3
Toward Considering Emotional Skills as Academic Skills
Sabine GUERAUD and Louise GOYET
DysCo, Université Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis, France
In everyday language, emotions are considered to be an intense emotional state that accompanies us throughout our daily lives and is an integral part of our personality. It is also considered that the nature of these emotions is shaped throughout life with the experiences we live. Indeed, humans express and feel emotions, and constantly process them, trying to make sense of them and determine their origin. Everyday, we interact with our fellow human beings and try to decode and understand the emotions produced by others. However, although emotions have been given a central place in developmental and cognitive psychology research, it is only recently that the study of emotions in the academic context has emerged (Cuisinier and Pons 2012). The issue of emotions can be broken down into two main areas. The first concerns students’ emotional feelings (Stegge et al. 1994; Efklides and Petkaki 2005) as well as teachers’ (Hargreaves 2000; Perry et al. 2002; Sutton and Wheatley 2003) and their impact on learning processes (Clavel and Cuisinier 2008; Cuisinier et al. 2010; Fartoukh et al. 2012, 2014; Tornare et al. 2016). A second focuses on emotions as objects of knowledge that the child acquires during development (Cuisinier and Pons 2012). This chapter is part of this second group and aims to provide readers with the current knowledge of the scientific literature on the development of emotional competencies, from infancy to adolescence. The aim here is to trace the child’s journey through this acquisition process, which is as complex as any other form of academic learning.
Numerous works from experimental, cognitive and developmental psychology have developed a large number of scientific theories, which are based on specific definitions of emotion. For example, Kleinginna and Kleinginna (1981) in Sander and Scherer (2014) agreed that there were as many definitions of emotion as there were theories of emotion. In a first section of the chapter, we will thus trace the evolution of the concept and the underlying theories of emotion. We then turn to the question of emotional competencies’ development. Finally, in the third section, we will be discussed the role and influence of language skills in the development of emotional competence.
3.1. Emotions: evolution of theories and the concept
As noted in the preface to this book, the definition of the concept of emotion is complex. Fehr and Russell (1984, p. 464) point out that “everyone knows what an emotion is, until asked to give a definition. Then, it seems, no one knows.” Thus, in this first section, we develop the early theories that attempted to provide a definition as well as contemporary conceptions of emotions.
3.1.1. The pioneers of the scientific theories of emotions
The scientific approach to the study of emotions was born thanks to the work of Charles Darwin, the famous naturalist who, in his book entitled The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), defended an evolutionary perspective on the origin of emotions. Darwin considered that the emotions experienced by different species were a faculty for adaptation and survival in their environment. He advocated the idea that emotions are universal (present in all cultures), innate (the individual has prerequisites for the development of emotions) and adaptive (would favor the adaptation and survival of the species in the face of environmental changes). Darwin also focused on the function of emotions and highlighted that each basic emotion corresponds to basic adaptive behaviors. Thus, fear is, for example, a physiological response to danger, anger is a mean to defend onself when faced with a threat and the facial expression of disgust corresponds to an expulsion movement through the nose or mouth. This expression, which was functional at one point in history, was intended to prevent man from eating deadly food. The emotion of disgust, like the other basic emotions, is therefore the result of adaptation (Sander and Scherer 2014).
The contribution of Darwin’s work to the study of the origin of emotions and their expressions has been very important and has subsequently influenced a great deal of scientific work. Custrini and Feldman (1989) consider that Darwin was among the first to propose the idea of a universally recognized set of facial expressions that serve to facilitate social communication within and between species. Thus, as Luminet (2008) argues, Darwin’s work highlighted that emotions refer to ontogenetic and phylogenetic aspects of human development.
William James (1884), on the other hand, proposed a functionalist perspective of emotions. He put forward the idea that bodily changes follow the perception of “an exciting fact” (James 1884, 2006) and considered that emotions are linked to the body’s responses. Let us take an example of a situation that illustrates the idea put forward by William James:
You are wandering down a dark alley late at night. Suddenly you hear footsteps behind you. You begin to tremble, your heartbeat quickens and your breathing becomes more labored. You unconsciously notice these physiological changes, interpreting them as the body’s preparation for a fearful situation. Finally, you feel the fear. (Mahboub 2011, p. 39)
At the same time, Carl Lange (1922) proposed that bodily changes are the origin and cause of an emotion. From the convergence of these two approaches to emotions, the so-called “peripheralist” theory (Lange 1922) was born, which considers that an emotion is not a cause but an effect of the emotion. Thus, this theory claims that the individual feels an emotion because he or she first has measurable physiological signs (tears, trembling hands and accelerated heart rate) that lead them to feel such or such an emotion.
