafragou, & Trueswell, 2005; Naigles, 1996) points to the role of
syntactic structure in cueing the meanings of these types of words;
work within this approach has focused mainly on verbs. Both
within a language and across different languages, the number of
noun phrases (i.e., arguments) that occur with a verb in a sentence
is related in highly regular ways to the lexical meaning of the verb.
Children can thus use these arguments to infer the meaning of
verbs (see Table 1 for examples). For instance, the novel verb gorp
in the sentence Bill gorped Jane a rose could not mean something
like “sleep” or “kiss” (note the oddness of ⴱBill slept Jane a rose).3
The syntactic bootstrapping hypothesis has been tested (Fisher
et al., 1991; Gleitman, 1990; Gleitman et al., 2005; Naigles, 1990,
1996) by presenting young children with novel verbs used in
particular sentence “frames” (e.g., with one vs. two arguments).
Children are then asked to point to, or their eye gaze is tracked
toward a visual image depicting the relevant action (Fisher, 2002;
Hirsh-Pasek & Golinkoff, 1996; Naigles, 1990; Yuan & Fisher,
2009). The methodology has been adapted to test learners’ interpretations of not only verbs denoting observable actions but also
relatively more abstract kinds of verbs, such as those that could
have a meaning like think or seem, or to abstract adjectives such as
3
easy (Becker, 2006, 2014, 2015; Becker & Estigarribia, 2013;
Papafragou, Cassidy, & Gleitman, 2007). In some cases, such as
for abstract verbs such as think, the sentence frame is even more
informative than extragrammatical situational context (what is
going on in the world when a particular verb is uttered) for cueing
children to the predicate’s meaning (Gleitman et al., 2005; Papafragou et al., 2007). However, children can draw such inferences
about more abstract verbs only after age 4 (Becker, 2006, 2014).
Although syntactic bootstrapping is a likely mechanism by
which children learn predicate meanings, there is little work examining the relative role of sentence frame in the acquisition of
adjectives as a lexical category (Booth & Waxman, 2003, 2009;
Syrett & Lidz, 2010). No work to our knowledge looks at the
application of this approach to novel emotion concepts. Insofar as
emotions are most often labeled by adjectives (happy, sad, mad,
etc.; Shablack, 2017), children should be able to use syntactic
bootstrapping to understand the meaning of novel emotion words
and concepts. On the other hand, emotions are highly situated
concepts in which people are responding to real or imagined events
in the world around them (Wilson-Mendenhall, Barrett, Simmons,
& Barsalou, 2011). As such, access to details about the context in
which emotions are occurring (Harris, Johnson, Hutton, Andrews,
& Cooke, 1989; Kayyal et al., 2015; Widen & Russell, 2010, 2011,
2013) may influence a child’s inferences about the meaning of
emotion concept labels. In particular, situational details from the
immediate context, such as information about the causes of a
certain emotion (e.g., loss) and what a person did as a consequence
(e.g., cry) help children to accurately identify the emotion concept
being described in a story, often above and beyond other perceptual information such as facial expressions (Kayyal et al., 2015;
Widen & Russell, 2010, 2011). When the evidence is taken together, it is likely that children use both linguistic information
(sentence frames) and situational cues from the environment
(causes and consequences of emotion) in the acquisition of emotion words. Yet no work to our knowledge has assessed how
children use syntactic structure in combination with situational
context to learn the meaning of emotion concept labels.
Present Studies
We conducted two studies examining the extent to which sentence frames and situational context impact children’s (aged 3–5)
understanding that novel words denote emotion concepts. In Study
1, we manipulated the sentence frame a novel word was presented
in to examine whether sentence frame alone helps children perceive that a word denotes an emotion concept as opposed to other
predicate meanings such as a physical state or an action, and at
what age this occurs. Sentence frames were manipulated by presenting a novel word in a verb structure that limits the possible
meaning of the word. For example, when presenting a novel word
(binty) as the sole complement of the verb is (i.e., Susan is binty),
the meaning of binty is fairly unlimited. As an adjective binty can
denote an emotion, such as “happy,” a physical state, such as
“cold,” or even a physical characteristic, such as “tall” (note the
grammaticality of Susan is happy/cold/tall). However, if binty is
the complement of the verb feels (i.e., Susan feels binty), the
3
Linguists use the symbol
ability.
