Previous research suggests that the ability to make finegrained
distinctions among emotions emerges gradually over
development. However, such studies have looked primarily at
children’s first-person responses to emotional expressions or
at whether children can match emotion labels to emotional
expressions. Relatively little work has looked at children’s
ability to link emotional responses to their probable causes.
Here we ask two, three, and four year-old children and adults
to identify the causes of vocal expressions. Because we were
interested in the ability to make nuanced distinctions, we
looked within a single valence and asked whether children
could distinguish expressions elicited by exciting, delicious,
adorable, funny, and sympathetic events. Our results suggest
both an early emerging ability to distinguish within-valence
emotions and rapid development; by four, children’s
performance mirrored that of the adults. This suggests that
very early in development, children have a rich representation
of emotions that allows them to link distinct positively
valenced emotional expressions to their probable causes