Children use process of elimination to associate a novel expression with a novel cause

We adapted a previous protocol to assess children’s ability to spontaneously associate a novel cause with a novel emotional expression. An experimenter opened a series of boxes and generated an expression based on what was inside (the cause of the emotion). Participants (4- to 9-year-olds; N = 72) guessed what the experimenter saw from four possible objects linked to four expressions: stickers (happy), a broken balloon (sad), a spider (scared), and a novel object, pax (novel puffed cheeks expression). Children were then invited to open a series of boxes and generate expressions for the experimenter. Results suggest that children used a process of elimination to associate the novel pax object with the puffed cheeks expression. Some children also re-produced the puffed cheeks expression in a later task. As a final trial, when children were asked how people would feel when seeing the pax object, younger children tended to use positive labels and older children used negative labels. These results show that children are able to quickly associate novel facial expressions with precipitating events as early as 4 years of age, comparable to their performance in linking familiar expressions and objects.