ⴱ
to indicate ungrammaticality or unaccept-
SHABLACK, BECKER, AND LINDQUIST
4
Table 1
Examples of Syntactic Structure Cueing Possible Meaning
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Number of
arguments (NP)
Examples
Verb denotation
Single NP
Two NPs
John slept; Mary is running
Sue kissed the baby; Kevin hugged his friend
Three NPs
Katrina gave Emily a pen; Roger told Marvin a story
meaning of binty can no longer denote a physical characteristic
like “tall” (excepting figurative uses of this adjective), though it
could still denote either an emotion (“happy”) or a temporary
physical state (“cold”; thus: Susan feels happy/cold/ⴱtall). Finally,
if binty is used within a sentence like Susan feels binty about
something, the meaning of binty is further restricted to denoting a
mental or emotional state; it can no longer denote a physical state
like “cold” (Susan feels happy/ⴱcold/ⴱtall about something). Therefore, we predicted that if children rely exclusively on linguistic
cues, the likelihood for a child to determine that a novel word is an
emotion concept label would increase as the sentence frame becomes more restrictive.
In Study 2, we examined the extent to which the sentence frame
helped children acquire the meaning of novel emotion concepts
when that acquisition was also scaffolded by situational context.
We manipulated the sentence frame as in Study 1 and also told
children a “background” story that highlighted the causes and
consequences of an experience that the main character underwent.
For example, prior to a sentence such as “Palooza feels binty,”
children heard a story about a character receiving a gold star for
her drawing, providing situational context for what she was feeling
and why. Study 2 thus examined whether the sentence frame a
word appeared in is especially useful for understanding the meaning of a novel emotion concept when that word appears in a
relevant situation.
Across both studies we hypothesized that older children would
be more likely to perceive a novel word as an emotion concept
label given appropriate linguistic and situational cues; however, as
we hypothesize that sentence frames and situational context provide specific cues in concept acquisition and word disambiguation,
we predicted age interactions with sentence frame (Study 1),
especially in the presence of situational context (Study 2).
Study 1
In Study 1, we predicted that children would use sentence frame
as a cue for their understanding of novel emotion words. Specifically, if children use sentence frame alone to drive emotion
concept word acquisition, then children would especially perceive
a novel word as labeling an emotion when it is presented in a more
restrictive sentence frame (e.g., feels or feels about). Mirroring
past work on syntactic bootstrapping (e.g., Papafragou et al., 2007)
we predict that children would become more adept at using the
sentence frame as age increases.
Method
Participants. One hundred sixty-two children participated in
the study at the Museum of Life and Science in Durham, North
An action/event that an individual engages in by themselves
An action/event that one individual does to another (i.e., the
object is affected by the action)
Generally means something about transfer or communication
Carolina. Children who did not meet our a priori inclusion criteria
were excluded from further analysis. Nine children were not within
our desired age range (i.e., were siblings of other children who
participated or were found to not be in the proper age range
following parent report). Three additional children were removed
from the analysis because they lived in households in which
languages other than English were spoken greater than 50% of the
time; we reasoned that in the case of bilingual children our sentence frame manipulation would be less effective since those
children might regularly experience more varied sentence frames.
Two children were removed from analysis because their parent/
guardian reported that they had a learning disability on the parent
questionnaires. An additional 12 children started, but did not
complete the video task because they either stopped participation
part way through (n ⫽ 9) or failed the screening task (n ⫽ 3). One
child completed an incorrect survey due to experimenter error and
is not included. The final sample consisted of 135 (Mage ⫽ 3.97,
SDage ⫽ .79; 72 female) children: 44 3-year-olds (25 female), 51
4-year-olds (27 female), and 40 5-year-olds (20 female).4
Children completed the study individually with a single experimenter. A second experimenter observed the interaction and answered any parent/guardian questions. Parents and/or legal guardians completed a packet of questionnaires about their child’s home
life and development. Sixteen individuals did not report family
income; of the 119 who did, 19.3% reported a household income ⬍$70,000; 21% reported between $70,000 and $100,000;
29.4% reported between $100,000 and $150,000; and 30.3% reported $150,000 or higher. Thirty-one individuals did not report
the race/ethnicity of one or both parents. Of the 104 who did,
83.7% of the children were Caucasian/White, 13.5% multiracial,
1.9% African American, and .9% Asian.
Materials.
Novel word videos. Children viewed videos of two animal
hand puppets conversing about aliens (see Table 2 for general
dialogue) followed by a picture pointing task with three image
options. These brief dialogues were modeled after those used by
Yuan and Fisher (2009) and Arunachalam and Waxman (2010) in
a syntactic bootstrapping study with 2-year-olds. Videos were on
average 16-s long and contained voices from two out of four
different individuals. Voice identity was quasirandomly distrib4
Because the museum’s staff wished to create an atmosphere of inclusivity, we permitted all interested children to participate in the task.
Children were excluded post hoc only for the reasons listed above (out of
age range, not monolingual, learning impairment, etc.; i.e. reasons that
would have led to them not participating if we had prescreened them for
eligibility). We excluded children who had already started the task if they
failed to continue the task at that point without making children feel
excluded.
CHILDREN’S EMOTION ACQUISITION
Table 2
Study 1 Sentence Frames and General Puppet Video Dialogue
Sentence frame
Is
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Feels
Feels about
Fillers
General script
Puppet 1: I know an alien who is [novel word].