The centralist theory of emotions supported by Cannon (1927) and Bard (1928) was opposed to that of James and Lange. The latter postulates that human beings can present emotional reactions that provoke physiological changes, thus characterizing the physiological disturbance as a consequence of an emotional feeling and not as a cause. Cannon (1932) shows that a surgical procedure in cats involving disconnection of visceral organs from the central nervous system does not prevent the occurrence of emotional reactions (e.g. joy or sadness), even though no visceral response can be produced. Thus, Cannon (1932) gives a major role to the central nervous system, and in particular to the thalamus, involved in the triggering of emotions. Cannon suggested that the visceral response is not necessary for emotional behavior. He bases this on the observation that similar visceral changes can occur in different emotional states. Thus, there is no such thing as an emotion caused by a specific bodily activation, as William James claimed. Let us take the previous example to understand his point:
You are wandering down a dark alley late at night. Suddenly you hear footsteps behind you. You begin to tremble, your heartbeat quickens, and your breathing becomes more labored. As you experience these physiological manifestations, you are overcome with fear. (Mahboub 2011, p. 40)
3.1.2. Contemporary scientific approaches to emotions
Contemporary approaches to emotions are in line with the approaches developed above.
The evolutionary theory, defended by Paul Ekman, is directly in line with a Darwinian perspective. In 1982, Ekman developed a discrete emotion theory, which provided evidence to support the hypothesis that there are six basic emotions: happiness, anger, fear, surprise, disgust and sadness, which are generated by biological affective programs wired in the brain. Ekman (1992a, 1992b) considers that there are common properties to each of these emotions, which are characterized by a rapid, spontaneous and automatic triggering and which exist in different species. Thus, the patterns of emotional responses are genetically programmed, and therefore innate. The human face has the ability to encode the six basic emotions that can be communicated to others. From birth, human beings possess the six categories into which the six basic emotions are classified. Like Darwin, Ekman believes that emotions play a specific role in helping the individual adapt to his or her environment.
He also assumes that emotions play a fundamental role in communication and that they regulate social relations between people. He postulates that facial emotional expressions have no boundaries because people can recognize emotions across cultures. For example, people all over the world would be willing to produce five or six categories of emotions (Feldman-Barrett et al. 2007). Ekman suggests that these primal emotions are universal and play a central role in the adaptation of humans to their environment – and thus in evolution. To defend his theory, he takes into account the results of research on the universality of emotions and on the specific physiological expression of each emotion, and he considers that the emotional labels that the child gradually acquires through the entry into language come to label the already existing emotional categories.
So-called appraisal theories (evaluation of a particular event) such as Scherer’s (1984, 2001) define emotion as a complex process and a multi-component concept (Sander and Scherer 2014). Thus, Sander and Scherer (2014) propose to define emotion as:
a set of episodes of corporal and psychic changes that are coordinated in several components of the organism (physiological changes, behavioral dynamics, com-behavioral and motor expression, subjective feeling or experience, and cognitive appraisal) in response to internal (thoughts, memories) or external (environmental change) events appraised as important by the organism.
Emotion is thus a rapid episode that is activated following the relevance of a processed external or internal event and triggers an emotional response characterized by the synchronization and coordination of several components. According to Sander and Varone (2011, p. 25), “most theorists accept the idea that the nature of this appraisal will determine both the functional response of the organism and the nature of the organic and mental changes that will occur during the emotional episode.”
