Children's Perception of Facial Expressions

• Published in: Developmental psychology Vol. 57; no. 4; pp. 506 - 518
• Main Authors: de Bordes, Pieter F., Hasselman, Fred, Cox, Ralf F. A.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States American Psychological Association 01-04-2021
• Subjects: Age Differences; Bias; Children; Children & youth; Diversity; Elementary School Students; Elementary schools; Emotional Response; Face Perception; Facial Expressions; Female; Foreign Countries; Human; Male; Nonverbal Communication; Older children; Perception; Perceptual Development; Perceptual Learning; Psychosocial Development; Research Methodology; Signal detection; Signal Detection (Perception); Social Development; Social Learning; Netherlands; Shannon Diversity Index; signal detection theory; perceptual learning; social development; facial expressions
• ISSN: 0012-1649; 1939-0599
• DOI: 10.1037/dev0000979

This study investigated the developing ability of children to identify emotional facial expressions in terms of the contexts in which they generally occur. We presented Dutch 6- to 9-year-old primary school children (N = 164, 98 girls) prototypical contexts for different emotion categories and asked them whether different kinds of facial expressions belonged to those contexts or not, using a 2-alternative forced-choice task. Correct and incorrect responses were quantified into a single index using signal detection theory, representing children's sensitivity to perceive each facial expression as categorically different from each of the others in terms of their prototypical contexts. Results show age-related improvements in identifying facial expressions as belonging to their prototypical contexts. In addition, we found that older children not only made less misidentifications but also misidentified less kinds of facial expressions to the prototypical contexts. Furthermore, the kinds of misidentifications children made suggest that they do not identify facial expressions based on their conceptual emotional valence. Results were discussed from a perceptual learning account.