Puppet 2: Really? You know an alien who is
[novel word]?
Puppet 1: Yes! This alien is [novel word]
Puppet 2: Wow! You know an alien who is
[novel word]
Puppet 1: I know an alien who feels [novel
word].
Puppet 2: Really? You know an alien who feels
[novel word]?
Puppet 1: Yes! This alien feels [novel word]
Puppet 2: Wow! You know an alien who feels
[novel word]
Puppet 1: I know an alien who feels [novel
word] about brushing his teeth.
Puppet 2: Really? You know an alien who feels
[novel word] about brushing his teeth.?
Puppet 1: Yes! This alien feels [novel word]
about brushing his teeth.
Puppet 2: Wow! You know an alien who feels
[novel word] about brushing his teeth.
Puppet 1: I saw an alien who was [novel word].
Puppet 2: Really? You saw an alien who was
[novel word]?
Puppet 1: Yeah! I saw an alien who was [novel
word]
Puppet 2: Oh! You saw an alien who was
[novel word]
uted across all videos. Conversations about aliens were used both
to engage children’s interest and to allow the framing of the novel
words as new “alien words.” This limits any undue influence of
already known emotion concept words via mutual exclusivity (i.e.,
the belief that two words cannot have the same meaning; Clark,
1987; Hutchinson, 1986; Markman, 1990).
Prior to the experiment, each child completed three screening
trials. Each screening trial had a single video that discussed an
alien engaging in an action (i.e., “I know an alien who likes to eat
pizza”) and an accompanying descriptive sentence using a verb in
the present progressive (i.e., “Point to where the alien is eating
pizza!”). To continue, children had to correctly answer at least two
trials (i.e., point to the picture of the alien eating pizza and not the
distractor pictures), demonstrating that they could watch a brief
video accompanied by a verbal description and point to a picture
that matched the description.
In the subsequent experimental trials, children watched the hand
puppet videos with puppets conversing and introducing a novel
word (binty, daxy, strupy, moky, joomy, gorpy, reksy, tropy) four
times using one of the following sentence frames:
Is: The alien is [novel word]
Feels: The alien feels [novel word].
Feels about: The alien feels [novel word] about something.5
Each child was presented with the same sentence frame for all
experimental trials and no novel word was repeated across trials.
Each experimental video and novel word was presented in random
order.
5
In between each experimental trial was a filler trial containing a
novel verb in the present progressive (ending in -ing: piffing,
tayving, serding) to indicate an action. The filler trials were included to give children a break from the experimental trials and
were not intended as control trials. Nonetheless, child performance
on these trials was included as a covariate in the event that
children’s filler performance significantly impacted their performance on the trials of interest. See online supplemental materials
for analyses of filler trials and main analyses without filler trial
performance as a covariate. Over the course of the session, each
child saw 10 videos (three screening, four experimental, three
filler).
Picture pointing task. Following each video, a screen containing auditory instructions with accompanying text instructed the
child to “Point to where the alien [sentence frame] [novel word].”
The voice from a single individual was used in the auditory
instruction. Children then saw three images of a cartoon alien
presented in a random array, with each image depicting the alien
expressing an emotion, a physical state, or engaging in an action
(see Table 3 for list of image types and Figure 1 for sample trial).
Children were instructed to point to the image that corresponded to
the novel word. Their choice served as the dependent variable.
Three alien identities were used in screening trials. Four different
alien identities were used for the experimental and filler trials, with
the limitation that each experimental trial employed a different
alien (thus, the same alien may have been seen in both an experimental trial and a filler, but not in two experimental trials). Images
were randomized across all trials to appear once (i.e., children saw
all seven possible emotion images appearing in either an experimental or filler trial). All alien stimuli were validated in a separate
sample of 3- to 5-year-olds, in which children were better than
chance at associating the images with the intended physical state,
emotion or action (see online supplemental materials).
Parent questionnaire. While the child completed the computerized task, parents and/or legal guardians completed a voluntary
paper questionnaire. Information was gathered on the child’s birth,
including date, location and whether the mother’s pregnancy was
normal. Children’s general communicative and linguistic development was measured including any information on whether the
child had been evaluated for speech problems or learning disabilities, and a rudimentary number of spontaneous word production
of a subset of word categories. Information on familial language
was gathered, as well as who the child lived with. Parental race/
ethnicity, place of birth and native language, education, career, and
household income were also gathered. The first was used as a
measure of child race/ethnicity.
Procedure. This study was approved by the University of
North Carolina Institutional Review Board. Parents of children
who looked to be 3–5 years of age were approached at the museum
and asked if their child would like to participate in a short video
task on word learning. Only children who were 3–5 years of age
were subsequently enrolled (with the exception of children who
were accidentally enrolled due to a miscommunication about their
5
For the feels about conditions, story endings were: “about brushing his
teeth”; “about cleaning her room”; “about eating cookies”; and “about
playing games.” The picture pointing task instructed kids to “point to
where the alien feels [novel word] about something.”