Finally, the socioconstructivist theory is radically opposed to theories that consider emotion to be primarily a biologically determined and universal phenomenon (Averill 1980). This perspective considers that human behavior is a purely social and cultural construction (Gergen 1985). In other words, emotions are the product of a given culture or society. The main argument of this theory is based on two types of observations. On the one hand, emotions can, depending on the language, be grouped under the same nominal category, even though they differ conceptually; on the other hand, an emotion can be named in one language and not named in another. Thus, some emotional words found in other languages are untranslatable. For example, in German the concept Vorfreude refers to the joyful anticipation of someone who imagines a future pleasure and Schadenfreude refers to a feeling of pleasure and enjoyment felt when a person feels pain or suffering. Another example is Fargin, in the Yiddish language, which refers to “ungraduding and overt (expressed) pride and happiness at others’ successes” (Lomas 2018), three feelings for which we do not have a name for in the English language (Tcherkassof 2008). These two arguments thus illustrate that there are differences in the way people from different cultures or countries express, feel and name emotions.
The evolution of scientific approaches to emotions shows the complexity of understanding this phenomenon. Regardless of the approach, however, a consensus has emerged that emotions are subjective, complex and dynamic experiences. These theories also agree on the idea that emotions are situational categories whose identification and understanding are crucial for mental health (Philippot 2013), learning (Cuisinier and Pons 2012) and the social integration of individuals (Deneault et al. 2011). This ability to identify and understand emotions corresponds to what is defined today as emotional competencies, the development of which is the subject of section 3.2.
3.2. Development of emotional competencies
Emotional competencies are defined as the ability of individuals to identify, express, understand and regulate their emotions and those of others. Mikolajczak et al. (2014) refer to emotional competencies and state that while the nature and number of these competencies differ across models, there is a consensus around five of them: identification, expression, understanding, regulation and use (Gentaz 2017).
| Skills | Definition |
| Identification | To be able to identify one’s own emotions and those of others. |
| Expression | To be able to express emotions, according to social norms, and to allow others to express them. |
| Understanding | To understand the causes and consequences of one’s own actions and those of others. |
| Regulation | To be able to manage one’s own emotions, especially when unsuitable to the situation, and to manage those of others. |
| Use | To be able to use one’s own emotions or those of others in order to increase their effectiveness. |
These skills optimize the individual’s adaptation to his or her environment. In other words, a person who is unable to perceive or recognize emotions would have less chance of adapting to his or her environment. In the following, we will discuss the current scientific knowledge on three of these areas: the identification of emotions, the understanding of emotions and emotional regulation.
3.2.1. Identification, recognition and expression of emotions
Emotional perception involves the ability to recognize and identify one’s own and others’ facial, vocal, postural and gestural emotional expressions, as emotions are conveyed through the entire body. Facial expressions are thus a means of communication and a relay of information to those around us. The ability to identify emotions emerges during the first year of life. Thus, from their first days, babies already show an early preference for human faces compared to schematic faces, which testifies to the existence of a functional cognitive system from the beginning of life (Pascalis et al. 1995). A study by Farroni et al. (2007) showed that newborns are able to distinguish a smiling face from a fearful face when both stimuli are presented simultaneously. On average, they look longer at the smiling face than at the other face. While they can differentiate between happy and surprised faces, the results of the study show that newborns do not discriminate between a frightened face and a neutral face. From the point of view of expression, it has also been observed that, very early on, infants are able to produce prototypical expressions of joy, sadness, disgust and anger (Izard et al. 1995).
Two-month-old infants are also able to respond to emotional expressions appropriately. This result was confirmed by the still face experiment of Tronick et al. (1978). In this experiment, mothers were asked to maintain an impassive face during an exchange with their baby, accompanied by an immobility of the body, and to suspend verbal exchanges. The 3-month-old baby showed expressions of surprise and then began to smile at his mother to attract her attention. After a while, the baby showed his despair, cried, disturbed by the absence of emotional expression from his mother. This experiment demonstrates the sensitivity of the baby to emotional expressions and their influence on the child’s emotional state.
At 5 months of age, babies discriminate between different faces that express the same emotion. At the same age, they differentiate between expressions of fear and joy on identical or different faces. They are able to categorize expressions of the same valence but of different intensity on similar and dissimilar faces (Bornstein and Arterberry 2003). As early as 4–6 months of age, children can even differentiate between facial expressions of anger, fear or surprise (Serrano et al. 1992). Thus, between 4 and 7 months of age, the baby acquires the faculty of perceptual categorization (de Haan and Nelson 1998). However, according to Ludemann and Nelson (1988), the ability to categorize emotions does not develop until the age of 7 months. A study shows, by means of an intermodal paradigm, that babies from 5 to 7 months of age have the ability to recognize a facial expression corresponding to its sound expression (Walker-Andrews 1997). The baby thus possesses the capacity for cross-modal integration of visual and auditory emotional information.
