Utterance Emotion Dynamics in Children’s Poems: Emotional Changes Across Age

Daniela Teodorescu, Alona Fyshe, Saif Mohammad


Abstract
Emerging psychopathology studies are showing that patterns of changes in emotional state — emotion dynamics — are associated with overall well-being and mental health. More recently, there has been some work in tracking emotion dynamics through one’s utterances, allowing for data to be collected on a larger scale across time and people. However, several questions about how emotion dynamics change with age, especially in children, and when determined through children’s writing, remain unanswered. In this work, we use both a lexicon and a machine learning based approach to quantify characteristics of emotion dynamics determined from poems written by children of various ages. We show that both approaches point to similar trends: consistent increasing intensities for some emotions (e.g., anger, fear, joy, sadness, arousal, and dominance) with age and a consistent decreasing valence with age. We also find increasing emotional variability, rise rates (i.e., emotional reactivity), and recovery rates (i.e., emotional regulation) with age. These results act as a useful baselines for further research in how patterns of emotions expressed by children change with age, and their association with mental health.
Anthology ID:
2023.wassa-1.35
Volume:
Proceedings of the 13th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment, & Social Media Analysis
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Jeremy Barnes, Orphée De Clercq, Roman Klinger
Venue:
WASSA
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
401–415
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.wassa-1.35
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.wassa-1.35
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Daniela Teodorescu, Alona Fyshe, and Saif Mohammad. 2023. Utterance Emotion Dynamics in Children’s Poems: Emotional Changes Across Age. In Proceedings of the 13th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment, & Social Media Analysis, pages 401–415, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Utterance Emotion Dynamics in Children’s Poems: Emotional Changes Across Age (Teodorescu et al., WASSA 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.wassa-1.35.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.wassa-1.35.mp4