Facial Expressions of Emotions: Recognition Accuracy and Affective Reactions During Late Childhood

Abstract

The present study examined the development of recognition ability and affective reactions to emotional facial expressions in a large sample of school-aged children (n = 504, ages 8-11 years of age). Specifically, the study aimed to investigate if changes in the emotion recognition ability and the affective reactions associated with the viewing of facial expressions occur during late childhood. Moreover, because small but robust gender differences during late-childhood have been proposed, the effects of gender on the development of emotion recognition and affective responses were examined. The results showed an overall increase in emotional face recognition ability from 8 to 11 years of age, particularly for neutral and sad expressions. However, the increase in sadness recognition was primarily due to the development of this recognition in boys. Moreover, our results indicate different developmental trends in males and females regarding the recognition of disgust. Last, developmental changes in affective reactions to emotional facial expressions were found. Whereas recognition ability increased over the developmental time period studied, affective reactions elicited by facial expressions were characterized by a decrease in arousal over the course of late childhood.

Age, gender, and puberty influence the development of facial emotion recognition

“…It would seem that the young children possessed adult-levels of sensitivity for detecting happiness and fear in faces. The stability of happiness recognition across this age range, and the fact that we are sensitive to this emotion from a young age is consistent with the findings of Mancini et al (2013).…”

“…One study, for example, found that females had a higher rate of correct classification of facial expressions, with males being more likely to have difficulty distinguishing one emotion from another (Thayer and Johnsen, 2000). This finding holds both for basic emotional expressions (Hall, 1978; McClure, 2000; Montagne et al, 2005; Biele and Grabowska, 2006; Mancini et al, 2013) and for more complex emotional and mental states (Baron-Cohen et al, 1997; Alaerts et al, 2011). Furthermore, males and females have been reported to show distinctive patterns of activation in neural regions involved in the processing of facial expressions of emotion including the amygdala and prefrontal cortex (Killgore et al, 2001), suggesting the possibility of different underlying mechanisms for processing them.…”

“…As a review by Herba and Phillips (2004) pointed out, no studies to date have examined the developmental trajectory of emotion recognition development throughout childhood and adolescence. Although there now exist a handful of reports focusing on this age range, the methodologies employed differ to a straightforward emotion recognition labeling paradigm (Thomas et al, 2007; Rodger et al, 2015) and the majority of studies focus their attention on the early childhood period, with few even considering 8–11 year olds (Gao and Maurer, 2010; Mancini et al, 2013 being notable exceptions).…”

“…A more recent study (Mancini et al, 2013) included a paradigm that called upon participants (aged between 8 and 11 years) to choose between the six basic emotions, together with neutral, for each face shown. Recognition accuracy increased during this period of mid-childhood, except (as found by Gao and Maurer, 2010) for happy faces.…”

Affective norms for 720 French words rated by children and adolescents (FANchild)

“…For instance, recent studies have focused on the cost effects associated with processing emotional distractors in children and adolescents (Cohen-Gilbert & Thomas, 2013;Heim, Ihssen, Hasselhorn, & Keil, 2013), emotional reactions to facial emotional expression during childhood (Mancini, Agnoli, Baldaro, Ricci Bitti, & Surcinelli, 2013), affective reactions in anxious children (Kotta & Szamosközi, 2012), attentional or memory bias for emotional information in both child and adolescent emotionally disordered samples , false memory (Brainerd, Holliday, Reyna, Yang, & Toglia, 2010;Howe, Candel, Otgaar, Malone, & Wimmer, 2010), and the influence of emotional valence on children's recall (Syssau & Monnier, 2012;Van Bergen, Wall, & Salmon, 2015). Despite the increasing interest in emotional word processing within a developmental perspective, few norms providing children's or adolescents' emotional ratings have been published yet (Syssau & Monnier, 2009, in French;Vasa, Carlino, London, & Min, 2006, in English;Ho et al, 2015, in Chinese).…”