An In Situ, Child-Led Intervention to Promote Emotion Regulation Competence in Middle Childhood: Protocol for an Exploratory Randomized Controlled Trial.

Background: Emotion regulation is a key transdiagnostic risk factor for a range of psychopathologies, making it a prime target for both prevention and treatment interventions in childhood. Existing interventions predominantly rely on workshops or in-person therapy-based approaches, limiting the ability to promote emotion regulation competence for children in everyday settings and at scale. Purrble is a newly developed, inexpensive, socially assistive robot-in the form of an interactive plush toy-that uses haptic feedback to support in-the-moment emotion regulation.

How does emotional intelligence relate to adolescents' interpretation of cues for disgust?

This study investigated the relationship of emotional intelligence and age to adolescents' (11-17 years) free labelling responses to proposed facial expressions and situations for disgust. Emotional intelligence continues to develop throughout adolescence and may provide needed cognitive support for linking the disgust face to the disgust script. Emotional intelligence, specifically, regulating one's own and others emotions, and age predicted adolescents' labelling of disgust facial expressions (but not situations) as disgusted.

The word disgust may refer to more than one emotion.

Contrary to a common presupposition, the word disgust may refer to more than one emotion. From an array of 3 facial expressions (produced in our lab), participants (N = 44) in Study 1 selected the one that best matched 11 types of emotion-eliciting events: anger, sadness, and 9 types of disgust (7 types of physical disgust plus moral disgust and simply feeling ill). From an array of 4 facial expressions (two from Matsumoto & Ekman, 1988; two produced in lab), participants (N = 120) in Study 2 selected the one that best matched 14 types of disgust-eliciting events (8 physical and 6 moral).

Context is more powerful than we think: contextual cues override facial cues even for valence.

Context-the external situation-overrides facial information when judging the emotion from spontaneous facial expressions, even on valence. Observers (N = 60) judged the emotion in each of 15 facial expressions of athletes in the 2012 Olympics who had just won or lost their respective event. Observers were given either correct, incorrect, or no information about the results of the event.

The development of emotion concepts: a story superiority effect in older children and adolescents.

Contrary to traditional assumptions, young children are more likely to correctly label someone's emotion from a story that describes the causes and consequences of the emotion than from the person's facial expression. This story superiority effect was examined in a sample of older children and adolescents (N=90, 8-20 years) for the emotions of fear, disgust, shame, embarrassment, and pride. Participants freely labeled the emotion they inferred from a story describing a cause and consequence of each emotion and, separately, from the corresponding facial expression.

Children's recognition of disgust in others.

Disgust has been theorized to be a basic emotion with a facial signal that is easily, universally, automatically, and perhaps innately recognized by observers from an early age. This article questions one key part of that theory: the hypothesis that children recognize disgust from its purported facial signal. Over the first 5 years, children experience disgust, produce facial expressions of disgust, develop a concept of disgust, understand and produce the word disgust or a synonym, know about disgust's causes and consequences, and infer disgust in others from a situation or a behavior.

The within-subjects design in the study of facial expressions.

The common within-subjects design of studies on the recognition of emotion from facial expressions allows the judgement of one face to be influenced by previous faces, thus introducing the potential for artefacts. The present study (N=344) showed that the canonical "disgust face" was judged as disgusted, provided that the preceding set of faces included "anger expressions", but was judged as angry when the preceding set of faces excluded anger but instead included persons who looked sad or about to be sick. Chinese observers showed lower recognition of the "disgust face" than did American observers.

What emotion does the "facial expression of disgust" express?

The emotion attributed to the prototypical "facial expression of disgust" (a nose scrunch) depended on what facial expressions preceded it. In two studies, the majority of 120 children (5-14 years) and 135 adults (16-58 years) judged the nose scrunch as expressing disgust when the preceding set included an anger scowl, but as angry when the anger scowl was omitted. An even greater proportion of observers judged the nose scrunch as angry when the preceding set also included a facial expression of someone about to be sick.

Can an anger face also be scared? Malleability of facial expressions.

Do people always interpret a facial expression as communicating a single emotion (e.g., the anger face as only angry) or is that interpretation malleable? The current study investigated preschoolers' (N = 60; 3-4 years) and adults' (N = 20) categorization of facial expressions.

Do proposed facial expressions of contempt, shame, embarrassment, and compassion communicate the predicted emotion?

Shame, embarrassment, compassion, and contempt have been considered candidates for the status of basic emotions on the grounds that each has a recognisable facial expression. In two studies (N=88, N=60) on recognition of these four facial expressions, observers showed moderate agreement on the predicted emotion when assessed with forced choice (58%; 42%), but low agreement when assessed with free labelling (18%; 16%). Thus, even though some observers endorsed the predicted emotion when it was presented in a list, over 80% spontaneously interpreted these faces in a way other than the predicted emotion.

Differentiation in preschooler's categories of emotion.

Two studies (N = 68, ages 2;0-3;11; N = 80, ages 2;6-4;11) explore the idea that, rather than starting with a separate mental category for each discrete emotion, children start with two broad categories (positive and negative) and then differentiate within each until adult-like categories form. Children generated emotion labels for (a) facial expressions or (b) stories about an emotion's cause and consequence. Emotions included were happiness, anger, fear, sadness, and disgust.

Children's scripts for social emotions: causes and consequences are more central than are facial expressions.

Understanding and recognition of emotions relies on emotion concepts, which are narrative structures (scripts) specifying facial expressions, causes, consequences, label, etc. organized in a temporal and causal order. Scripts and their development are revealed by examining which components better tap which concepts at which ages.

The "disgust face" conveys anger to children.

What does the "facial expression of disgust" communicate to children? When asked to label the emotion conveyed by different facial expressions widely used in research, children (N = 84, 4 to 9 years) were much more likely to label the "disgust face" as anger than as disgust, indeed just as likely as they were to label the "angry face" as anger. Shown someone with a disgust face and asked to generate a possible cause and consequence of that emotion, children provided answers indistinguishable from what they provided for an angry face--even for the minority who had labeled the disgust face as disgust. A majority of adults (N = 22) labeled the same disgust faces shown to the children as disgust and generated causes and consequences that implied disgust.

A closer look at preschoolers' freely produced labels for facial expressions.

Children's performance on free labeling of prototypical facial expressions of basic emotions is modest and improves only gradually. In 3 data sets (N = 80, ages 4 or 5 years; N = 160, ages 2 to 5 years; N = 80, ages 3 to 4 years), errors remained even when method factors (poor stimuli, unavailability of an appropriate label, or the difficulty of a production task) were controlled. Children's use of emotion labels increased with age in a systematic order: Happy, angry, and sad emerged early and in that order, were more accessible, and were applied broadly (overgeneralized) but systematically.