5-Year-Olds’ Integration of Prosodic and Facial Emotions When Controlling for Valence and Arousal

A previous study presented 5-year-olds with a cross-modal matching task, wherein emotional prosody (e.g., happy prosody) was presented along with two emotional faces (Amyot et al., 2025). Participants were asked to choose between a target face (e.g., a happy face), and a foil face of the same valence (e.g., a positive surprise face). This task allowed researchers to determine whether children could accurately infer discrete emotion concepts from the voice and face, beyond the broader valence category. 5-year-olds accurately matched sadness and anger at above-chance levels, but not happy and positive surprise. Notably, the sad stimuli were rated as low in arousal, and the anger stimuli as high in arousal, while happy and positive surprise were both high in arousal. Thus, it remains unclear whether 5-year-olds were using arousal differences to accurately match sad and angry prosody with their respective faces. To examine this, the present study aims to determine whether 5-year-olds can differentiate between two high-arousal negative emotions, anger and fear. Happiness and pleasant surprise will also be tested to determine whether previous findings will be replicated. Additionally, previous research has shown that emotion words may facilitate the development of emotion concepts (Nook et al., 2020; see Lindquist, 2017, Lindquist et al., 2015 for reviews). A secondary aim of the present study is to investigate whether children’s performance on the cross-modal matching task is associated with their performance on an emotion vocabulary assessment. We will adopt Nook et al.’s (2020) emotion vocabulary assessment, which we will administer after the cross-modal matching task. Altogether, this study will contribute to our understanding of the development of emotion concepts.