SHABLACK, BECKER, AND LINDQUIST
6
Table 3
Image Stimuli for Study 1 and Study 2
Emotions
Actions
Physical states
happy, excited, sad, mad, scared, disgusted,
surprised
sleeping, jumping, sitting, falling, cartwheeling,
walking, running, eating pizza/fruitⴱ,
swimmingⴱ
itchy, hot, cold, sick, burned, hungry, hurt
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Note. Four cartoon alien identities exhibited the listed emotion, action, or
physical state. Screening trials included an emotion image and two action
images.
ⴱ
denotes action images that were only included in screening trials.
age or allowed to participate because a sibling participated; these
children were not included in analyses). Children were told that
they would play a game involving aliens. Following the parent/
legal guardian’s consent, the experimenter spent the first few
minutes getting to know the child and obtaining verbal assent. The
experimental task was then administered online on a laptop computer via Qualtrics.
Children who failed two or more of the three screening trials
were thanked for their time and told that the game was over. If
children passed the screening trials, the experimenter then introduced the experimental task by saying “You’re doing great! Let’s
keep playing this game! Now we’re going to watch some more
videos. These videos are going to have a special alien word and I
need help to figure out what that word means! Do you want to
play/Are you ready?” If the child wanted to continue, the experimenter then played the first experimental video containing a novel
“alien” word followed by a screen with visual and auditory instructions for the picture pointing task. Once an image was chosen,
the experimenter confirmed the choice and made the selection by
clicking the radio button beneath the image the child chose. If a
child was hesitant, the experimenter encouraged them up to three
times before continuing to the next trial. Following the video task,
children had the option to complete an additional task, not discussed here. For their participation, children received a hand stamp
and temporary tattoo.
Results
To examine the impact of sentence frame and age on image
choice, mean proportions of each image choice type were created
across trial types (e.g., mean proportion of emotion images chosen
within each experimental condition).6 We opted to treat age as a
categorical variable rather than a continuous variable due to the
ease of interpreting mixed model ANOVAs over regression models with categorical outcomes. We nonetheless also computed
multilevel multinomial logistic regression analyses in which age
was a continuous predictor and sentence frame was a categorical
predictor of choice outcomes (see online supplemental materials).
These findings replicated the mixed model ANOVA findings so
we report the ANOVA findings in the main text for ease of
interpretation.
To examine our main hypothesis that sentence frame and age
would interact to influence children’s image choice, we conducted
a 3 (image choice: emotion, action, physical state) ⫻ 3 (sentence
frame: is, feels, feels about) ⫻ 3 (age: 3, 4, 5) mixed model
ANOVA with mean proportions of Image choice as a within
subjects factor and sentence frame and age as between subjects
factors. To control for the effects of participant gender and screening trial performance, we also conducted a 3 (image choice:
emotion, physical state, action) ⫻ 3 (sentence frame: is, feels, feels
about) ⫻ 3 (age: 3, 4, 5) mixed model ANCOVA with gender and
performance on the screening trials as covariates. Lastly, to account for filler trial performance, we conducted a 3 (image choice:
emotion, physical state, action) ⫻ 3 (sentence frame: is, feels, feels
about) ⫻ 3 (age: 3, 4, 5) mixed model ANCOVA with gender,
performance on the screening trials, and performance on filler
trials as covariates. Filler trial performance was computed as the
proportion of trials in which an action image was chosen. Findings
were largely identical across the three analyses, so we report the
most conservative ANCOVA findings controlling for gender, performance on screening and filler trials. Findings from the other
ANOVA and ANCOVA are available in the online supplemental
materials.
See Table 4 for all effects; we explicitly discuss only significant
effects and predicted effects. First, we found a main effect of
image choice, F(2, 246) ⫽ 3.10, p ⫽ .05, ␩2 ⫽ .03.7 Children
chose physical state (p ⬍ .001) and emotion (p ⬍ .001) images
significantly more than action images. Children chose physical
state images significantly more than emotion images over all (p ⫽
.002; see Figure 2).
The main effect of image choice was qualified by a significant
interaction between image choice and age, F(4, 246) ⫽ 2.53, p ⫽
.04, ␩2 ⫽ .04. Simple effects show a significant effect of age on
action images, F(2, 123) ⫽ 4.69, p ⫽ .01, ␩2 ⫽ .07 and a
significant effect of age on physical state images, F(2, 123) ⫽
3.65, p ⫽ .03, ␩2 ⫽ .06. Pairwise comparisons reveal that 3-yearolds chose action images (p ⫽ .003) significantly more than
5-year-olds. Five-year-olds chose physical state images (p ⫽ .008)
significantly more than 3-year-olds did. Emotion images were
chosen equally between all ages (see Figure 3).
