Categorical emotion recognition from voice improves during childhood and adolescence

Abstract

Converging evidence demonstrates that emotion processing from facial expressions continues to improve throughout childhood and part of adolescence. Here we investigated whether this is also the case for emotions conveyed by non-linguistic vocal expressions, another key aspect of social interactions. We tested 225 children and adolescents (age 5–17) and 30 adults in a forced-choice labeling task using vocal bursts expressing four basic emotions (anger, fear, happiness and sadness). Mixed-model logistic regressions revealed a small but highly significant change with age, mainly driven by changes in the ability to identify anger and fear. Adult-level of performance was reached between 14 and 15 years of age. Also, across ages, female participants obtained better scores than male participants, with no significant interaction between age and sex effects. These results expand the findings showing that affective prosody understanding improves during childhood; they document, for the first time, continued improvement in vocal affect recognition from early childhood to mid- adolescence, a pivotal period for social maturation.

Age-related differences in neural activation and functional connectivity during the processing of vocal prosody in adolescence

“…around the age of 14 to 15 years (Grosbras, Ross, & Belin, 2018), the current study and previous work have noted continued improvement beyond age 15 for the recognition of vocal affect in speech (Chronaki et al, 2018;Morningstar et al, 2018a). Thus, it is possible that agerelated changes in the neural representation of these stimuli also may differ from those noted in response to speech-based vocal emotion.…”

Expanding Simulation Models of Emotional Understanding: The Case for Different Modalities, Body-State Simulation Prominence, and Developmental Trajectories

“…Emotion recognition also has a complex developmental trajectory, with studies suggesting that recognition of facial emotion is not adult-like until approximately 11 years of age (Tonks et al, 2007;Gao and Maurer, 2010;Chronaki et al, 2015), bodily emotions at approximately 8 years of age (Boone and Cunningham, 1998;Lagerlof and Djerf, 2009;Ross et al, 2012) and vocal emotion recognition ability still developing into adolescence (Chronaki et al, 2015;Grosbras et al, 2018). Might these differing trajectories be a product of differential development in simulation abilities?…”

“…However, Hatfield et al (1993) argue that contagion is a higher-level cognitive phenomenon that can involve not only the synchronizations of facial expressions, but as mentioned above, also vocalizations, postures and the movements of another person. We already know that the body (Atkinson et al, 2004;de Gelder et al, 2010;de Gelder and Van den Stock, 2011) and the voice (Belin et al, 2008;Grosbras et al, 2018) are important expressive channels for providing cues to another's emotional state, but to date these cues have been largely omitted in sensorimotor simulation models.…”

“…Furthermore, we know that the ability to recognize emotions from the face, body and voice follow different developmental trajectories throughout childhood and adolescence (De Sonneville et al, 2002;Herba et al, 2006;Wade et al, 2006;Tonks et al, 2007;Ross et al, 2012;Chronaki et al, 2015;Grosbras et al, 2018). This doesn't seem to be the case in infancy, however, with evidence indicating that emotional understanding is a unified ability that develops in concert across various modalities at the same time (Missana and Grossmann, 2015).…”

Peer Review #3 of "Early language competence, but not general cognitive ability, predicts children’s recognition of emotion from facial and vocal cues (v0.1)"

“…It provides us with information about other people's internal emotional states and helps us to interpret and predict their behaviour. Children have typically acquired the vocabulary for basic emotions by 4-6 years of age (Baron-Cohen, Golan, Wheelwright, Granader, & Hill, 2010;Ridgeway, Waters, & Kuczaj, 1985), but accuracy in identifying non-verbal emotional cues continues to improve into late adolescence (Grosbras, Ross, & Belin, 2018;Herba & Phillips, 2004;Rodger, Vizioli, Ouyang, & Caldara, 2015). Accurate emotion identification has been linked to positive outcomes later in development, including academic success (Denham et al, 2012;Izard et al, 2001), social integration (Sette, Spinrad, & Baumgartner, 2017) and good mental health (Ciarrochi, Scott, Deane, & Heaven, 2003).…”