For over a century, philosophers, historians, and psychologists have debated the answer to this question: What is an emotion?. Classical emotion theories argue that certain “basic” emotions are evolutionarily based, universal, potentially innate, and easily recognized on others’ faces. Yet, constructionist theories disagree, arguing that emotions are highly variable in experience and expression and highlighting the role that language plays in understanding emotions.
Early in my career, I realized that empirical support for these debates relied heavily on studies with adults or children who are able to verbally communicate. Largely missing were studies with infants. Infants, who have comparatively little experience with language and others’ emotions, were the missing piece—the ideal test case to elucidate whether emotions and the ability to understand emotions are:
- early emerging or innate, based in our shared evolutionary history, or
- constructed slowly over development by language and social experience.
I designed my dissertation, with a focus on infancy, to provide a developmental perspective to these debates. My dissertation examined two related questions:
- whether infants understand different negative emotions prior to learning emotion labels (e.g., “anger”), and
- whether labels influence infants’ categorization of negative emotions.
Across eleven experiments, I found that 10-, 14-, and 18-month-olds may begin to understand different negative emotions prior to learning emotion labels (Ruba et al., 2019; Ruba et al., 2020a). Yet, I also found that labels help 14- and 18-month-olds form categories of negative emotions (Ruba et al., 2020b). Taken together, these studies suggest that infants’ emotion understanding is both early emerging and influenced by language. These findings prompted me to develop new hypotheses for the development of emotion understanding, with insights from both classical and constructionist emotion theories (Ruba and Repacholi, 2020a).
My dissertation, combined with my undergraduate research (Ruba et al., 2017, 2018), suggests that infants’ emotion understanding changes across the lifespan. However, little is understood about the mechanisms driving these changes (Ruba and Repacholi, 2020b). I am currently exploring these developmental changes as a postdoctoral fellow supported by the NIMH Training Program in Emotion Research. Over the past year, I have developed a novel framework to guide research on emotion understanding development (Ruba and Pollak, 2020b). I am applying this framework to my ongoing empirical projects, which examine how developmental processes (e.g., language) and early life stress influence how children learn about and use others’ emotional cues (Ruba et al., 2020c; Ruba and Pollak, in press).
Humans experience a wide range of emotions, expressed in variable ways across many different situations. In order to have successful social interactions, children must decode this complex communicative system. I am honored that my dissertation, “The Development of Emotion Understanding in Infancy,” has received the APA Dissertation Award in Developmental Psychology. For nearly ten years, I have been fascinated by theoretical questions in developmental affective science. I am excited to continue my research at the forefront of this burgeoning field.
References
Ruba, A. L., Harris, L. T., and Wilbourn, M. P. (2020c). Examining preverbal infants’ ability to map labels to facial configurations. Affective Science. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42761-020-00015-9opens in new window
Ruba, A. L., Johnson, K. M., Harris, L. T., and Wilbourn, M. P. (2017). Developmental changes in infants’ categorization of anger and disgust facial expressions. Developmental Psychology, 53(10), 1826–1832. https://doi.org/10.1037/dev0000381opens in new window
Ruba, A. L., Meltzoff, A. N., and Repacholi, B. M. (2019). How do you feel? Preverbal infants match negative emotions to events. Developmental Psychology, 55(6), 1138–1149. https://doi.org/10.1037/dev0000711opens in new window
Ruba, A. L., Meltzoff, A. N., and Repacholi, B. M. (2020a). The development of negative event-emotion matching in infancy: Implications for theories in affective science. Affective Science, 1(1), 4–19. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42761-020-00005-xopens in new window
Ruba, A. L., Meltzoff, A. N., and Repacholi, B. M. (2020b). Superordinate categorization of negative facial expressions in infancy: The influence of labels. Developmental Psychology, 56(4), 671–685. https://doi.org/10.1037/dev0000892opens in new window
Ruba, A. L., and Pollak, S. D. (in press). Children’s emotion inferences from masked faces: Implications for social interactions during COVID-19. PLoS ONE.
Ruba, A. L., and Pollak, S. D. (2020). The development of emotion reasoning in infancy and early childhood. Annual Review of Developmental Psychology, 2, 22.1-22.29. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-devpsych-060320-102556opens in new window
Ruba, A. L., and Repacholi, B. M. (2020a). Do preverbal infants understand discrete facial expressions of emotion? Emotion Review, 12(4), 235–250. https://doi.org/10.1177/1754073919871098opens in new window
Ruba, A. L., and Repacholi, B. M. (2020b). Beyond language in infant emotion concept development. Emotion Review, 12(4), 255–258. https://doi.org/10.1177/1754073920931574opens in new window
Ruba, A. L., Wilbourn, M. P., Ulrich, D. M., and Harris, L. T. (2018). Constructing emotion categorization: Insights from developmental psychology applied to a young adult sample. Emotion, 18(7), 1043–1051. https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0000364opens in new window