As predicted, there was a marginal interaction between image
choice and sentence frame, F(4, 246) ⫽ 2.28, p ⫽ .06, ␩2 ⫽ .04,
suggesting that children relied on more restrictive sentence frames
to inform image choice. Simple effects reveal that the proportion
of trials in which emotion images were chosen is marginally
influenced by the sentence frame, F(2, 123) ⫽ 2.92, p ⫽ .06, ␩2 ⫽
.05. Pairwise comparisons demonstrated that emotion images were
chosen significantly more in the feels about (p ⫽ .02) than the feels
condition, but that the is condition (p ⫽ .57) did not differ from
feels about condition. Emotion images were chosen marginally
more during is trials than during feels trials (p ⫽ .09; see Figure 4).
We did not find a predicted three-way interaction between
image choice, age, and sentence frame, suggesting that children
did not rely more on sentence frame with increasing age. Instead,
age and sentence frame separately moderated image choice.
6
Eight children had technical difficulties during one or two trials. In
these cases, mean proportions were weighted by the number of completed
trials.
7
Mauchly’s test indicated that the assumption of sphericity was violated, ␹2 (2) ⫽ 6.36, p ⫽ .04, therefore degrees of freedom were corrected
using Huynh-Feldt corrections follow Girden (1992) suggestion based on
Greenhouse-Geisser estimate, ε ⫽ 0.95, being greater than .75.
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CHILDREN’S EMOTION ACQUISITION
7
Figure 1. Sample trials for Study 1 and Study 2. For the text of the Study 1 video, see Table 2. In Study 2,
children heard a two to three sentence story, see Table 4 for examples. Each video was played on a screen by
itself, and the next screen presented three randomized images of the alien character, accompanied by audio
instructions for the child to point to the image they believe depicts the novel word. See the online article for the
color version of this figure.
Discussion
Results provide preliminary support for our hypotheses in Study
1, which is a conservative test of the syntactic bootstrapping
hypothesis in which children received no other context for the
Table 4
Study 1 Within Subjects Main Effects and Interactions for 3
(Image Choice: Emotion, State, Action) ⫻ 3 (Sentence Frame:
Is, Feels, Feels About) ⫻ 3 (Age: 3, 4, 5) Mixed Model
ANCOVA With Participant Gender, Screening Trial
Performance, and Filler Trial Performance as Covariates
Variable
Image
Image
Image
Image
Image
Image
Image
choice
Choice
Choice
Choice
Choice
Choice
Choice
⫻
⫻
⫻
⫻
⫻
⫻
Screening Trial Performance
Gender
Filler Performance
Age
Sentence Frame
Age ⫻ Sentence Frame
df
F
/2
p
2
2
2
2
4
4
8
3.10
4.23
2.65
3.55
2.53
2.28
1.28
.03
.03
.02
.03
.04
.04
.04
.05
.02
.07
.03
.04
.06
.25
Note. Mauchly’s test indicated that the assumption of sphericity was
violated, |2 (2) ⫽ 6.36, p ⫽ .04, therefore degrees of freedom were
corrected using Huynh-Feldt corrections follow Girden (1992) suggestion
based on Greenhouse-Geisser estimate, 冱 ⫽ .95, being greater than .75,
dferror ⫽ 246.
meaning of a novel word except the sentence frame it was heard in.
We found that age influenced children’s tendency to perceive a
novel word as denoting an internal state (physical state or emotion)
over an action. Three-, 4-, and 5-year-olds were equally likely to
choose emotion images, with the relative proportion of physical
state to action choices increasing over age. Three-year-olds chose
more action items than 5-year-olds, whereas 5-year-olds were
more likely than 3-year-olds to choose physical state images.
Because all of our novel words ended in -y (daxy, joomy, binty),
and words ending in this sound are prototypically adjectives
(happy, bouncy, hungry, thirsty, rosy, furry, smelly), this feature
alone may have been a cue to 5-year-old children that novel words
labeled attributes or states. The fact that 3-year-olds chose the
action images the most out of the age groups suggests that 3-yearolds may not yet understand that words ending in -y are likely to
be adjectives.
We also found suggestive evidence that more restrictive sentence frames impact children’s understanding that novel words
refer to emotions, although this effect was only marginal. Children
were more likely to choose emotions in the most restrictive sentence frame (feels about) as compared with the feels condition.
Children were equally likely to choose emotions in is and feels
about conditions, but recall that is [emotion adjective] is also a
grammatically correct choice.
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8
SHABLACK, BECKER, AND LINDQUIST
Figure 2. Study 1 estimated marginal means of each image choice. Bars represent 95% confidence intervals.
See the online article for the color version of this figure.
