UC Merced

Emotion expressions communicate more than internal states; they function to signal the significant relations with our environment and guide how social partners may adaptively respond. This dissertation presents four studies investigating the communicative functions of discrete emotions. Chapter 1 provides an overview of how discrete emotions convey different information to observers by integrating prior theories of emotion and empirical research as support to the claims. Chapter 2 describes my first empirical study on different communicative functions of emotions through observing how adults highlight elements of discrete emotional contexts. Findings indicate that adults differentially highlight relational elements of emotional contexts as a function of the emotion being displayed. Chapter 3 expands upon the results of Chapter 2 by examining differential highlighting of relational elements in the context of parent-child discussions about emotions. The results paralleled those found in Chapter 2. Next, Chapter 4 follows up and expands the prior studies through investigating preschool-aged children’s descriptions of face and context images of discrete emotions. Young preschool-aged children did not differentially highlight elements of emotional contexts, but older preschool-aged children did. Taken together, the first three studies reported in this dissertation provide evidence that discrete emotions communicate different information to an observer as indicated by their differential highlighting of relational elements. Chapter 5 applied this conceptualization of emotional communication to a behavioral paradigm to investigate the generalizability of emotions. Results indicated that children do not generalize preferences, or dis-preferences, to another individual as a function of the discrete emotion display. Other behavioral measures indicated a valence-based difference in responding which may have been due to the paradigm and ages tested. The theoretical framework and studies reported in this dissertation provide a strong foundation for future work on the communicative functions of discrete emotions.