A Functionalist Perspective of Young Children’s Anger and Sadness

Functional emotion theory defines anger as appraisal that a goal is blocked and readiness to act to overcome the obstacle—to approach, and sadness as appraisal that a goal is lost and readiness to relinquish effort—to withdraw. We test relations between these emotions and actions in young children during a blocked reward task, specifically associations in (a) anger and approach toward the goal, (b) sadness and withdrawal from the goal, and (c) greater association of anger and approach with greater age. We observed 153 children (M_age = 45.03 months, range 29.7–60.3 months, 49% girls; 94.8% White; collected June 2017–December 2019) during a 6-min Locked Box task. Children were told to unlock the box to retrieve their selected toy but given the wrong key. Fluctuations in anger, sadness, approach, and withdrawal intensity were coded from video records. Results supported most hypotheses. Within-person, increased anger intensity was associated with increased approach, and increased sadness intensity was associated with increased withdrawal. Contrary to hypotheses, there was no evidence of age differences in the anger–approach association. The models also revealed presence of withdrawal-related anger, approach-related sadness, and age differences in approach- and withdrawal-related sadness. Finally, sadness enhanced approach-related anger while anger dampened withdrawal-related sadness but these effects waned as task time elapsed. This study provides evidence of the functional nature of young children’s anger and sadness and demonstrates that investigation of temporal dynamics reveals new information about how emotions contribute to behavior.