Facial affect recognition and social anxiety in preschool children

Ale, Chelsea M.; Chorney, Daniel B.; Brice, Chad; Morris, Tracy L.

doi:10.1080/03004430903059318

Cited by 16 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 21 publications

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“…However, we did not find a significant emotion x age interaction for either response time or accuracy, which differs from previous evidence of asynchronous development across different facial expressions. For example, there is evidence that the ability to recognize more basic expressions (e.g., happy, anger) develops earlier than other more complex emotions (e.g., surprise, shame) [Ale et al, ; Broeren et al, ; De Sonneville et al, ; Durand et al, ]. Nonetheless, there is evidence that children have learned to accurately label happy and sad faces by the age of 5 or 6 and to discriminate fearful, angry, and neutral expressions by age 10 [Durand et al, ].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Age‐related changes in amygdala–frontal connectivity during emotional face processing from childhood into young adulthood

Kujawa

et al. 2016

Human Brain Mapping

114

106

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The ability to process and respond to emotional facial expressions is a critical skill for healthy social and emotional development. There has been growing interest in understanding the neural circuitry underlying development of emotional processing, with previous research implicating functional connectivity between amygdala and frontal regions. However, existing work has focused on threatening emotional faces, raising questions regarding the extent to which these developmental patterns are specific to threat or to emotional face processing more broadly. In the current study, we examined age-related changes in brain activity and amygdala functional connectivity during an fMRI emotional face matching task (including angry, fearful and happy faces) in 61 healthy subjects aged 7–25 years. We found age-related decreases in ventral medial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) activity in response to happy faces but not to angry or fearful faces, and an age-related change (shifting from positive to negative correlation) in amygdala-anterior cingulate cortex/medial prefrontal cortex (ACC/mPFC) functional connectivity to all emotional faces. Specifically, positive correlations between amygdala and ACC/mPFC in children changed to negative correlations in adults, which may suggest early emergence of bottom-up amygdala excitatory signaling to ACC/mPFC in children and later development of top-down inhibitory control of ACC/mPFC over amygdala in adults. Age-related changes in amygdala-ACC/mPFC connectivity did not vary for processing of different facial emotions, suggesting changes in amygdala-ACC/mPFC connectivity may underlie development of broad emotional processing, rather than threat-specific processing.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Age‐related changes in amygdala–frontal connectivity during emotional face processing from childhood into young adulthood

Kujawa

et al. 2016

Human Brain Mapping

114

106

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“…However, accuracy in emotion recognition may be improved when children with symptoms of social anxiety are presented with child rather than adult faces (Ale et al 2010), and both accuracy and reaction times for identifying emotional expressions have been found to improve with age (Broeren et al 2011). On the other hand, other research suggests that social anxiety may enhance children’s emotion recognition abilities, with one study showing that children who had greater social anxiety symptoms were better at emotion recognition (Ale et al 2010). Similarly, research using a sample of children with a range of anxiety disorders found that anxious children were equally able to identify emotional expressions in child faces when compared with healthy controls (McClure et al 2003).…”

Section: Emotion Recognitionmentioning

confidence: 99%

No Significant Evidence of Cognitive Biases for Emotional Stimuli in Children At-Risk of Developing Anxiety Disorders

Ewing

Dash

Thompson

et al. 2016

J Abnorm Child Psychol

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This paper explores whether the increased vulnerability of children of anxious parents to develop anxiety disorders may be partially explained by these children having increased cognitive biases towards threat compared with children of non-anxious parents. Parents completed questionnaires about their child’s anxiety symptoms. Children aged 5–9 (n = 85) participated in two cognitive bias tasks: 1) an emotion recognition task, and 2) an ambiguous situations questionnaire. For the emotion recognition task, there were no significant differences between at-risk children and children of non-anxious parents in their cognitive bias scores for reaction times or for accuracy in identifying angry or happy facial expressions. In addition, there were no significant differences between at-risk children and children of non-anxious parents in the number of threat interpretations made for the ambiguous situations questionnaire. It is possible that these cognitive biases only become present subsequent to the development of an anxiety disorder, or only in older at-risk children.

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“…The majority (69.0%) of the drop-offs observed occurred between 7:15 a.m. and 8:15 a.m., with an additional 7.1% occurring between 6:30 a.m. and 7:15 a.m. and 23.9% occurring after 8:15 a.m. Data for time of drop-off were not recorded for four participants. In a previous study, including participants from the preschool where these data were collected, participants were highly educated (79.3% held a college or graduate degree) and predominately non-Hispanic Caucasian (90%) (Ale, Chorney, Brice, & Morris, 2010). These demographics are typical for the area in which the data were collected.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 98%

A naturalistic observation of social behaviours during preschool drop-off

Grady

Ale

Morris

2012

Early Child Development and Care

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The present study utilised naturalistic observation to assess the impact of parental departure during daily drop-off at preschool on children's settling into daily preschool routines. Forty-six 3 -5-year-old children and their parents/caregivers were observed during morning drop-off at preschool. Longer latencies of parent/ caregiver leaving were associated with less child -peer engagement, solitary active play, and onlooking and were associated with more child -caregiver proximity-seeking, hugging and kissing, and picking up and holding. Mothers and other female caregivers were slightly more likely to pick up and hold their children during drop-off than fathers and other male caregivers. Findings suggest that continued parental involvement may initially hinder children's daily settling into the preschool classroom environment through facilitation of escape or avoidance. Additional research is needed to better understand individual differences that may serve as protective factors or vulnerabilities affecting children's daily adaptation to the preschool environment.

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Facial affect recognition and social anxiety in preschool children

Cited by 16 publications

References 21 publications

Age‐related changes in amygdala–frontal connectivity during emotional face processing from childhood into young adulthood

Age‐related changes in amygdala–frontal connectivity during emotional face processing from childhood into young adulthood

No Significant Evidence of Cognitive Biases for Emotional Stimuli in Children At-Risk of Developing Anxiety Disorders

A naturalistic observation of social behaviours during preschool drop-off

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