We note that we did not find the predicted three-way interaction
between age, sentence frame, and image choice. This null finding
could in part be a result of the conservative study design we used,
in which children received no other context but the linguistic
context. If younger children cannot use sentence frames effectively
and thus choose randomly, whereas older children are reasonably
concluding that is, feels, and feels about are each grammatically
appropriate for a third of the trials, then it may have been difficult
to observe a three-way interaction. This interaction was perhaps
even more difficult to observe in light of all children’s bias toward
choosing physical state images.
There are two potential interpretations of children’s bias toward
physical state images. First, a bias toward choosing the physical
state (as opposed to the emotion) may merely reflect the relative
salience of these images to children, as physical state images in our
study often contained other potentially interesting details such as
areas of differently colored skin, bandages, and so forth, which
were necessary to convey meanings such as cold, hot, hurt, and
sick. This bias might have especially occurred in Study 1 because
there was no other situational information to drive children’s
attention to the other images. Without situational information, the
older children may have used the linguistic cue of the novel word
ending in -y (suggestive of an adjective, rather than the verbindicating -ing) to narrow their choices down to the physical state
and emotion images, and then fixated on the physical state images
due to their additional intrigue. Indeed a few children did note that
they chose images based on color (i.e., “that one because it’s blue”
and “I chose that one cause it’s blue and blue is my favorite
color”).
This interpretation is consistent with the fact that children even
showed a bias toward physical state images in the filler condition
(see online supplemental materials). We included filler items because it is common to include filler items to break up the experimental trials on this type of task (Gerken & Shady, 1996). Note
that accounting for children’s performance on the filler trials did
not alter our results, meaning that children’s ability to perform on
Figure 3. Study 1 estimated marginal means of each image choice by age
in years. Bars represent 95% confidence intervals. See the online article for
the color version of this figure.
Figure 4. Study 1 estimated marginal means of each image choice by
sentence frame. Bars represent 95% confidence intervals. See the online
article for the color version of this figure.
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CHILDREN’S EMOTION ACQUISITION
filler trials did not affect our findings. Nonetheless, we cannot be
sure why children chose the physical state images on the filler
trials. One possibility is that in the absence of any situational
context, children inferred that the images had multiple meanings.
That is, an image of a physical state in which an alien was sick
could have been interpreted as also “disgusted” or “sad” by children, which would have been technically correct. Our validation
data are somewhat consistent with this interpretation; although
children performed greater than chance on all stimuli, the stimuli
that they performed the least accurately on were the physical states
of “sick” and “hurt.” In both cases, children were most likely to
misinterpret these states as emotional (e.g., disgusted, sad). This
fact is not likely to just be a limitation of our stimuli. Mental states
have multiple levels of meaning and individuals differ in the
complexity of the inferences drawn about those states—a person
who has tears coming from their eyes and is emitting sound from
their mouth could be “crying,” “sad,” or “experiencing grief at a
loss” (Vallacher & Wegner, 1987, 1989; Wegner & Vallacher,
1987). Even highly caricatured facial expressions of emotion are
perceived as indicative of mental states in some cultures (e.g., sad)
but as actions (e.g., crying) in others (Gendron, Roberson, van der
Vyver, & Barrett, 2014).
Nonetheless, observations of children’s spontaneous comments,
in combination with our validation data, suggests that on average
children understood the intended meaning of the alien images.
Children were more accurate than chance at identifying the correct
emotion, physical state, and action image in our validation study
(see online supplemental materials). Additionally, children’s spontaneous utterances during our experimental trials suggested that
they understood the meaning of the stimuli. For instance, for action
images children stated “this is running,” “[s/he is] falling down,”
“the one who is walking is moky,” or imitated running. For
physical state images children proclaimed things such as “this
one’s hot,” “sweaty!,” “he has two Band Aids, he hurts,” “maybe
he broke his leg,” and “he’s ouchy.” Finally, for emotion images
children made statements such as “this means mad,” “he’s
scared!,” and “that one is sad.”
Second, it is possible that children had a bias toward the physical state images because the feels versus feels about sentence
frame was not sufficiently helpful across the age range to help
children move beyond their bias toward physical state images. This
interpretation is consistent with our observation of an interaction
between image choice and sentence frame, but lack of a three-way
interaction between sentence frame, age, and image choice. The
marginal interaction between image choice and sentence frame
suggests that children may be able to use the sentence frame to
begin to home in on the correct word meaning, supporting prior
research (Becker, 2015; Gleitman et al., 2005; Papafragou et al.,
2007). However, the fact that older children were not significantly
more likely to choose the emotion image over physical state
images in the feels about condition suggests that even 4- and
5-year-olds are not yet able to use feels about to restrict an
adjective meaning to an emotion rather than a physical state.