All of the data presented here are based on facial recognition of emotions as a cue to emotion identification. It is important to note, however, that there are alternative developmental proposals that suggest that facial emotional expressions are not the earliest or strongest cue. Charles Darwin (Darwin 1872) already attributed a key role to facial expressions in the perception of emotions and also to body movements (Lhommet and Marcella 2015). Ekman (1965) also studied posture as a means of transmitting the intensity of emotion by noting the features of body movements that were relevant in the identification of emotions. Similarly, Mikolajczak et al. (2014) argue that gestural language gradually transfers to vocalizations and thus to vocal expressions. Finally, the scripting approach to emotions (Widen and Russell 2004; Widen 2014) goes even beyond corporal-related cues. Indeed, this approach supports the idea that conceptual categories of emotions are, in adulthood, scripts that include various cues to emotion along both a temporal and causal course. These scripts are built progressively during development, which implies, on the one hand, that the identification of an emotion could be based on different cues at different ages and, on the other hand, that the most relevant cue for the identification of an emotion could vary from one emotion to another. Consistent with this idea, recent studies conducted with children aged 3–11 years have found that the causes and consequences of an emotion were a better cue for emotion categorization than facial expressions (Smith and Walden 1999; Russell and Widen 2002b; Balconi and Carrera 2007; Widen and Russell 2010; Nelson et al. 2013; Widen et al. 2015).
These works highlight a rapid and early development of the young child’s ability to identify and recognize basic emotions and to respond appropriately. It is considered that this rapid development constitutes the basis for the development of skills that allow the understanding of emotions. Indeed, understanding emotions does not only rely on the ability to identify them but also implies that the child is able to consider emotion as an object of knowledge (de Rosnay et al. 2008).
3.2.2. The understanding of emotions
There has been a great deal of work on the development of emotional understanding in recent decades. The most influential and successful model to date is the hierarchical model proposed by Pons et al. (2004a) (see also Harris and Pons (2003) and Pons and Harris (2005)). This model proposes three developmental stages of emotional understanding from childhood to late adolescence through the acquisition of nine skills, three per developmental stage (Table 3.2).
The first stage of development, from 2 to 4 years of age, is qualified by the authors as the external stage insofar as it refers to the understanding of the external dimensions of emotions. During this first stage of development, the child will be able to identify and express basic emotions such as joy, sadness, fear and anger (competence I). Then he or she will be able to understand the influence of external causes on the emotions felt by others, for example, understanding that one of his or her classmates will be sad at the loss of his or her favorite stuffed animal (competence II). This first stage is completed by understanding the influence that memories can have on the emotion felt, such as feeling joy when remembering the gift received for one’s birthday (competence III).
Table 3.2. Developmental stages and competencies of emotional understanding according to the hierarchical model by Pons et al. (2004b)
| Stage 1 External dimension of emotions | Stage 2 Internal dimension of emotions | Stage 3 Complex dimension of emotions |
| Competence I: recognition | Competence IV: desire | Competence VII: managing the emotion felt |
| Competence II: external causes | Competence V: belief | Competence VIII: mixed emotions |
| Competence III: memories | Competence VI: real and apparent emotions | Competence IX: mental health |
The second stage of development is marked by the progressive consideration of psychological and phenomenological causes in the understanding of emotions. As such, it is defined as mental or internal. At this stage, the child is able to appreciate that other people’s emotions depend on their desires, and thus that, faced with the same situation, two people may feel a different emotion depending on their desires (competence IV). The child also understands that the emotion felt by another person is based on the belief, true or false, that this person has about the situation in which he or she finds himself or herself (skill V). The classic example provided by the authors to illustrate the acquisition of this skill is that of a child who feels joy at doing one of his or her favorite activities while his or her bike is being stolen (insofar as he or she is not yet aware of its disappearance). The child will understand the joy of the other child in this situation. Finally, it is assumed that this second stage of development will end when the child understands that others can express an emotion different from the one actually felt (competence VI). An understanding of the social role of emotions then emerges. For example, the child understands that others can express joy at a gift even if they are disappointed with the gift they receive. The child is now about 7 years-old.
