Past research has shown that children recognize emotions from facial expressions poorly and improve only gradually with age, but the stimuli in such studies have been static faces. Because dynamic faces include more information, it may well be that children more readily recognize emotions from dynamic facial expressions. The current study of…

The Affective Circumplex Model holds that emotions can be described as linear combinations of two underlying, independent neurophysiological systems (arousal, valence). Given research suggesting individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) have difficulty processing emotions, we used the circumplex model to compare how individuals with ASD and…

Disgust has been theorized to be a basic emotion with a facial signal that is easily, universally, automatically, and perhaps innately recognized by observers from an early age. This article questions one key part of that theory: the hypothesis that children recognize disgust from its purported facial signal. Over the first 5 years, children…

In daily experience, children have access to a variety of cues to others' emotions, including face, voice, and body posture. Determining which cues they use at which ages will help to reveal how the ability to recognize emotions develops. For happiness, sadness, anger, and fear, preschoolers (3-5 years, N=144) were asked to label the emotion…

In prior research, preschoolers were surprisingly poor at naming the emotion purportedly signaled by prototypical facial expressions--when shown as static images. To determine whether this poor performance is due to the use of static stimuli, rather than dynamic, we presented preschoolers (3-5 years) with facial expressions as either static images…

Understanding and recognition of emotions relies on emotion concepts, which are narrative structures (scripts) specifying facial expressions, causes, consequences, label, etc. organized in a temporal and causal order. Scripts and their development are revealed by examining which components better tap which concepts at which ages. This study…

Verbal self-report measures for various emotional states were used in the present study to test the hypotheses that anger consists of feelings of displeasure, high arousal, and dominance; whereas anxiety consists of feelings of displeasure, high arousal, and submissiveness. (Author)

In a study using 200 undergraduates, results indicated that approach toward an environment and the desire to affiliate there are influenced by the emotion-eliciting quality of that environment. (Author/MA)

The Profile of Mood States lists emotional categories. It was studied for actual interrelationships among its categories. An examination of intraindividual relationships showed that emotion categories are systematically interrelated and can be accounted for by three bipolar dimensions: pleasure-displeasure, arousal-sleepiness, and…

To examine how a person's gender influences the emotion children attribute to that person, 80 preschoolers were asked to name the emotion of either a boy (Judd) or girl (Suzy), given identical stories and pictures with identical facial expressions. Boys labeled Judd more often than Suzy as being disgusted. Girls labeled Suzy more often than Judd…

This report discusses three studies of 2- to 5-year-old children's interpretations of facial expressions in terms of (1) the structure of the emotional domain and (2) prototypic example, overlap, and range of emotion categories. In the first study, 78 children were asked to make similarity judgments about 10 photographed facial expressions by…

Three studies examined preschoolers' performance on free labeling of prototypical facial expressions of basic emotions. Findings indicated that children's errors remained even when method factors (poor stimuli, unavailability of an appropriate label, or production task difficulty) were controlled. Use of emotion labels increased with age…

Emotional impact of various stimulant and depressant drugs is reviewed and emotional impact of various types of environments is described. Emotional predispositions associated with personality are noted. Specific hypotheses are derived to show which drugs are most likely to be used in different, environmentally induced or temperament-associated,…

A list of 105 adjectives which describe affective qualities of environments was developed and presented to 323 subjects. Factor analysis of subjects' ratings produced two bipolar factors that correlated with reactions of arousal and pleasure to various environments. (Author/WB)