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Previous research suggests that the use of emotion labels helps children to learn about emotions. However, the mechanism behind this relation remains somewhat elusive. The present study examined 3-year-old children's ( N = 72; M age = 3.51 years; 42 female) ability to match faces to emotional vignettes, and the role that the use of emotion labels plays in this process. Parents identified participating children as White ( N = 37), multiracial ( N = 17), African American/Black ( N = 5), Asian ( N = 5), Hispanic ( N = 3), Latino ( N = 2), South Asian/Indian ( N = 1), Middle Eastern ( N = 1), and other ( N = 1), and most children had a parent with a college degree ( N = 66). After a pretest, children heard either explicit emotion labels ("she feels annoyed "), novel labels ("she feels wuggy "), or irrelevant information ("she sits down") paired with a vignette and associated facial configuration. Children were then tested again at posttest for evidence of learning. Results revealed that children only improved from pre- to posttest in the explicit label condition, demonstrating that explicit emotion labels, which are likely to be familiar to children, facilitate children's learning of emotion information. Altogether, our results suggest that familiarity with emotion words from prior daily experience may best explain how emotion words influence children's learning about emotions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

The ability to categorize emotions has long-term implications for children's social and emotional development. Therefore, identifying factors that influence early emotion categorization is of great importance. Yet, whether and how language impacts emotion category development is still widely debated. The present study aimed to assess how labels influence young children's ability to group faces into emotion categories for both earliest-learned and later-learned emotion categories. Across two studies, 128 two- and 3-year-olds (77 female; Mean age = 3.04 years; 35.9% White, 12.5% Multiple ethnicities or races, 6.3% Asian, 3.1% Black, and 42.2% not reported) were presented with three emotion categories (Study 1 = happy, sad, angry; Study 2 = surprised, disgusted, afraid). Children sorted 30 images of adults posing stereotypical facial expressions into one of the three categories. Children were randomly assigned to either hear the emotion labels before sorting (e.g., " happy faces go here") or were not given labels (e.g., "faces like this go here"). Study 1 results indicated no significant effects of labels for earlier-learned emotion categories, F (1, 60) = .94, p = .337, η p ² = .013. However, the Study 2 results revealed that labels improved emotion categorization for later-learned categories, F (1, 60) = 8.15, p = .006, η p ² = .024. Taken together, these results suggest that labels are important for emotion categorization, but the impact of labels may depend on children's familiarity with the emotion category. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Recent theories have suggested that emotion words may facilitate the development of emotion concepts. The present study investigates whether emotion words affect children's performance on an emotion category learning task. Across two experiments, 72 three-year-old children (49 female) were asked to identify which emotional face best matched particular emotional scenarios during nine pretest and nine posttest trials. The scenarios in the present studies aligned with emotions typically learned among older age groups (annoyed, disgusted, and nervous). Between pretest and posttest, children participated in training in which a facial configuration (annoyed, disgusted, or nervous) was paired with an associated scenario while they heard the emotion labeled explicitly or heard irrelevant information (Experiment 1) or heard a broad emotion label versus irrelevant information (Experiment 2). Aside from the labels presented, all other information was kept the same across conditions, including the specific faces and scenarios heard during learning trials. In Experiment 1, children's emotion understanding increased more from pretest to posttest in the explicit label versus irrelevant condition, t (34) = 2.26, p = .030, d = .75, but in Experiment 2 the broad emotion labels did not provide an advantage over irrelevant information, t (34) = .72, p = .474, d = .24. These results suggest that emotion labels may be particularly helpful for young children learning about unfamiliar emotions, because specific labels may help children to aggregate disparate emotional information into meaningful categories. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).