Labeling and Describing Discrete Emotions in Early Childhood: A Relational Approach.

Emotion understanding involves appreciating the significance of the relational context; the "aboutness" of the emotion. This study examined how children labeled emotions and described relational elements of discrete emotion contexts. Preschool children (3.5-year-olds, n = 22; 4.5-year-olds, n = 23) described images of 5 emotion contexts (anger, sadness, disgust, fear, and joy). Researchers assessed children's (1) correct labeling of discrete emotions, and (2) differential mentioning of the emoter (person displaying the emotion) and the referent (the elicitor of the emotion) across discrete emotions. Children's pattern of accurately labeling discrete emotions was similar to prior research, with both age groups correctly labeled anger, sadness, and joy more often than disgust or fear. Novel to the present study, we found that older children differentially highlighted emotional elements (i.e., the emoter, the referent) when describing discrete emotion contexts. Specifically, 4.5-year-olds emphasized the emoter more when describing anger, sadness, and joy than fear and disgust contexts, and mentioned the referent more in disgust, fear, and joy than anger and sadness contexts. Differential emphasis of relational elements was not observed for 3.5-year-olds. These findings highlight the importance of examining children's appreciation of relational contexts and indicate important differences in how children differentially emphasize relational elements when viewing discrete emotion contexts. Potential developmental mechanisms, opportunities for further empirical research, and implications for emotion theory are discussed. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s42761-022-00170-1.

The influence of context on distinct facial expressions of disgust.

Face perception is susceptible to contextual influence and perceived physical similarities between emotion cues. However, studies often use structurally homogeneous facial expressions, making it difficult to explore how within-emotion variability in facial configuration affects emotion perception. This study examined the influence of context on the emotional perception of categorically identical, yet physically distinct, facial expressions of disgust. Participants categorized two perceptually distinct disgust facial expressions, "closed" (i.e., scrunched nose, closed mouth) and "open" (i.e., scrunched nose, open mouth, protruding tongue), that were embedded in contexts comprising emotion postures and scenes. Results demonstrated that the effect of nonfacial elements was significantly stronger for "open" disgust facial expressions than "closed" disgust facial expressions. These findings provide support that physical similarity within discrete categories of facial expressions is mutable and plays an important role in affective face perception. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Putting "context" in context: The effects of body posture and emotion scene on adult categorizations of disgust facial expressions.

Affective face perception is influenced by nonfacial contextual elements. However, investigations often conflate body posture and emotion scene, making it unclear whether posture or the combination of posture and scene produces perception-altering effects. This study examined adults' categorizations of disgust facial expressions superimposed onto isolated emotion postures or postures embedded in emotion scenes. Results indicated that emotional postures exerted a significant contextual effect on adults' emotion categorizations of disgust faces. Of note, postures in emotion scenes exerted a stronger contextual effect than isolated postures for sadness and fear contexts. These findings suggest that contextual elements exert varying degrees of influence on emotion perception and produce combinatorial effects. (PsycINFO Database Record

Postural Communication of Emotion: Perception of Distinct Poses of Five Discrete Emotions.

Emotion can be communicated through multiple distinct modalities. However, an often-ignored channel of communication is posture. Recent research indicates that bodily posture plays an important role in the perception of emotion. However, research examining postural communication of emotion is limited by the variety of validated emotion poses and unknown cohesion of categorical and dimensional ratings. The present study addressed these limitations. Specifically, we examined individuals' (1) categorization of emotion postures depicting 5 discrete emotions (joy, sadness, fear, anger, and disgust), (2) categorization of different poses depicting the same discrete emotion, and (3) ratings of valence and arousal for each emotion pose. Findings revealed that participants successfully categorized each posture as the target emotion, including disgust. Moreover, participants accurately identified multiple distinct poses within each emotion category. In addition to the categorical responses, dimensional ratings of valence and arousal revealed interesting overlap and distinctions between and within emotion categories. These findings provide the first evidence of an identifiable posture for disgust and instantiate the principle of equifinality of emotional communication through the inclusion of distinct poses within emotion categories. Additionally, the dimensional ratings corroborated the categorical data and provide further granularity for future researchers to consider in examining how distinct emotion poses are perceived.