Children's comprehension of expressive states depicted in a television cartoon

Abstract Three studies investigated 6–13 year old children's comprehension of expressive states shown on television. A longitudinal component linked the first and third studies. Children identified eight emotional states depicted in a television cartoon, and their discriminations were related to age, verbal ability, and sex. The youngest children had a poor understanding of the expressive states, but understanding improved through to 9 years. Verbal ability was positively related to ability to identify expressions in 6–8 year olds. Girls of 8–13 years performed better than boys of the same age. The longitudinal results showed that in children of 6–10 years, accuracy in labelling expressive states was stable over a period of two years. While younger children could not accurately identify specific expressions, they rarely confused a positive emotion with a negative one. The poor comprehension of television often found in young children may be at least partly explained by their inability to identify discrete...