Happy, sad, or yucky? Parental emotion talk with infants in a book-sharing task

While preschoolers consistently produce and use labels for happy and sad emotional states, labels for other emotional states (e.g., disgust) emerge much later in development. One explanation for these differences may lie in how parents first talk about these emotions with their children in infancy and toddlerhood. The current study examined parent talk about different emotions (i.e., happiness, sadness, anger, fear, and disgust) in a book-sharing task with their 12- to 24-month-old infants. Parental talk on each emotion page was coded for both quantity and quality of emotion talk. We found that, rather than labeling or asking questions about disgust emotional states, parents instead elaborated on and asked questions about the context of disgust pictures. In contrast, parents frequently labeled happy and sad emotional states and behaviors. Parental use of causal questions related to infants' productive emotion vocabularies. These different narrative styles may partly explain why older children acquire emotion labels for happy and sad much earlier than disgust.

Automated summary

The study found that parents have different narrative styles when discussing emotions with their infants, with disgust emotions being discussed in the context rather than being labeled. In contrast, happy and sad emotions are more frequently labeled by parents, which contributes to the earlier acquisition of emotion labels by older children.