Seven- to 11-Year-Olds’ Developing Ability to Recognize Natural Facial Expressions of Basic Emotions

Abstract

(2017) Seven-to 11-year-olds' developing ability to recognize natural facial expressions of basic emotions. Perception, 46 (9 A note on versions:The version presented here may differ from the published version or from the version of record. If you wish to cite this item you are advised to consult the publisher's version. Please see the repository url above for details on accessing the published version and note that access may require a subscription.For more information, please contact eprints@nottingham.ac.uk Recognizing natural expressions 2 AbstractBeing able to recognize facial expressions of basic emotions is of great importance to social development. However, we still know surprisingly little about children's developing ability to interpret emotions that are expressed dynamically, naturally and subtly, despite real-life expressions having such appearance in the vast majority of cases. The current research employs a new technique of capturing dynamic, subtly expressed natural emotional displays (happy, sad, angry, shocked and disgusted). Children aged 7, 9 and 11 years (and adults) were systematically able to discriminate each emotional display from alternatives in a 5-way choice. Children were most accurate in identifying the expression of happiness and were also relatively accurate in identifying the expression of sadness; they were far less accurate than adults in identifying shocked and disgusted. Children who performed well academically also tended to be the most accurate in recognizing expressions and this relationship maintained independently of chronological age. Generally, the findings testify to a well-developed ability to recognize very subtle naturally occurring expressions of emotions.

Judging Personality from A Brief Sample of Behaviour: Detecting Where Others Stand on Trait Continua

“…Given that signal detection theory (SDT) allows an assessment of accuracy and sensitivity that is immune to response bias (the tendency to select one category more frequently than another; Macmillan & Creelman, ; Macmillan & Pashler, ; Stanislaw & Todorov, ), it is widely applied to measure performance across various tasks, including those that employ multi‐way forced choice procedures (Macmillan & Creelman, ; Macmillan & Pashler, ), as illustrated in the following examples: SDT has been used to examine accuracy in empathy judgments (Wu et al, ) and mental state inferences (Pillai, Sheppard, & Mitchell, ; Pillai et al, ), eyewitness's identification of suspects (Clark, ), perceptual judgments (Kang, Anthoney, & Mitchell, ), diagnostic decisions more generally (Swets, Dawes, & Monahan, ), and optimal decision making (Lynn & Barrett, ). We thus adopted SDT to compute participant accuracy (sensitivity) in detecting targets' trait levels.…”

Interpreting signals in other people's behavior to sense things about them and to infer things about their world

“…In real life, people usually have a wide range of information to draw upon in making a retrodictive inference, including the natural and spontaneous facial expression of the target along with other aspects of observable behavior coupled with contextual information. An expressive face can signal an emotional state (Zaki, Bolger, & Ochsner, , ), a state that will likely be caused by events in the world (Cassidy, Ropar, Mitchell, & Chapman, , ; Kang, Anthoney, & Mitchell, ; Pillai, Sheppard, & Mitchell, ; Pillai et al, ; Sheppard et al, ; Teoh et al, ; Valanides, Sheppard, & Mitchell, ; Wu & Mitchell, ). Hence, retrodiction as an account of mindreading assumes that a person's inner states are to some degree signaled in their behavior (e.g., see Gallagher, , for a perspective on how behavior signals inner states), implying that a person (a perceiver) who is accurate in mindreading is one who is capable of interpreting such signals.…”

“…In many cases, the target reaction will be subtle, meaning that targets look somewhat neutral. Neutral expressions may be interpreted by perceivers as negative expressions (Kang et al, ), which could result in a preponderance of “negative” responses. This bias in perceiver judgments needs to be separated from aspects of performance which speak to perceivers' competence or lack of competence (West and Kenny, — Principle 3 , measure and take into account response bias ).…”

“…Retrodictive inference enables the perceiver to guess what happened to others from their reactions (Cassidy et al, , ; Pillai et al, , ; Sheppard et al, ), to know the emotion being expressed by a third party that the target accompanies (Kang et al, ), and to infer what the target was thinking as demonstrated by accurate identification of a cue word presented to the target (Wu & Mitchell, ). In the study conducted by Kang et al (), for example, targets observed a succession of faces posing expressions displayed on a computer screen. Videos of the targets as they viewed the expressions were subsequently shown to perceivers who were tasked with inferring which emotional expression the target was viewing at any one time.…”

“…In many cases, the target reaction will be subtle, meaning that targets look somewhat neutral. Neutral expressions may be interpreted by perceivers as negative expressions (Kang et al, 2017), which could result in a preponderance of "negative" responses.…”