During the third and final stage of development, described as the reflective phase, the child enters into an understanding of the complex relationships between “internal states, the state of the world and emotion” (Cuisinier and Pons 2012, p. 9). It is marked, first, by the child’s ability to understand that he or she or others can control emotions through mental strategies and to implement such strategies (competence VII). Whereas in the first stage, the child understood that a memory can bring out an emotion (competence III), he or she is now able to use, by himself or herself, a pleasant memory to counteract an unpleasant emotion, for example. This last stage also sees the emergence of an understanding of mixed emotional feelings, that is the fact that the same situation can lead to ambivalent emotions in oneself or others (competence VIII). Finally, this last stage is based on the consideration of social or moral norms in the feeling of emotions (competence IX). The child understands that it is possible to feel a pleasant emotion when performing a positive action that is socially appreciated, or conversely to feel a negative emotion when performing an action that is questionable from a moral point of view, such as lying. These skills are acquired during adolescence.
In order to validate their model and evaluate the development of emotional understanding, Pons and Harris (2000) developed the Test of Emotion Comprehension (TEC), which assesses the acquisition of each of the competencies in their hierarchical model. This test has been validated in recent years with children of different nationalities and cultures (Albanese et al. 2006) and with typical and atypical development (Treillet et al. 2014) and is now considered a solid assessment tool for the development of emotional understanding in children aged 3–11 years.
The TEC is based on the presentation of cartoon scenarios, to which a short story is associated. Each one has been elaborated in such a way as to imply the feeling of an emotion (simple or mixed) by its protagonist (each story is presented in male and female versions). In each scenario, the protagonist’s head is schematically drawn, but does not contain his or her eyes, nose or mouth. It is a drawing of a head without a face, to allow the protagonist to give his or her answer. Thus, to follow up the drawn scenario, the child is offered four faces, differentiated on the basis of facial expressions and representing possible emotional outcomes. The evaluator reads the short story while the child looks at the cartoon scenario and then asks the child to point out the facial expression that seems to correspond to the emotion felt by the character, after having orally specified the emotion expressed by each face. The following is an example of a competence from each of the developmental phases.
In a first example scenario, the child visualizes the head without a face and a drawing of a gift. The child is told that:
“This child just got a present for his birthday.”
The teacher should then point to how this child is feeling: is he or she happy, sad, just fine or scared? This type of scenario is used to assess the child’s ability to recognize the emotions of others, a competence from the first stage of development.
Another example of a scenario is designed to assess competence V of the second stage of development, namely, taking into account the belief in the emotions felt by others. Here the child is shown a picture of a wolf in a bush and a rabbit with a carrot. The child is told that:
“The rabbit has just found a carrot, but he didn’t notice that a wolf was watching him, hiding behind a bush.”
The child must choose, among four emotions, the one felt by the rabbit: is he happy, just fine, angry or afraid?
Finally, a last example of a scenario concerns the last stage of development of emotional understanding, and more specifically the competence reflecting the ability to understand that the same person can feel ambivalent emotions (competence VIII). A faceless head is presented on top of a bicycle. The scenario here refers to a situation where:
“A child receives a bicycle as a gift but he doesn’t know how to ride it.”
The proposals for emotional expression made to the child are then either simple or mixed: that is does the child feel only joy, sadness and fear, joy and fear or only fear?
The success or failure of the child in the various scenarios thus allows us to closely assess the development of his or her understanding of emotions.
3.2.3. Regulation of emotions
In their work, Mikolajczak et al. (2014) define emotional regulation as the set of processes by which an individual will be able to modify their emotion. Vieillard and Harm (2013) specify that different forms of regulation can be distinguished: the attenuation of unpleasant emotions, the maintenance or increase of pleasant emotions, the maintenance or increase of unpleasant emotions and finally the attenuation of pleasant emotions. The development of emotion regulation will enable the individual to recognize, guess and interpret the emotions of others, as well as their beliefs or ideas, and to respond appropriately.
