Angry, Sad, or Scared? Within-valence Mapping of Emotion Words to Facial and Body Cues in 2 to 4-Year-Old Children

The acquisition of emotion words is critical to children’s socio-emotional development. Previous studies report that children acquire emotion words gradually during ages 3–5 and beyond. The majority of this work, however, has used demanding tasks for young children (e.g., asking children to label emotion-related facial configurations) and has predominantly relied on facial configurations. Here we designed a child-friendly, word-comprehension task incorporating both facial configurations and body language. In two preregistered online experiments, we asked two to four-year-olds (N = 96) to connect emotion words—happy, sad, angry, and scared—to either facial configurations (Experiment 1) or combined facial and body cues (Experiment 2). We found relatively early competence in understanding emotion words, especially those of the same-valence. All age groups, including 2-year-olds, successfully linked emotion words to corresponding facial configurations (Experiment 1). Experiment 2 replicated this pattern and further showed that children performed equally well (though not substantially better) when given additional body cues. Parental reports of children’s exposure to and use of masks during the COVID-19 pandemic did not correlate with children’s performance in either experiment. Even before children can produce emotion words in an adult-like manner, they possess at least a partial understanding of those words and can map them to emotion cues within valence domains.