Language modulation on emotional valence tasks in preschoolers

Abstract

Language plays a crucial role in developing emotions. Diverse investigations studied the relationship between different components of emotional understanding and language skills. Specifically, we want to find out if this modulation is uniform or if there are variations in the different components of emotional understanding. The goals of this study were to compare the responses to tasks with different cognitive demands and different emotional information processing modalities and to demonstrate any variations in function to the language performance. For it, this paper analysed the responses to tasks with an emotional and neutral valence of preschool children grouped by different language performances. The children performed three tasks related to different emotional understanding components (video and images emotional appraisal, and an emotional memory task) and a language test that evaluated different language skills in a single sample of participants. Language skills are associated with different emotional appraisal task performances but only for dynamic visual stimuli and emotional valences (positive and negative). According to the type of stimulus used, the differences in emotional processing tasks’ performance align with the literature about using dynamic and ecological stimuli for studies with children. Language comprehension would play an essential role in assessing dynamic emotional stimuli, while other language skills would not affect the assessment of static or neutral dynamic stimuli during preschool.