The ability to categorize emotions has long-term implications for children's social and emotional development. Therefore, identifying factors that influence early emotion categorization is of great importance. Yet, whether and how language impacts emotion category development is still widely debated. The present study aimed to assess how labels…

In this article, we integrate two constructionist approaches--the theory of constructed emotion and rational constructivism--to introduce several novel hypotheses for understanding emotional development. We first discuss the hypothesis that emotion categories are abstract and conceptual, whose instances share a goal-based function in a particular…

For decades, scholars have examined how children first recognize emotional facial expressions. This research has found that infants younger than 10 months can discriminate negative, within-valence facial expressions in looking time tasks, and children older than 24 months struggle to categorize these expressions in labeling and free-sort tasks.…

Integrating generic information about categories with knowledge of specific individuals is a critical component of successful inductive inferences. The present study tested whether children's approach to this task systematically shifts as they develop causal understandings of the mechanisms that shape individual action. In the current study, 3-and…