Differentiation and Language Acquisition in Children’s Understanding of Emotion

This chapter provides evidence of two processes that contribute to the acquisition of emotion categories (represented by their labels). The first is a process in which children gradually differentiate an early, valence-based (i.e., feels good vs. feels bad) emotion understanding into more discrete categories, while also learning to link the various components of emotion (e.g., causes, consequences, behaviors, facial expressions, labels) until their taxonomy closely resembles the taxonomy of the adults with whom they interact. For example, children gradually learn that some bad feelings are caused by a loss, result in tears, and are called sad, whereas others are caused by danger, result in the desire to flee, and are called scared. The second process supports the first. It is a process of elimination which enables children to quickly map novel emotion components to novel emotion categories and to begin to acquire a new emotion category.