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.

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评论：语言在婴儿情绪概念习得中的作用

Ruba和Repacholi（2020）回顾了情感发展文献中的一个重要辩论：婴儿是否可以感知和理解作为离散情感类别实例的面部构造。与心理建构主义者的解释一致（Lindquist＆Gendron，2013; Shablack＆Lindquist，2019），他们得出结论，婴儿可以感知到面部的价态，但认为证据远不能清晰地表明婴儿能够感知并理解离散的情绪。Ruba和Repacholi概述了情绪感知和理解的新发展轨迹，其中早期情绪概念学习可能与语言无关。在这篇评论中，我们认为语言可能甚至在儿童产生情感标签的能力之前就已经在情感概念的获取中发挥作用。我们期待着针对这一假设的未来研究。