From a developmental perspective, many authors agree that the ability to regulate one’s own emotions in adulthood is initially rooted in the early development of emotionally mediated regulation of the child’s behavior (Harris and Pons 2003; Roskam 2012; Brun 2015). In other words, the child learns to regulate behavior through emotional activity to gradually regulate their own emotional behaviors (Brun 2015). Indeed, developmental research indicates that the first forms of emotional regulation, appearing very early in development, correspond to interpersonal regulation through emotion. It has been observed that, as early as 12 months of age, children are able to modulate and adapt their emotional behavior when faced with unfamiliar objects or people. Similarly, studies indicate that it is in the school setting and in interactions with peers that the child gradually develops the ability to display an emotion other than the one actually felt (Saarni 1999).
In his 2015 article, Brun thus proposes to conceive the development of emotional regulation as a process in three developmental phases articulating, on the one hand, the interpersonal and intrapersonal dimensions of emotional regulation, and the external, internal and reflexive dimensions of the child’s thinking on the other hand. Thus, as we have just seen, the first stage, which can be described as the external interpersonal regulation stage, corresponds to the development of regulation skills in a real social situation between the child and their relations, those nearest to them and then extended to interactions with peers in particular. The second stage of development, still anchored in the interpersonal dimension, is marked by the child’s ability to decontextualize his or her emotional experiences and to internalize them, thus allowing him or her to think about his or her emotional regulation in fictitious situations. Finally, the third and last stage is manifested by a change regarding each of the dimensions: emotional regulation is then qualified as intrapersonal and reflexive. It corresponds to the observation of the implementation of self-regulatory procedures for the representation of emotions, as defined in Gross’ model (2007) for example.
Table 3.3. Stages of development regarding emotional regulation according to Brun (2015)
| Stage | External | Internal | Reflective |
| Interpersonal Regulation by emotion | Stage I Regulation skills in social situations | Stage II Regulation skills in a fictitious situation | |
| Intrapersonal Regulation of emotion | Stage III Self-regulation of emotion representation |
Still from a developmental point of view, the question of the development of emotional regulation is also addressed in close connection with another skill: theory of mind. Theory of mind is defined as the set of processes that allow us to understand and represent other people and social groups, to regulate our emotions, to establish social and moral norms and to cooperate. Theory of mind is therefore a fundamental stage in the development of children and corresponds to their ability to attribute a mental state to themselves and to others. Duval et al. (2011) consider that theory of mind is a determining factor in social relationships and adaptation to a social environment. This then requires an ability to regulate one’s emotions.
In the literature, theory of mind is characterized by two components: a cognitive component and an affective component. The cognitive component provides access to the mental representation of another’s beliefs, intentions or thoughts, while the affective component underlies the ability to access the mental representation of another’s emotions or feelings. Besche-Richard et al. (2012) found a link between the recognition of emotional facial expressions and the child’s ability to attribute mental states to others, including beliefs. This relationship thus suggests that, in order to be able to attribute a belief to another and put oneself in someone else’s place, one must be able to feel that emotion oneself and perceive what another will be able to feel depending on the situation or be able to attribute a given emotion to another. Baron-Cohen (1995) suggests the importance of understanding the mental states of others in order to better understand the other person and to better represent their emotions.
Duval et al. (2011) suggest that context not only plays an important role in our own cognitive or affective attitudes and representations but also modulates the inferences and interpretations we have of the mental or emotional states of our fellow human beings. The authors explain that an attitude in an individual can only be correctly interpreted if it is contextualized. Knowledge of the history of people is a context that modulates our actions toward them. Emotional regulation or social adaptation could thus be better considered as constant and voluntary updates of the context. The authors suggest that the integration of contextual information serves social cognition and modulates its functions.
We have just seen the developmental trajectories of three of the five emotional competencies as classically described in the literature. It emerges that, even if traces of these emotional competencies are found early on in infancy, they develop continuously and progressively until adolescence. They also play a central role in the child’s social development. It should be noted that, although research has made it possible to advance the development of each of these competencies, the question of how they relate to each other, that is whether and how the development of one influences that of the other, remains to be clarified.
The influence of other skills, such as language development, on the development of emotional skills has been the subject of much research. This work has shown that their development is strongly influenced by the development of language and emotional labeling. Emotional language provides a conceptual context for the processing of emotion that refines the child’s perception, categorization, understanding and emotional representation. The third and final section of this chapter therefore elaborates on the research that has focused on the link between the development of language skills and emotional skills.
