Emotion Recognition in Kindergarten Children

Abstract

Background/Aims: Recognition and understanding of emotions are essential skills in nonverbal communication and in everyday social functioning. These are already evident in infancy. We aimed to compare how young children recognize facial emotional expressions from static faces versus vocal emotional expressions from speech prosody. Methods: Participants were 313 kindergarten children (162 girls, mean age = 51.01, SD 9.65 months; range 36–72). The design consisted of a visual and an auditory block (with 45 randomized trials each). Children were seated in front of a 14-inch laptop monitor and received visual stimuli (photos of faces) or auditory stimuli (spoken sentences) via loudspeakers. Results: Recognizing emotions from looking at static faces was found to be easier compared to interpreting emotions transmitted by speech prosody alone. The ability to interpret emotions from both faces and speech prosody increased with age. It was easier to identify a “happy” emotion from a facial expression than an “angry” or “sad” one, whereas a “sad” emotion could be more easily recognized from speech prosody alone than facial imagery alone. Girls were significantly better than boys in identifying “sad” facial expressions. Conclusion: The results of the study are discussed in terms of educational implications for nonverbal communication.

The Role of Face Masks in the Recognition of Emotions by Preschool Children

“…Joy was more recognised and mistakenly chosen for anger or sadness, probably due to a positivity bias in children [6]. Overall, participants of our study, who had been exposed to facemasks for nearly a year, recognized emotions on pictures better than reported in previous research, even with facemasks [1,6]. This study has several limitations including the generalizability of its findings using static pictures instead of live actors, and the validity of the outcomes.…”

“…This has prompted worries about the ability of young children to recognize emotions and the possible impact on their development. Without face masks, preschoolers aged 36 to 72 months had a rate of correctly identified emotions on pictures of 11.8% to 13.1% . Recent studies using photographs with digitally added face masks showed that participants had worse emotional recognition of the images with face masks; the first of these tested preschoolers on a smartphone at home, and the second tested children aged 7 to 13 years.…”

A Recognition Method of Athletes’ Mental State in Sports Training Based on Support Vector Machine Model

“…Emotion recognition has been widely studied and applied in various fields. For example, emotion recognition is used in medical care [4][5][6], education [7][8][9], service industry [10][11][12], and other fields. For emotion recognition methods, there are mainly scale methods [13,14], machine learning [15][16][17], and deep learning algorithms [18][19][20].…”

Facial and Auditory Recognition Abilities of Implanted Primary Schoolers

“…The ability to acquire emotion recognition is a continual process that depends on the developmental phases of human beings and improves significantly with age [Covic et al, 2020]. The children were reported to be able to recognize facial emotions of happiness and surprise at 3 months [Young-Brownee and Rosenfeld, 1977], anger at 4 months [Barrera and Maurer, 1981], and fear at 7 months [Kotsoni et al, 2001] of age.…”