Comment: A role of Language in Infant Emotion Concept Acquisition

Abstract

Ruba and Repacholi (2020) review an important debate in the emotion development literature: whether infants can perceive and understand facial configurations as instances of discrete emotion categories. Consistent with a psychological constructionist account (Lindquist & Gendron, 2013; Shablack & Lindquist, 2019), they conclude that infants can perceive valence on faces, but argue the evidence is far from clear that infants perceive and understand discrete emotions. Ruba and Repacholi outline a novel developmental trajectory of emotion perception and understanding in which early emotion concept learning may be language-independent. In this comment, we argue that language may play a role in emotion concept acquisition even prior to children’s ability to produce emotion labels. We look forward to future research addressing this hypothesis.