Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

How do children learn to categorize the facial configurations classically believed to represent basic emotions? Many stud-ies have examined when children are able to perceptually discriminate between emotional facial expressions and whenchildren are able to verbally label these expressions. However, while these studies provide important information aboutthe timeline of emotional development, they give less information about the nature of childrens category representationsfor different facial configurations. For instance, emotion concepts may emerge from childrens perceptions of facial con-figurations along the dimensions of valence and arousal. To evaluate how 3- to 7-year-old children categorize emotionconcepts, we had them sort facial configurations on a grid based on whether the people were feeling the same kind ofthing. We found that while both children and adults consistently sorted faces according to the dimensions of valence andarousal, sorting faces using discrete emotion categories emerged only gradually across development, with children notdemonstrating consistent use of emotion categories until approximately 5- to 6- years of age.