About this session

Thursday, 1:40 PM - 3:10 PM

Emotion-Wise: New Insights into the Multifaceted Nature of How Children Conceptualize, Learn, and Perceive Emotions

From playground laughter to sibling squabbles, children encounter a wide range of emotions daily—but how do they make sense of them? Investigating the processes that underlie children’s thinking about emotions requires a multifaceted approach across distinct but interconnected cognitive systems. This symposium presents four novel studies that employ diverse methodologies to provide new insights into how children conceptualize, learn, and perceive emotions.

Paper 1 employs network analyses and mixed-effects models to examine emotion word production from ages 4 to 25, showing that ‘basic’ emotion concepts emerge as the strongest predictors of semantic structure in an emotion fluency task. Paper 2 investigates developmental differences among 5- through 10-year-olds in attention strategy and cue use when learning about emotions. Results reveal developmental stability in the use of selective attention and the primacy of facial vs. contextual cues. Paper 3 examines 4- to 10-year-old children's ability to reliably self-report their worry emotions, demonstrating the importance of obtaining child self-reports due to differences in parent and child perspectives of children's emotions. Paper 4 explores children's understanding of happiness in goal-preference conflicts, finding that from ages 4 to 8, children consistently consider the importance of goals in these situations, which predicts their choice of long-term benefits over immediate gratification.

Together, these findings reveal the multifaceted nature of how children conceptualize and perceive emotions, integrating systems of learning, attention, experience, and motivation. These findings also have significant implications for how we guide children in developing emotional wisdom––a life-long journey that can and should begin early in life.

Paper #1
Title	Emotion Word Production Reveals Key Dimensions Organizing Emotion Concepts in Youth and Young Adults
Presenting author	Chantal Alejandra Valdivia-Moreno, Princeton University, United States

Paper #2
Title	Five- Through 10-Year-Olds Use Selective Attention to Learn About Emotions
Presenting author	Ms. Andrea Gray Stein, University of Wisconsin-Madison, United States

Paper #3
Title	Four- to 10-Year-Olds’ Self-Reports of Their Worry: Comparison to Parent Perspectives
Presenting author	Maritza Miramontes, University of California, Davis, United States

Paper #4
Title	Finding Happiness: How Goals Shape Children's Perceptions Beyond Simple Preferences
Presenting author	Lingyan Hu, M.Ed., University of Pennsylvania, United States

View all paper details

Session chairs
Lingyan Hu, M.Ed., University of Pennsylvnia, United States; Maritza Miramontes, , United States

⇦ Back to schedule