Impact of familiarity upon children's developing facial expression recognition

Ostracism modulates children's recognition of emotional facial expressions

Ostracism has been shown to induce considerable physiological, behavioral and cognitive changes in adults. Previous research demonstrated its effects on children's cognitive and behavioral abilities, but less is known about its impact on their capacity to recognize subtle variations in social cues. The present study aimed at investigating whether social manipulations of inclusion and ostracism modulate emotion recognition abilities in children, and whether this modulation varies across childhood. To do so, 5- and 10-year-old children participated in a computer-based ball tossing game called Cyberball during which they were either included or ostracized. Then, they completed a facial emotion recognition task in which they were required to identify neutral facial expressions, or varying levels of intensity of angry and fearful facial expressions. Results indicated lower misidentification rates for children who were previously ostracized as compared to children who were previously included, both at 5 and 10 years of age. Moreover, when looking at children's accuracy and sensitivity to facial expressions, 5-year-olds' decoding abilities were affected by the social manipulation, while no difference between included and ostracized participants was observed for 10-year-olds. In particular, included and ostracized 10-year-old children as well as ostracized 5-year-olds showed higher accuracy and sensitivity for expressions of fear as compared to anger, while no such difference was observed for included 5-year-olds. Overall, the current study presents evidence that Cyberball-induced inclusion and ostracism modulate children's recognition of emotional faces.

Emotional face expressions recognition in childhood: developmental markers, age and sex effect

Recognizing emotional face expressions in others is a valuable non-verbal communication and particularly relevant throughout childhood given that children's language skills are not yet fully developed, but the first interactions with peers have just started. This study aims to investigate developmental markers of emotional facial expression in children and the effect of age and sex on it. A total of 90 children split into three age groups: 6-7 years old (n = 30); 8-9 years old (n = 30); 10-11 years old (n = 30) took part in the study. Participants were exposed to 38 photos in two exposure times (500 ms and 1000 ms) of children expressing happiness, sadness, anger, disgust, fear and surprise on three intensities, plus images of neutral faces. Happiness was the easiest expression to be recognized, followed by disgust and surprise. As expected, 10-11-year-old group showed the highest accuracy means, whereas 6-7-year-old group had the lowest means of accuracy. Data support the non-existence of female advantage.

Sensitivity to Emotion Intensity and Recognition of Emotion Expression in Neurotypical Children

This study assessed two components of face emotion processing: emotion recognition and sensitivity to intensity of emotion expressions and their relation in children age 4 to 12 (N = 216). Results indicated a slower development in the accurate decoding of low intensity expressions compared to high intensity. Between age 4 and 12, children discriminated high intensity expressions better than low ones. The intensity of expression had a stronger impact on overall face expression recognition. High intensity happiness was better recognized than low intensity up to age 11, while children 4 to 12 had difficulties discriminating between high and low intensity sadness. Our results suggest that sensitivity to low intensity expressions acts as a complementary mediator between age and emotion expression recognition, while this was not the case for the recognition of high intensity expressions. These results could help in the development of specific interventions for populations presenting socio-cognitive and emotion difficulties.

Emotional facial expression recognition and depression in adolescent girls: Associations with clinical features

Studies have reported that emotional facial expression recognition (EFER) may be altered in individuals with depression. This study examined EFER in adolescent girls with and without depression and further examined associations between relevant clinical features of depression and EFER. Fifty adolescent girls aged 12 to 19 years old meeting criteria for depression or subthreshold levels of symptomatology and 55 adolescent girls with no psychiatric diagnosis completed EFER tasks. Reaction time and accuracy for recognising expressions at high and low intensities, and sensitivity in recognising happiness, sadness, anger and fear were assessed. Data were analysed using linear mixed models. Adolescents with depression were marginally faster than those in the comparison group to recognize sadness, although this trend disappeared once covarying for age and antidepressant use. Amongst adolescents with depression, clinical features were associated with poorer EFER performance. In contrast, anxiety symptoms were linked to better accuracy and heightened sensitivity towards happiness. A better understanding of EFER in adolescent girls with and without depression, and how clinical features might be associated with altered patterns of EFER could help to explain clinical heterogeneity observed in such studies of adolescents with depression. Knowledge of socio-cognitive alterations associated with depression will help to better develop and tailor interventions.

