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SUMMARY:The Emotional Content of Children’s Writing: A Data-Driven Appro
 ach - Rainy Dong (University of Oxford)
DTSTART;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20240605T173000
DTEND;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20240605T183000
UID:https://new.talks.ox.ac.uk/talks/id/95a961b2-a53d-4623-827e-e067248918
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DESCRIPTION:Abstract: \nEmotion is closely associated with language\, but 
 we know very little about how children express emotion in their own writin
 g. We used a large-scale\, cross-sectional\, and data-driven approach to i
 nvestigate emotional expression via writing in children of different ages\
 , and whether it varies for boys and girls. We first used a lexicon-based 
 bag-of-words approach (after Hipson & Mohammad\, 2020) to identify emotion
 al content in a large corpus of stories (N>100\,000) written by 7- to 13-y
 ear-old children. Generalized Additive Models were then used to model chan
 ges in sentiment across age and gender. Two additional approaches (BERT an
 d TextBlob) validated and extended these analyses\, converging on the find
 ing that positive sentiments in children’s writing decrease with age. Th
 ese findings echo reports from previous studies showing a decrease in mood
  and an increased use of negative emotion words with age. We also found th
 at stories by girls contained more positive sentiments than stories by boy
 s. Our study shows the utility of using large-scale data-driven approaches
  to reveal the content and nature of children’s writing. Future experime
 ntal work should build on these observations to understand the likely comp
 lex relationships between written language and emotion\, and how these cha
 nge over development.\n\nTeams link: https://teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-
 join/19%3ameeting_ZTZlMmI3OTYtNTAwZS00YzZhLTg5NWMtNGRkOWI3YTZjZWJi%40threa
 d.v2/0?context=%7b%22Tid%22%3a%22cc95de1b-97f5-4f93-b4ba-fe68b852cf91%22%2
 c%22Oid%22%3a%22e44820d7-5edb-4030-9763-4c8cdc3aafd6%22%7d\n\nBio:\nMy nam
 e is Rainy Dong and I’m a third-year DPhil in Experimental Psychology\, 
 supervised by Prof Kate Nation and Prof Robert Hepach. My DPhil research i
 s on children’s emotion and language development. Emotions play a pivota
 l role in human experiences and are closely intertwined with language stru
 cture and use in both adults and children (Lindquist\, 2017). Understandin
 g emotional language\, such as the term "upset"\, is crucial for emotional
  comprehension during development (Grosse et al.\, 2021\; Nook et al.\, 20
 20). Despite the acknowledged importance of language in emotional concept 
 development\, little research has explored the link between emotions and w
 ritten language in particular. Compared to spoken language\, written langu
 age is more decontextualised and linguistically more complex (Dawson et al
 .\, 2021). Written language might be instrumental in conveying nuanced emo
 tional concepts. Hence\, my DPhil research focuses on interplay between la
 nguage and emotion and how this unfolds over development\, with a particul
 ar focus on written language. I combined both corpus analysis to look at t
 he emotional language in various children’s language corpora\; and exper
 imental approaches to look at the influence of emotional context on langua
 ge learning.\nSpeakers:\nRainy Dong (University of Oxford)
LOCATION:Wolfson College (Levett Room)\, Linton Road OX2 6UD
TZID:Europe/London
URL:https://new.talks.ox.ac.uk/talks/id/95a961b2-a53d-4623-827e-e067248918
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DESCRIPTION:Talk:The Emotional Content of Children’s Writing: A Data-Dri
 ven Approach - Rainy Dong (University of Oxford)
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