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Children’s Judgments of Emotion From Conflicting Cues in Speech: Why 6‐Year‐Olds Are So Inflexible
Author(s) -
Waxer Matthew,
Morton J. Bruce
Publication year - 2011
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 - 10.1111/j.1467-8624.2011.01624.x
Subject(s) - paralanguage , psychology , feeling , content (measure theory) , cognitive psychology , developmental psychology , social psychology , communication , mathematical analysis , mathematics
Six‐year‐old children can judge a speaker's feelings either from content or paralanguage but have difficulty switching the basis of their judgments when these cues conflict. This inflexibility may relate to a lexical bias in 6‐year‐olds' judgments. Two experiments tested this claim. In Experiment 1, 6‐year‐olds ( n = 40) were as inflexible when switching from paralanguage to content as when switching from content to paralanguage. In Experiment 2, 6‐year‐olds ( n = 32) and adults ( n = 32) had more difficulty when switching between conflicting emotion cues than conflicting nonemotional cues. Thus, 6‐year‐olds' inflexibility appears to be tied to the presence of conflicting emotion cues in speech rather than a bias to judge a speaker's feelings from content.