The Role of Racial and Developmental Experience on Emotional Adaptive Coding in Autism Spectrum Disorder

Sensitivity to emotional face aids in rapid detection and evaluation of others, such that by school-age, children and youth exhibit adult-like patterns when the prolonged viewing of an emotional face distorts the perception of a subsequent face. However, the developmental considerations of this phenomenon (known as emotional adaptive coding) are unclear given ongoing maturational and experiential changes, including the influence of own-race experiences or the lack of face expertise, as is evident in autism spectrum disorder (ASD). This study addressed whether emotional adaptive coding is sensitive to factors of face perception expertise, specifically self-race and developmental experience, in adults (age 19-28 years) and youth (age 10-16 years). Emotional adaptive coding was not influenced by race expertise (i.e., other versus same race identity) in White and Asian adults. Emotional adaptation coding during childhood and adolescence is consistent with adults, though youth with ASD exhibited stronger adaptor after-effects in response to other-race faces, relative to TD youth and adults. By extending prior work to examine the integration of race and emotional adaptive coding in ASD, we discovered that the strength of response in ASD is atypical when viewing other-race faces, which clarifies the role of racial and facial experience on emotional face adaption.

Recognizing Genuine From Posed Facial Expressions: Exploring the Role of Dynamic Information and Face Familiarity

The accurate recognition of emotion is important for interpersonal interaction and when navigating our social world. However, not all facial displays reflect the emotional experience currently being felt by the expresser. Indeed, faces express both genuine and posed displays of emotion. In this article, we summarize the importance of motion for the recognition of face identity before critically outlining the role of dynamic information in determining facial expressions and distinguishing between genuine and posed expressions of emotion. We propose that both dynamic information and face familiarity may modulate our ability to determine whether an expression is genuine or not. Finally, we consider the shared role for dynamic information across different face recognition tasks and the wider impact of face familiarity on determining genuine from posed expressions during real-world interactions.

I know that voice! Mothers' voices influence children's perceptions of emotional intensity

The ability to interpret others' emotions is a critical skill for children's socioemotional functioning. Although research has emphasized facial emotion expressions, children are also constantly required to interpret vocal emotion expressed at or around them by individuals who are both familiar and unfamiliar to them. The current study examined how speaker familiarity, specific emotions, and the acoustic properties that comprise affective prosody influenced children's interpretations of emotional intensity. Participants were 51 7- and 8-year-olds presented with speech stimuli spoken in happy, angry, sad, and nonemotional prosodies by both each child's mother and another child's mother unfamiliar to the target child. Analyses indicated that children rated their own mothers as more intensely emotional compared with the unfamiliar mothers and that this effect was specific to angry and happy prosodies. Furthermore, the acoustic properties predicted children's emotional intensity ratings in different patterns for each emotion. The results are discussed in terms of the significance of the mother's voice in children's development of emotional understanding.

The Nature of Facial Emotion Recognition Impairments in Children on the Autism Spectrum

This study examined socio-emotional skills, utilizing a facial emotion recognition (FER) task featuring unfamiliar and familiar faces, in children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) compared to typically developing (TD) children. Results showed that the TD children were more proficient on the FER overall whereas ASD children recognized familiar expressions more precisely than unfamiliar ones. Further, ASD children did not differ from TD children in recognizing happy expressions but ASD children were less skilled with recognizing negative expressions. Findings suggest that ASD children possess more adept FER abilities than previously thought especially for important social others. Ultimately, a task featuring an array of positive and negative familiar and unfamiliar expressions may provide a more comprehensive assessment of socio-emotional abilities in ASD children.

