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15.11: The Role of Language in Emotion

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    140951

    • Amanda Taintor
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    Exploring the Connection Between Language and Emotion

    Young children's growing language skills are vital to their emotional development. Language opens new avenues for communicating and regulating emotions (Campos, Frankel, & Camras, 2004). It helps children more effectively negotiate acceptable outcomes in emotionally charged situations.[1]

    Growing evidence from developmental and cognitive science demonstrates that knowing words helps infants and adults acquire and use language concepts throughout their lifespan; this evidence suggests that language is key to developing emotional structures.[2]

    Practitioners have theorized that infants use the phonological sound as a cue for differentiating between environmental sensations. This is particularly relevant for emotion categories, where the word anger, for example, can tie together multiple modalities of sensorimotor experience (such as bodily sensations, situations, or behaviors). These emotion categories also serve as "glue" for different instances of anger that are not perceptually regular or consistent with one another. For example, being angry at one's computer may not look or feel the same as being angry about an insult. Emotion labels may be an important cue for helping infants and young children understand emotion categories and apply them to their own experiences and observations. No research has directly examined this hypothesis.[2]

    Young Boy Smiles At Father Holding Baby Sister Photo
    Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): Reading with Infants is an important part of Language and Emotional Development (Image at Piqsels )

    2-year-olds use the straightforward emotion labels "angry" and "happy" in daily interactions, yet 2-year-olds cannot distinguish between more specific unpleasant emotion categories until they start reliably using additional negative emotion terms in daily interactions (Widen & Russell, 2008). As children acquire emotional words and start using them in everyday life with caregivers, they become increasingly competent at perceiving and labeling facial expressions in their culture's emotion categories. Just as words help infants generalize between otherwise perceptually distinct objects during learning, toddlers show a "language superiority effect" when categorizing facial expressions. Language superiority effect means 2- and 3-year-olds are better able to accurately place pictures of facial expressions in a box labeled with a word (e.g., anger) as compared to a box labeled with a face (e.g., an angry face), an effect that increases over early childhood (Russell & Widen, 2002). Studies also demonstrate a link between children's emotional understanding and linguistic development, which suggest that children's advances in emotional understanding develop at the same rate as their advances in language comprehension (Harris et al., 2005).[2]

    Caregivers' conceptual knowledge about emotions and communication skills can transfer to their children. For instance, 2– to 4-year-old children’s emotional utterances correlate with the emotion labels that their mothers know and use (Cervantes & Callanan, 1998). Children whose mothers used more emotion terms when they were 18 months old were able to produce more emotion words at 24 months (Dunn et al., 1987). Children whose caregivers discussed emotions more when children were 36 months old also had better emotional understanding at 6 years of age (Dunn et al., 1991). An adult’s explanation of internal states and attributes (such as hungry, sad, or nice) scaffold children's abilities to identify and describe the same experiences in themselves and others (Saarni, 1999; Yehuda, 2005). Use of words helps children acquire complex information about an emotion category (Lindquist, 2015) By contrast, caregivers who lack conceptual knowledge about emotion or struggle to communicate this knowledge with words decrease the child's opportunities to develop a conceptual understanding of emotion.

    [1] California Department of Education (CDE Press). Development Foundations: Social-Emotional Development . Is used with permission

    [2] Lindquist, K. A., MacCormack, J. K., & Shablack, H. (2015). The role of language in emotion: predictions from psychological constructionism. Frontiers in psychology, 6, 444. CC BY

    This page titled 15.11: The Role of Language in Emotion is shared under a mixed 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Amanda Taintor.