Vignettes for Emotion Recognition Research and Affective Therapy With Children

Abstract

We created 54 brief vignettes that covered six emotion categories: happy, sad, angry, surprised, disgusted, and afraid. The vignettes described emotion- eliciting situations and were validated by administration of them to 5- and 6-year-olds who were asked to pick one of three emotion labels provided that would best match the feeling of the character in the vignette. Each vignette was scored for percentage of correct responses. We retained the five vignettes in each emotion category that were correctly identified most frequently. The "surprise" vignettes were most difficult for children to identify correctly, whereas the happy vignettes were easiest. Due to their validation with young children, the 30 vignettes provided here would be appropriate for use in emotion recognition research or affective therapy programs with children.