When a seven-year-old reaches for red paint to show anger, the color wheel is not proving a hidden neural pathway, but turning the expanding language of emotion into something the child can see

When a seven-year-old reaches for red paint to show anger, the color wheel is not proving a hidden neural pathway, but turning the expanding language of emotion into something the child can see

By age seven, a child can understand far more feeling words than most adults use with them in a normal day. Not just happy, sad, mad and scared. By the early school years, the list has begun to fill with annoyed, ashamed, proud, nervous, lonely, embarrassed, jealous, disappointed, relieved, worried, guilty and bored. The brain is not discovering those words in a dictionary. It is building them out of faces, voices, stories, corrections, family r…