Recognition of Facial Emotional Expressions Among Italian Pre-adolescents, and Their Affective Reactions

The recognition of emotional facial expressions is a central aspect for an effective interpersonal communication. This study aims to investigate whether changes occur in emotion recognition ability and in the affective reactions (self-assessed by participants through valence and arousal ratings) associated with the viewing of basic facial expressions during preadolescence (n = 396, 206 girls, aged 11-14 years, Mage = 12.73, DS = 0.91). Our results confirmed that happiness is the best recognized emotion during preadolescence. However, a significant decrease in recognition accuracy across age emerged for fear expressions. Moreover, participants' affective reactions elicited by the vision of happy facial expressions resulted to be the most pleasant and arousing compared to the other emotional expressions. On the contrary, the viewing of sadness was associated with the most negative affective reactions. Our results also revealed a developmental change in participants' affective reactions to the stimuli. Implications are discussed by taking into account the role of emotion recognition as one of the main factors involved in emotional development.

Emotion Recognition in Children With Down Syndrome: Influence of Emotion Label and Expression Intensity

Some children with Down syndrome may experience difficulties in recognizing facial emotions, particularly fear, but it is not clear why, nor how such skills can best be facilitated. Using a photo-matching task, emotion recognition was tested in children with Down syndrome, children with nonspecific intellectual disability and cognitively matched, typically developing children (all groups N = 21) under four conditions: veridical vs. exaggerated emotions and emotion-labelling vs. generic task instructions. In all groups, exaggerating emotions facilitated recognition accuracy and speed, with emotion labelling facilitating recognition accuracy. Overall accuracy and speed did not differ in the children with Down syndrome, although recognition of fear was poorer than in the typically developing children and unrelated to emotion label use. Implications for interventions are considered.

Positively Biased Processing of Mother's Emotions Predicts Children's Social and Emotional Functioning

Risk for internalizing problems and social skills deficits likely emerges in early childhood when emotion processing and social competencies are developing. Positively biased processing of social information is typical during early childhood and may be protective against poorer psychosocial outcomes. We tested the hypothesis that young children with relatively less positively biased attention to, interpretations of, and attributions for their mother's emotions would exhibit poorer prosocial skills and more internalizing problems. A sample of 4- to 6-year-old children (N=82) observed their mothers express happiness, sadness and anger during a simulated emotional phone conversation. Children's attention to their mother when she expressed each emotion was rated from video. Immediately following the phone conversation, children were asked questions about the conversation to assess their interpretations of the intensity of mother's emotions and misattributions of personal responsibility for her emotions. Children's prosocial skills and internalizing problems were assessed using mother-report rating scales. Interpretations of mother's positive emotions as relatively less intense than her negative emotions, misattributions of personal responsibility for her negative emotions, and lack of misattributions of personal responsibility for her positive emotions were associated with poorer prosocial skills. Children who attended relatively less to mother's positive than her negative emotions had higher levels of internalizing problems. These findings suggest that children's attention to, interpretations of, and attributions for their mother's emotions may be important targets of early interventions for preventing prosocial skills deficits and internalizing problems.

The integration of visual context information in facial emotion recognition in 5- to 15-year-olds

The current study investigated the role of congruent visual context information in the recognition of facial emotional expression in 190 participants from 5 to 15years of age. Children performed a matching task that presented pictures with different facial emotional expressions (anger, disgust, happiness, fear, and sadness) in two conditions: with and without a visual context. The results showed that emotions presented with visual context information were recognized more accurately than those presented in the absence of visual context. The context effect remained steady with age but varied according to the emotion presented and the gender of participants. The findings demonstrated for the first time that children from the age of 5years are able to integrate facial expression and visual context information, and this integration improves facial emotion recognition.

No Own-Age Advantage in Children's Recognition of Emotion on Prototypical Faces of Different Ages

We test whether there is an own-age advantage in emotion recognition using prototypical younger child, older child and adult faces displaying emotional expressions. Prototypes were created by averaging photographs of individuals from 6 different age and sex categories (male 5-8 years, male 9-12 years, female 5-8 years, female 9-12 years, adult male and adult female), each posing 6 basic emotional expressions. In the study 5-8 year old children (n = 33), 9-13 year old children (n = 70) and adults (n = 92) labelled these expression prototypes in a 6-alternative forced-choice task. There was no evidence that children or adults recognised expressions better on faces from their own age group. Instead, child facial expression prototypes were recognised as accurately as adult expression prototypes by all age groups. This suggests there is no substantial own-age advantage in children's emotion recognition.

