Words versus faces in evoking preschool children’s knowledge of the causes of emotions

Abstract

Children (N = 160), aged 3 to 4 years, generated stories describing the causes of six different emotions: happiness, surprise, fear, anger, disgust, and sadness. The emotion was specified to the child either by a word (such as scared or disgusted) or by a photograph of a facial expression said to be a universal, biologically based signal for that emotion. For no emotion did the face produce significantly better performance than did the word. For fear and disgust, the word produced significantly better performance than did the face.

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