Utterance Emotion Dynamics in Children's Poems: Emotional Changes Across
  Age
Daniela Teodorescu Alona Fyshe Saif M. Mohammad
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.