Neural mechanism of facial expression perception in intellectually gifted adolescents

The current study investigated the relationship between general intelligence and the three stages of facial expression processing. Two groups of adolescents with different levels of general intelligence were required to identify three types of facial expressions (happy, sad, and neutral faces), which were presented with either inverted or upright orientation. Participants' response times and accuracy were measured and event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded to evaluate neural dynamic processes. The behavioral results showed that high IQ adolescents exhibited shorter response times than average IQ adolescents during the facial expression identification task. The electrophysiological responses showed that no significant IQ-related differences were found for P1 responses during the early visual processing stage. During the middle processing stage, high IQ adolescents had faster structural encoding of inverted faces (shorter N170 latencies) compared to their average IQ peers, and they also showed better structural encoding of sad faces, with larger vertex positive potential (VPP) amplitudes than for neutral faces. During the late processing stage, adolescents with high IQ showed better attentional modulation, with larger late positive potential (LPP) amplitudes compared to adolescents with average IQ. The current study revealed that adolescents with different intellectual levels used different neural dynamic processes during these three stages in the processing of facial expressions.

A new approach to measuring individual differences in sensitivity to facial expressions: influence of temperamental shyness and sociability

To examine individual differences in adults' sensitivity to facial expressions, we used a novel method that has proved revealing in studies of developmental change. Using static faces morphed to show different intensities of facial expressions, we calculated two measures: (1) the threshold to detect that a low intensity facial expression is different from neutral, and (2) accuracy in recognizing the specific facial expression in faces above the detection threshold. We conducted two experiments with young adult females varying in reported temperamental shyness and sociability - the former trait is known to influence the recognition of facial expressions during childhood. In both experiments, the measures had good split half reliability. Because shyness was significantly negatively correlated with sociability, we used partial correlations to examine the relation of each to sensitivity to facial expressions. Sociability was negatively related to threshold to detect fear (Experiment 1) and to misidentify fear as another expression or happy expressions as fear (Experiment 2). Both patterns are consistent with hypervigilance by less sociable individuals. Shyness was positively related to misidentification of fear as another emotion (Experiment 2), a pattern consistent with a history of avoidance. We discuss the advantages and limitations of this new approach for studying individual differences in sensitivity to facial expressions.

Sex differences in the ability to recognise non-verbal displays of emotion: a meta-analysis

The present study aimed to quantify the magnitude of sex differences in humans' ability to accurately recognise non-verbal emotional displays. Studies of relevance were those that required explicit labelling of discrete emotions presented in the visual and/or auditory modality. A final set of 551 effect sizes from 215 samples was included in a multilevel meta-analysis. The results showed a small overall advantage in favour of females on emotion recognition tasks (d=0.19). However, the magnitude of that sex difference was moderated by several factors, namely specific emotion, emotion type (negative, positive), sex of the actor, sensory modality (visual, audio, audio-visual) and age of the participants. Method of presentation (computer, slides, print, etc.), type of measurement (response time, accuracy) and year of publication did not significantly contribute to variance in effect sizes. These findings are discussed in the context of social and biological explanations of sex differences in emotion recognition.

Familiarity and face emotion recognition in patients with schizophrenia

OBJECTIVE

To assess the emotion recognition in familiar and unknown faces in a sample of schizophrenic patients and healthy controls.

METHODS

Face emotion recognition of 18 outpatients diagnosed with schizophrenia (DSM-IVTR) and 18 healthy volunteers was assessed with two Emotion Recognition Tasks using familiar faces and unknown faces. Each subject was accompanied by 4 familiar people (parents, siblings or friends), which were photographed by expressing the 6 Ekman's basic emotions. Face emotion recognition in familiar faces was assessed with this ad hoc instrument. In each case, the patient scored (from 1 to 10) the subjective familiarity and affective valence corresponding to each person.

RESULTS

Patients with schizophrenia not only showed a deficit in the recognition of emotions on unknown faces (p=.01), but they also showed an even more pronounced deficit on familiar faces (p=.001). Controls had a similar success rate in the unknown faces task (mean: 18 +/- 2.2) and the familiar face task (mean: 17.4 +/- 3). However, patients had a significantly lower score in the familiar faces task (mean: 13.2 +/- 3.8) than in the unknown faces task (mean: 16 +/- 2.4; p<.05). In both tests, the highest number of errors was with emotions of anger and fear. Subjectively, the patient group showed a lower level of familiarity and emotional valence to their respective relatives (p<.01).