3.3. Role and influence of language in the development of emotional skills
Feldman-Barrett et al. (2007) consider that “emotion words (with associated conceptual content) that become accessible serve to reduce the uncertainty that is inherent in most natural facial behaviors and constrain their meaning to allow for quick and easy perceptions of emotion”, thus refuting the idea that the perception of emotions is independent of conceptual processes such as the use of language. This assertion is based on a body of work that has focused on children’s categorization of emotions and the development of emotional vocabulary.
Studies show that, as early as 16 months, children stare longer at a happy face when hearing the corresponding language label and improve their performance for the emotion of anger by 28 months (Casasola et al. 2013). This work shows that a nominal label refines the young child’s ability to discriminate emotions and also to perform an initial categorization of some basic emotions. Thereafter, these categorization processes will continue to develop and be refined. According to Feldman-Barrett and Russel (1998) and Widen and Russell (2008b), children begin by categorizing emotions according to two categories based on positive valences (pleasant and agreeable) and negative valences (unpleasant and disagreeable), and only later do they categorize them into specific emotions, as in adults. The semantic categorization of emotions is acquired around the age of 5 years (Bullock and Russel 1984; Gosselin and Kirouac 1995). The work of Gosselin and Kirouac (1995) shows that the verbal identification of emotional expressions in young children does not develop at the same speed for all expressions; positive expressions seem to be the first to be named, while negative ones are named later. Widen and Russell (2008a) describe an order of appearance of emotional labels using their model of differentiation. The most typical order of emotion acquisition is: joy, sadness, anger, fear, surprise and disgust. The label “anger”, for example, initially encompasses all negative categories (broad category processing), and then the child begins to use the labels of sadness and fear for the corresponding faces.
Categorization (Russell and Widen 2002a; Widen and Russell 2008b) and facial expression matching (Bullock and Russel 1984, 1985; Camras and Allison 1985; Vicari et al. 2000) or labeling tasks (Widen and Russell 2003) are used and show that language labeling facilitates emotion recognition compared to face presentation alone. For example, Russell and Widen (2002b) asked children aged 2–7 years to categorize photographs of faces expressing different emotions. The emotional categories were “physically” represented by boxes in which the child was invited to place the faces presented to him or her one by one, according to the category to which he or she thought the emotion expressed belonged to. Here, the researchers manipulated the way in which the emotional categories were presented to the children: either by the emotional label or by the presentation of a photograph of a face showing an emotional expression, or both simultaneously. The results showed that children categorized emotion better in the emotional label condition at all ages. These results suggest that the concept of emotion facilitates its recognition or that the emotional word is mastered earlier than its physical expression.
This label superiority effect, highlighted by Russell and Widen (2002b), demonstrates the role that language labeling plays in the acquisition of the concept of emotion. The child thus acquires the different emotional concepts during development and uses the labels with increasing precision. Thus, having a parent with a rich emotional language is an important characteristic for the acquisition and development of the child’s emotional skills. Roberson et al. (2010) add that a person with delayed language development can expect to show some difficulty in interpreting facial expressions. These findings thus point to the fact that emotional language refines children’s abilities to identify, recognize, differentiate, categorize and represent emotions. A study by Lindquist et al. (2006) also shows that reduced accessibility to emotional words could lead to a decrease in the accuracy of recognizing emotional facial expressions.
Regarding emotional vocabulary, data indicate that the understanding of emotional information emerges around the age of 12 months (Boucenna 2011). Between the ages of 2 and 6 years, Boucenna (2011) states that the child is in the process of acquiring language and an emotional lexicon, and also faculties that are indispensable for the development of social life. This acquisition of an emotional lexicon will enable him or her to describe and understand his or her own emotional experiences, as well as those of others. He or she will then be able to differentiate his or her own emotional experience. The lexicon allows the child to gradually name information from his or her environment. Their conceptual abilities must be sufficient to allow the child to extract this information and encode it into mental representations. By the age of 2 years, children understand and use certain emotional labels and expressions to describe various mood states: feeling happy or feeling good, laughing, loving, angry, scared and sad (Ridgeway et al. 1985; Wellman et al. 1995).
