Premium
Sources of Inflexibility in 6‐Year‐Olds' Understanding of Emotion in Speech
Author(s) -
Morton J. Bruce,
Trehub Sandra E.,
Zelazo Philip David
Publication year - 2003
Publication title -
child development
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 3.103
H-Index - 257
eISSN - 1467-8624
pISSN - 0009-3920
DOI - 10.1046/j.1467-8624.2003.00642.x
Subject(s) - paralanguage , psychology , priming (agriculture) , content (measure theory) , cognitive psychology , developmental psychology , social psychology , communication , mathematical analysis , botany , germination , mathematics , biology
When utterances contain conflicting emotion cues, 6‐year‐olds judge emotion from content, even when instructed to judge emotion from paralanguage (Morton & Trehub, 2001). Two experiments examined the nature of this bias. In Experiment 1, priming paralanguage reversed 6‐year‐olds' normal bias to content. In Experiment 2, 6‐year‐olds were instructed to listen to paralanguage under various conditions. Children were more likely to follow instructions delivered with feedback than instructions delivered alone. Children who described conflicts between content and paralanguage were more likely to follow instructions than children who did not describe these conflicts. Results suggest that 6‐year‐olds can judge emotion from paralanguage in the presence of competing content but often remain focused on content because of the way they represent the instructions.