CONCLUSIONS

The sense of familiarity may be a factor involved in the face emotion recognition and it may be disturbed in schizophrenia.

Altered representation of facial expressions after early visual deprivation

We investigated the effects of early visual deprivation on the underlying representation of the six basic emotions. Using multi-dimensional scaling (MDS), we compared the similarity judgments of adults who had missed early visual input because of bilateral congenital cataracts to control adults with normal vision. Participants made similarity judgments of the six basic emotional expressions, plus neutral, at three different intensities. Consistent with previous studies, the similarity judgments of typical adults could be modeled with four underlying dimensions, which can be interpreted as representing pleasure, arousal, potency and intensity of expressions. As a group, cataract-reversal patients showed a systematic structure with dimensions representing pleasure, potency, and intensity. However, an arousal dimension was not obvious in the patient group's judgments. Hierarchical clustering analysis revealed a pattern in patients seen in typical 7-year-olds but not typical 14-year-olds or adults. There was also more variability among the patients than among the controls, as evidenced by higher stress values for the MDS fit to the patients' data and more dispersed weightings on the four dimensions. The findings suggest an important role for early visual experience in shaping the later development of the representations of emotions. Since the normal underlying structure for emotion emerges postnatally and continues to be refined until late childhood, the altered representation of emotion in adult patients suggests a sleeper effect.

Preschoolers' recognition of emotional expressions: relationships with other neurocognitive capacities

We cross-sectionally examined the development of the ability to recognize facial expressions of emotions in preschool-aged children and the relationship between this ability and other neurocognitive capacities, that is, attention/executive functions, language, memory/learning, sensorimotor functions, theory of mind, and visuospatial processing. Children aged 3 to 6 years with no significant developmental deficits (N = 370) were assessed with a nonverbal matching task of emotion recognition ability: The Affect Recognition subtest from the NEPSY-II. The relationship between emotion recognition ability and other neurocognitive capacities was analyzed using correlation, regression, and commonality analyses. The results showed that (a) emotion recognition ability improved with age-this development decelerating mildly between ages 5 and 6-(b) emotion recognition ability correlated with all other neurocognitive capacities, and (c) language, attention/executive functions, and theory of mind were significant predictors of emotion recognition ability in the regression analysis. As revealed by the commonality analysis, and in contrast to most previous studies, language was the most important predictor of nonverbal emotion recognition ability. These results suggest that nonverbal emotion matching is an early maturing skill that develops in relation to other neurocognitive capacities, especially linguistic ability.

I feel your fear: shared touch between faces facilitates recognition of fearful facial expressions

Embodied simulation accounts of emotion recognition claim that we vicariously activate somatosensory representations to simulate, and eventually understand, how others feel. Interestingly, mirror-touch synesthetes, who experience touch when observing others being touched, show both enhanced somatosensory simulation and superior recognition of emotional facial expressions. We employed synchronous visuotactile stimulation to experimentally induce a similar experience of "mirror touch" in nonsynesthetic participants. Seeing someone else's face being touched at the same time as one's own face results in the "enfacement illusion," which has been previously shown to blur self-other boundaries. We demonstrate that the enfacement illusion also facilitates emotion recognition, and, importantly, this facilitatory effect is specific to fearful facial expressions. Shared synchronous multisensory experiences may experimentally facilitate somatosensory simulation mechanisms involved in the recognition of fearful emotional expressions.