Baron-Cohen et al. (2010) examined the extent of emotional vocabulary, that is the quantity of words known, in children aged 4–16 years. To do this, the authors selected 336 emotional words and asked the children and adolescents to indicate whether they knew the meaning of each word. The results of this study show that the number of emotional concepts that children report understanding doubles between the ages of 4 and 8 years, and doubles again between the ages of 9 and 12 years. Specifically, this research suggests that between the ages of 4 and 6 years, children understand 41 emotional words, 88 words between the ages of 7 and 8 years, 180 words between the ages of 9 and 10 years, 299 words between the ages of 11 and 12 years, 320 words between the ages of 13 and 14 years and finally 330 words between the ages of 15 and 16 years.
For their part, Bazhydai et al. (2019) studied not the breadth but the depth of the emotional lexicon in adolescence, using an emotional category generation task. This task consisted of giving an emotional category, for example “happy”, and asking participants to give as many words as possible that could fit into this category, thus enabling the depth of the vocabulary to be assessed, that is the quality and precision of emotional concepts. The authors asked adolescents aged 13–17 years to list all the emotional words they could think of to describe a person feeling happy, relaxed, angry, sad and nervous. The main results indicate that 16–17 year-olds produce significantly more emotional words for each category than younger adolescents aged 13–15 years. Conversely, the data highlight that younger adolescents provide more non-emotional words such as physiological reactions, social experiences or personality traits. Overall, this study suggests that emotional lexicon development extends into late adolescence. Finally, it is important to note that a positive correlation was found between the number of emotional words produced and performance on the MSCEIT-YV (Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test-Youth Version) Comprehension of Emotions Subtest (Mayer et al. 2004). In other words, this study once again highlights the strong link between the development of language competences and emotional competences.
3.4. Emotional skills: academic skills?
Our objective in this chapter was to present the state of scientific knowledge concerning the development of emotional skills. We have thus been able to see the complexity of the acquisition of these skills from infancy to late adolescence, as well as their close connection with the development of language skills and theory of mind. While it seemed important to us to carry out such an inventory, even if it is not exhaustive, it is because the acquisition of such skills constitutes for many authors today an issue just as important as the development of other abilities in the context of academic learning.
In fact, many studies emphasize the link between emotional skills and the broader school context, as this link would manifest itself at different levels. First, studies have shown a relationship between the development of emotional skills and academic success, with children with low levels of emotional understanding generally being less academically receptive (Govaerts and Grégoire 2004; Lafortune and Pons 2005). Moreover, it is now widely recognized that the learner’s emotional state at the time of learning has a significant impact on their performance in learning situations (Clavel and Cuisinier 2008; Cuisinier et al. 2010; Fartoukh et al. 2012, 2014; Tornare et al. 2016) and can affect their relationship with the task. The influence of the emotional state (positive or negative) is all the more marked when the learning situation is based on complex cognitive processes such as those involved in problem-solving situations for example and, conversely, performances based on automated processes would have little impact. Similarly, recent studies show an influence of the emotional content of teaching materials on learners. In particular, Beauvais et al. (2020) showed that inferring the meaning of an unknown word from textual information was made more difficult from a positively connoted text than from a negatively connoted or neutral text. Finally, beyond academic learning, school is also the place where children’s social skills are developed, insofar as it corresponds to a standardized social situation. It is also a context in which emotions arise in a preferable way. It is now established that children’s emotional skills determine the quality of their prosocial behavior with their peers and teachers (Harrison and Paulin 2000; Pons et al. 2002; Harris and Pons 2003; Pons et al. 2004b). It has been shown that children with a good ability to understand emotions and to recognize facial emotional expressions are those who are most popular at school (Edwards et al. 1984; Cassidy et al. 1992).
The research and models we have developed throughout this chapter, as well as these final elements of the conclusion, bear witness to the central role of emotions in the child’s development and in that of the school context. They therefore advocate taking into account the acquisition of emotional skills at school as well as the implementation of pedagogical tools specifically aimed at the development of these skills. The literature reports promising initial attempts in this area, such as the SMILE program (School Matters In Lifeskills Education; Pons et al. 2002) or the development of activities based on sharing in a reading situation (LaForge et al. 2018) to support the development of children’s emotional skills, as part of their learning at school.
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