“Finding an Emotional Face” Revisited: Differences in Own-Age Bias and the Happiness Superiority Effect in Children and Young Adults

Abstract

People seem to differ in their visual search performance involving emotionally expressive faces when these expressions are seen on faces of others close to their age (peers) compared to faces of non-peers, known as the own-age bias (OAB). This study sought to compare search advantages in angry and happy faces detected on faces of adults and children on a pool of children (N = 77, mean age = 5.57) and adults (N = 68, mean age = 21.48). The goals of this study were to (1) examine the developmental trajectory of expression recognition and (2) examine the development of an OAB. Participants were asked to find a target face displaying an emotional expression among eight neutral faces. Results showed that children and adults found happy faces significantly faster than angry and fearful faces regardless of it being present on the faces of peers or non-peers. Adults responded faster to the faces of peers regardless of the expression. Furthermore, while children detected angry faces significantly faster compared to fearful ones, we found no such difference in adults. In contrast, adults detected all expressions significantly faster when they appeared on the faces of other adults compared to the faces of children. In sum, we found evidence for development in detecting facial expressions and also an age-dependent increase in OAB. We suggest that the happy face could have an advantage in visual processing due to its importance in social situations and its overall higher frequency compared to other emotional expressions. Although we only found some evidence on the OAB, using peer or non-peer faces should be a theoretical consideration of future research because the same emotion displayed on non-peers’ compared to peers’ faces may have different implications and meanings to the perceiver.

Facial Emotion Recognition Deficit in Children with Moderate/Severe Obstructive Sleep Apnea

“…As in these previous studies, group differences were also found between happy and sad conditions in the current study. Previous studies reported that PCA occurs in both healthy adults and children [ 50 , 51 , 52 ], and this finding was replicated in the present study. Positive facial expressions may have an advantage in visual processing because of the importance of positive expressions in emotion regulation and social relationship formation, and because they occur at a higher frequency than negative facial expressions.…”

Volume of the right supramarginal gyrus is associated with a maintenance of emotion recognition ability

“…neutral expression is important because it allows for a dichotomous analysis of whether a face contains emotion or not. Second, this study did not take into account the own-age bias, in which face recognition is typically superior for own-age faces compared with other-age faces [44]. In this study, all participants were shown the same photographs of young people 20-30 years of age.…”

The age bias in labeling facial expressions in children: Effects of intensity and expression

“…Interestingly, for detection speed there is no own-age bias in children, nor for happy faces in adult participants. However, this bias was observed for angry and fearful faces in adult participants [37]. Although this implies that processes underlying labeling of expressions are already affected by a bias towards specific expressions or stimulus age, it is important to realize that the biases in detection concern processing speed rather than the accuracy that was the focus of the current task, and that working memory likely plays a minimal role in labeling when stimulus and labels are presented at the same time.…”

“…Indeed, working memory for emotional faces already has a response bias to happy faces [34]. Moreover, multiple studies have shown that specific emotional faces are detected faster than others when presented amongst neutral faces, although there is a debate on whether this so-called superiority effect is mostly present for happy or angry faces [35][36][37]. Interestingly, for detection speed there is no own-age bias in children, nor for happy faces in adult participants.…”