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Updated: Oct 12, 2025

Psychophysiological Assessment of the Effectiveness of Emotion Regulation Strategies in Childhood
Published on: February 11, 2017
The representation of emotion knowledge across development
Kristina Woodard1, Martin Zettersten1,2, Seth D Pollak1
1Department of Psychology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wisconsin, USA.
Abstract:
The present study examined how children spontaneously represent facial cues associated with emotion. 106 three- to six-year-old children (48 male, 58 female; 9.4% Asian, 84.0% White, 6.6% more than one race) and 40 adults (10 male, 30 female; 10% Hispanic, 30% Asian, 2.5% Black, 57.5% White) were recruited from a Midwestern city (2019-2020), and sorted emotion cues in a spatial arrangement method that assesses emotion knowledge without reliance on emotion vocabulary. Using supervised and unsupervised analyses, the study found evidence for continuities and gradual changes in children's emotion knowledge compared to adults. Emotion knowledge develops through an incremental learning process in which children change their representations using combinations of factors-particularly valence-that are weighted differently across development.
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