Taken together, the findings of Study 1 suggest that although
linguistic cues may be meaningful to children in this age range,
children may not be able to use sentence-level cues alone to
understand emotion adjectives. These findings are consistent with
recent work showing that the same sentence-level cues children are
known to exploit for learning verbs may not be usable for adjec-
9
tives at this stage of development (Booth & Waxman, 2009; Syrett,
Latourrette, Ferguson, & Waxman, 2018). However, as we note,
Study 1 is a particularly conservative test of the syntactic bootstrapping hypothesis, as it is atypical for children to experience
emotion concepts and their words in the absence of an emotional
situation. We thus included situational context in Study 2 to more
clearly test the role of sentence frame in children’s understanding
of novel emotion words when an emotional situation was also
present.
Study 2
Because research on emotion concept development demonstrates that children rely on situational context—including the
causes and consequences of an emotion when determining the
meaning of an emotional facial expression (Kayyal et al., 2015;
Widen & Russell, 2010, 2011)—we modified Study 1 to include
information about the situational context a novel adjective was
occurring in. Study 1 was a conservative test of the syntactic
bootstrapping hypothesis, but we reasoned that including situational context would ultimately be a more ecologically valid test of
the types of contexts in which children learn about emotions (e.g.,
when observing an event and hearing an adult talk about it).
To achieve this end, children in Study 2 viewed videos of a
cartoon alien experiencing emotional situations. We predicted that
with this additional situational context present, we would observe
a three-way interaction such that older children would be more
likely to choose emotion images when the sentence frame was
maximally restrictive. As the procedure is largely identical to
Study 1, we only describe the differences between them below.
Method
Participants. One hundred forty-seven children participated
in the study at the Museum of Life and Science in Durham, North
Carolina. As in Study 1 children who did not meet our a priori
inclusion criteria were excluded from further analysis. Nine were
not within our desired age range (had mistakenly been enrolled or
allowed to participate because a sibling had done so). Seven were
removed from analysis because they lived in households where
languages other than English were spoken greater than 50% of the
time, and one was later found to have a learning disability as
reported by their parent/legal guardian in the parent questionnaires.
Eighteen children did not complete the video task either due to
screening trials failure (n ⫽ 9) or opting not to continue in the
midst of the task (n ⫽ 9). The final sample consisted of 113
(Mage ⫽ 4.04, SDage ⫽ .77; 45 females) children: 31 3-year-olds
(eight female), 46 4-year-olds (26 female), and 36 5-year-olds (11
female).
Parents and/or legal guardians completed a voluntary packet of
questionnaires identical to that in Study 1. Twelve individuals did
not report family income; of the 101 who did, 20.8% reported a
household income ⬍$70,000; 28.7% between $70,000 and
$100,000; 26.7% between $100,000 and $150,000; and 23.8%
reported $150,000 or higher. Sixteen parents/guardians did not fill
out the race/ethnicity information for one or both parents. Of the
97 who did, 82.5% of the children were Caucasian/White, 14.4%
10
SHABLACK, BECKER, AND LINDQUIST
Table 5
Sample Stories for Each Emotion Type of Study 2 and Novel Words
Emotion
Happy
Sad
Mad
Surprised
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Disgusted
Afraid
Excited
Story
Palooza ran a race at school. She was the fastest alien in the race, so she won first place! Now, Palooza [sentence frame]
[novel word]. What do you think [novel word] means?
Xylobean’s best friend moved away to a different planet, and they won’t see each other again. Now, Xylobean [sentence frame]
[novel word]. What do you think [novel word] means?
Chromia was reading her favorite book. Then, another alien took it and tore out a page! Now, Chromia [sentence frame] [novel
word]. What do you think [novel word] means?
One day Wazu came home and all his furniture was turned upside-down. He just stared at his furniture and couldn’t figure out
how that happened. Now, Wazu [sentence frame] [novel word]. What do you think [novel word] means?
Palooza took a bite of an apple. As soon as she bit into it, she realized it was rotten inside. She didn’t want to eat the rest of it.
She threw it in the trash. Now, Palooza [sentence frame] [novel word]. What do you think [novel word] means?
Wazu heard a loud crashing noise in the distance. Then, the sound started getting closer and closer! Now, Wazu [sentence
frame] [novel word]. What do you think [novel word] means?
Chromia always wanted to fly in a spaceship. Now she was going to get a chance to do it! Now, Chromia [sentence frame]
[novel word]. What do you think [novel word] means?
multiracial, 1.03% African American, 1.03% Asian, and 1.03%
Hispanic.
Materials.
Novel word videos. Children viewed videos of an alien cartoon
character with a narrator describing a short story (see Table 5 for
sample stories). Videos were created using GoAnimate (http://www
.goanimate.com) and were on average 23.85 s. A single individual
narrated the story for all videos. The screening video scripts were
similar to Study 1, but now had a single narrator, a name associated
with the alien, and a cartoon accompanying the auditory stimuli.
Children who failed two or more of the three screening trials were
thanked for their time and told that the game was over.
