Merry Bullock

Multidimensional Scaling of Emotional Facial Expressions: Similarity From Preschoolers to Adults

Structural models of emotion represent the fact that we perceive emotions as systematically interrelated. These interrelations may reveal a basic property of the human conception of emotions, or they may represent an artifact that is due to semantic relations learned along with the emotion lexicon. The first alternative was supported by results from a series of scalings of 20 emotional facial expressions, results that could not easily be attributed to word similarity. Similarity data on the facial expressions were obtained from 30 adults and 42 preschoolers. For preschoolers, prior evidence indicates that emotion labels are not readily available; for both groups, we measured similarity without the use of emotion labels by asking subjects to group together people who appear to feel alike. The structure of emotions obtained from both children and adults was as predicted: a roughly circular order in a two-dimensional space, the axes of which could be interpreted as pleasure-displeasure and arousal-sleepiness. The form and meaning of this structure was supported through two additional scalings of the facial expressions with adults: a multidimensional scaling based on direct ratings of similarity-dissimilarity, and unidimensional scalings on the pleasuredispleasure and arousal-sleepiness dimensions.

Preschool Children's Assumptions about Cause and Effect: Temporal Ordering.

BULLOCK, MERRY, and GELMAN, ROCHEL. Preschool Childrens Assumptions about Cause and Effect: Temporal Ordering. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1979, 50, 89-96. Preschool-aged children have been characterized as lacking an assumption that causes only precede or co-occur with effects. However, when 3-5-year-olds were shown a simple sequence of mechanical events in which 1 potential cause preceded and another followed an effect, they picked the first event as a cause. Further experimental trials indicated that order is dominant over other causal cues. A comparison of nonverbal and verbal responses revealed that, while children as young as 3 years behave as though they use an assumption of unidirectional order in reasoning about causality, it is only the older children who show some ability to articulate this belief.

Further Evidence on Preschoolers' Interpretation of Facial Expressions

Two studies assessed the organization and basis for childrens categories of emotion. In one, children (N = 240) from 2 to 5 years of age and adults (N = 60) chose facial expressions that exemplify such emotion categories as fear, anger, and happiness. In the other (N =100), they grouped expressions differing in arousal level or pleasure-displeasure according to perceived similarity. Preschoolers demonstrated more knowledge of emotion than had been seen in previous investigations, in which they were said to be inaccurate in categorizing expressions of all but a few emotions. The results fit a model of emotion categories in which the boundaries separating different categories are more fuzzy than distinct, and in which the categories are interrelated in a systematic order, an order based on their degree of pleasure and arousal. Childrens categories were not identical to those of adults, however; categories of the youngest children were broad, admitting as members expressions similar in pleasure and arousal, and categories of older children became increasingly narrow with age.

Causal Reasoning and Developmental Change over the Preschool Years

Some models of cognitive development postulate qualitative change in the fundamental nature of mental structure, whereas others stress more invariant constraints on the form of mental organization. Th

Interpreting contradictory communications: Age and context effects

This study examined how contractitory verbal-facial communications are understood and resolved in preschoolers, grade school children, and adults.

Toddlers' actions: Knowledge, control, and the self

A generally shared assumption is that children are active, goal-directed participants in what they experience. However, there appear to be large age differences in the content of and processes mediating goal-directed activity. Adults, in contrast to infants, for example, can explicitly plan, modify, and correct behavior, are not tied to a temporally immediate, physically accessible world, and can achieve desired outcomes in a flexible manner. In addition, adults are more likely to take responsibility for their actions and to relate those actions to personal goals and beliefs.