Geschlechts- und Altersunterschiede in der Emotionserkennung von Kindern und Jugendlichen

In dieser Arbeit werden zwei Studien präsentiert, welche Alters- und Geschlechtsunterschiede beim Erkennen von Emotionen im Gesichtsausdruck von Kindern und Jugendlichen untersuchten. Dabei kam eine neu entwickelte Bilderserie zum Einsatz. Die Bilder zeichnen sich dadurch aus, dass die mimischen Affektausdrücke in authentischen, interaktiven Situationen gefilmt wurden und die Auswahl der Einzelbilder auf der Basis objektiver Kodierungen mit den Facial Action Coding System (FACS) getroffen wurde. In der ersten Studie schätzten 275 Kinder und Jugendliche im Alter von 8 bis 14 Jahren (M = 10.46, SD = 1.45) 24 Bilder ein, auf welchen die Basisemotionen Freude, Ärger, Trauer, Überraschung, Angst und Ekel in jeweils vier Varianten abgebildet waren. 55.4 % der Bilder wurden dabei richtig erkannt, wobei Mädchen signifikant bessere Leistungen zeigten als Jungen. Am besten erkannt wurde Freude vor Ekel, gefolgt von Überraschung, Trauer, Ärger und Angst. Altersunterschiede waren nicht feststellbar. Die zweite Studie untersuchte die Emotionserkennungsfähigkeit bei Kindergartenkindern. Dazu wurden 62 Kindern zwischen 3 und 6 Jahren (M = 4.84, SD = 0.93) jeweils zwei Bilder pro Basisemotion vorgelegt. Die Erkennungsleistung lag hier bei 41.4 %, wobei Freude, wie auch bereits in der ersten Studie, am besten erkannt wurde, gefolgt von Trauer, Überraschung und Ärger sowie von Ekel und Angst. In Studie 2 zeigten sich Altersunterschiede dahingehend, dass ältere Kinder (5 – 6 Jahre) Emotionen insgesamt besser erkannten als die jüngeren Kinder (3 – 4 Jahre), insbesondere Überraschung und Trauer. Geschlechtsunterschiede wurden keine gefunden.

Preschooler’s faces in spontaneous emotional contexts—how well do they match adult facial expression prototypes?

Prototypical facial expressions of emotion, also known as universal facial expressions, are the underpinnings of most research concerning recognition of emotions in both adults and children. Data on natural occurrences of these prototypes in natural emotional contexts are rare and difficult to obtain in adults. By recording naturalistic observations targeted at emotional contexts in day-to-day kindergarten activities, we investigated the spontaneous facial behavior of 3-year-old children in order to explore associations between context and facial activity and verify the degree of matching between the well-known adult prototypes and facial configurations actually produced by children. When taken individually, most facial actions matched those that comprise the respective emotion prototypical face, but full facial configurations with all characteristic facial actions were scarce but for joy.

Facial emotion and identity processing development in 5- to 15-year-old children

Most developmental studies of emotional face processing to date have focused on infants and very young children. Additionally, studies that examine emotional face processing in older children do not distinguish development in emotion and identity face processing from more generic age-related cognitive improvement. In this study, we developed a paradigm that measures processing of facial expression in comparison to facial identity and complex visual stimuli. The three matching tasks were developed (i.e., facial emotion matching, facial identity matching, and butterfly wing matching) to include stimuli of similar level of discriminability and to be equated for task difficulty in earlier samples of young adults. Ninety-two children aged 5–15 years and a new group of 24 young adults completed these three matching tasks. Young children were highly adept at the butterfly wing task relative to their performance on both face-related tasks. More importantly, in older children, development of facial emotion discrimination ability lagged behind that of facial identity discrimination.

Emotion identification in girls at high risk for depression

BACKGROUND

Children of depressed mothers are themselves at elevated risk for developing a depressive disorder. We have little understanding, however, of the specific factors that contribute to this increased risk. This study investigated whether never-disordered daughters whose mothers have experienced recurrent episodes of depression during their daughters' lifetime differ from never-disordered daughters of never-disordered mothers in their processing of facial expressions of emotion.

METHOD

Following a negative mood induction, daughters completed an emotion identification task in which they watched faces slowly change from a neutral to a full-intensity happy, sad, or angry expression. We assessed both the intensity that was required to accurately identify the emotion being expressed and errors in emotion identification.

RESULTS

Daughters of depressed mothers required greater intensity than did daughters of control mothers to accurately identify sad facial expressions; they also made significantly more errors identifying angry expressions.

CONCLUSION

Cognitive biases may increase vulnerability for the onset of disorders and should be considered in early intervention and prevention efforts.