During the experimental trials, children watched seven cartoon
videos with accompanying narration: Each video employed a
different novel word (daxy, moky, reksy, binty, gorpy, joomy,
tropy) in one of three between-subjects experimental sentence
frames (is, feels, feels about) as in Study 1. Each alien character in
the video had a neutral expression. Aliens, video stories, and novel
words were fully randomized such that no single alien, story, or
word were consistently paired together. In contrast to Study 1, the
novel word was presented twice (rather than four times) in the
video and a third time (rather than fifth time) in the picture
pointing task instructions (see Table 5 for sample stories and
Figure 1 for a sample trial). Emotional situations were created by
providing a brief story that highlighted a positive or negative
discrete emotional experience for the alien (the alien was happy,
sad, afraid, mad, excited, disgusted, or surprised), prior to the
introduction of the novel word in the target sentence frame. Stories
were kept short to limit cognitive burden and to keep the child’s
attention. Stories were developed based on prior work (see Widen
& Russell, 2010) drawing from the prototypical causes of emotions
in a North American setting. A total of seven experimental trials of
a single alien identity were presented. We reasoned that variation
across videos (i.e., seeing aliens and stories) would be sufficiently
attention-capturing for children so we did not include filler trials to
maintain their attention. All sessions began with the happy story
followed by the remaining six emotions in randomized order. We
modeled this method after other developmental research on emotion (Russell & Widen, 2002a, 2002b; Widen & Russell, 2010). In
these studies, happy trials are presented first because happiness is
a well-understood emotion concept for 3- to 5-year-olds; it is
assumed that receiving a more difficult emotion concept first
might discourage children.
Picture pointing task. Cartoon alien images were identical to
Study 1 (see Table 3), however, each matched the alien seen in the
video, where s/he was given an identifying name (screening trials:
Chrysanthemum, Magenta, Frebedo; experimental trials: Palooza,
Chromia, Wazu, Xylobean). Female participants viewed either
Palooza or Chromia (the “female” aliens) and male participants
viewed either Wazu or Xylobean (the “male” aliens). We matched
the gender of the aliens and children because there is some evidence that interpersonal similarity facilitates mental state inference
(Ames, 2004). All children saw Chrysanthemum, Magenta, and
Frebedo for the screening trials. During the picture pointing task,
images of the aliens displaying a particular emotion, action, and
physical state image appeared only once throughout the seven
trials such that no image was repeated (e.g., children saw a happy
alien on only one trial throughout the experiment). The emotional
image depicted always matched the story (e.g., children saw a
happy alien for a story describing happiness) but the particular
action and physical state seen were randomly displayed.
Procedure. This study was approved by the University of North
Carolina Institutional Review Board. The procedure was identical to
Study 1, save that participants saw videos of the alien scenarios, rather
than videos of puppets holding short conversations.
Results
Analysis procedures are identical to that in Study 1 with mean
proportions of each image choice type calculated across trial types
(e.g., mean proportion of emotion images chosen within each
experimental condition)8 entered in mixed model ANOVAs. To
examine our main hypothesis, a 3 (image choice: emotion, physical state, action) ⫻ 3 (sentence frame: is, feels, feels about) ⫻ 3
(age: 3, 4, 5) mixed model ANOVA was conducted with image
choice as a within subjects factor and sentence frame and age as
between subjects factors. As in Study 1, we also computed a 3
(image choice: emotion, physical state, action) ⫻ 3 (sentence
8
One child experienced technical difficulties during one trial. As in
Study 1, their mean proportions were adjusted to be out of the number of
completed trials.
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CHILDREN’S EMOTION ACQUISITION
frame: is, feels, feels about) ⫻ 3 (age: 3, 4, 5) mixed model
ANCOVA with Image choice as a within subjects factor and
sentence frame and age as between subjects factors, including
participant gender and performance on the screening trials as
covariates. Findings were largely identical across the two analyses
so we report the more conservative ANCOVA findings. See online
supplemental materials for the ANOVA and multilevel multinomial logistic regression analyses.
See Table 6 for all effects; we discuss only the significant
effects and predicted effects here. As predicted, and as in Study 1,
we found a significant interaction between image choice and age,
F(3.73, 190.38) ⫽ 8.29, p ⬍ .001, ␩2 ⫽ .14.9 Emotion images
were chosen more as age increases, and both physical state and
action images were chosen less as age increases. Simple effects
reveal significant age differences in the proportion of trials in
which emotion images were chosen, F(2, 102) ⫽ 12.63, p ⬍ .001,
␩2 ⫽ .20, action images were chosen, F(2, 102) ⫽ 5.65, p ⫽ .005,
␩2 ⫽ .10, and physical state images are chosen, F(2, 102) ⫽ 4.59,
p ⫽ .01, ␩2 ⫽ .08. Pairwise comparisons reveal that 5-year-olds
chose emotion images significantly more than 4- (p ⫽ .01) and 3year-olds (…
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