Children Facial Expression Production: Influence of Age, Gender, Emotion Subtype, Elicitation Condition and Culture

Children's multimodal language development from an interactional, usage-based, and cognitive perspective

Through daily exposure to the surrounding input structured in conversations, children's language gradually develops into rich linguistic constructions that contain multiple cross-modal elements subtly used together for rich communicative functions. Children demonstrate their skills to resort to multiple semiotic resources in their daily interactions and expertly use them according to their expressive needs and communicative intents. Usage-based (Tomasello, 2003) and cognitive linguistics (Langacker, 1988) as well as construction grammar (Goldberg, 2006) have enriched our comprehension of the processes at work. Those approaches need to be combined to gesture studies (Kendon, 1988; McNeill, 1992) and multimodal approaches (Andren, 2010; Morgenstern, 2014) to fully capture the orchestration of the semiotic resources at play (Cienki, 2012; Müller, 2009). But child language development cannot be understood outside its interactional, dialogic context (Bakhtin, 1981) and without taking into account the role of expert languagers (Vygotsky, 1934) in routines or formats (Bruner, 1975). The first section thus extensively focuses on a productive combination of theoretical approaches and methods, which have been essential to understand child language development, but analyzing child language is also necessary in turn to ground socio-cognitive and interactional approaches to language. The salient features of the variably multimodal child's development are presented in the second section. The third section illustrates longitudinal pathways into multimodal languaging thanks to detailed analyses of adult-child interactive sequences. This article is categorized under: Cognitive Biology > Cognitive Development Computer Science and Robotics > Natural Language Processing Linguistics > Language Acquisition Linguistics > Cognitive Linguistics.

Head Movement Patterns during Face-to-Face Conversations Vary with Age

Advances in computational behavior analysis have the potential to increase our understanding of behavioral patterns and developmental trajectories in neurotypical individuals, as well as in individuals with mental health conditions marked by motor, social, and emotional difficulties. This study focuses on investigating how head movement patterns during face-to-face conversations vary with age from childhood through adulthood. We rely on computer vision techniques due to their suitability for analysis of social behaviors in naturalistic settings, since video data capture can be unobtrusively embedded within conversations between two social partners. The methods in this work include unsupervised learning for movement pattern clustering, and supervised classification and regression as a function of age. The results demonstrate that 3-minute video recordings of head movements during conversations show patterns that distinguish between participants that are younger vs. older than 12 years with 78% accuracy. Additionally, we extract relevant patterns of head movement upon which the age distinction was determined by our models.

The COVID-19 pandemic, mask-wearing, and emotion recognition during late-childhood

Face masks are an effective and important tool to prevent the spread of COVID-19, including among children. However, occluding parts of the face can impact emotion recognition, which is fundamental to effective social interactions. Social distancing, stress, and changes to routines because of the pandemic have also altered the social landscape of children, with implications for social development. To better understand how social input and context impact emotion recognition, the current study investigated emotion recognition in children (7-12 years old, N = 131) using images of both masked and unmasked emotional faces. We also assessed a subsample of participants ("pre-pandemic subsample," n = 35) who had completed the same emotion recognition task with unmasked faces before and during the pandemic. Masking of faces was related to worse emotion recognition, with more pronounced effects for happy, sad, and fearful faces than angry and neutral faces. Masking was more strongly related to emotion recognition among children whose families reported greater social disruption in response to the pandemic. Finally, in the pre-pandemic subsample, emotion recognition of sad faces was lower during versus before the pandemic relative to other emotions. Together, findings show that occluding face parts and the broader social context (i.e., global pandemic) both impact emotion-relevant judgments in school-aged children.

Emotion production of facial expressions: A comparison of deaf and hearing children

The production of facial expressions is an important skill that allows children to share and adapt emotions during social interactions. While deaf children are reported to show delays in their social and emotion understanding, the way in which they produce facial expressions of emotions has been relatively unexplored. The present study investigated the production of facial expressions of emotions by young congenitally deaf children. Six facial expressions of emotions produced by 5 congenitally deaf children and 5 hearing children (control group) were filmed across three tasks: 1) voluntarily posed expression of emotion 2) responding to social stories 3) intentionally mimicking expressions of emotion. The recorded videos were analysed using a software based of the Facial Action Coding System (FACS), and then judged by adult raters using two different scales: according to the emotion elicited (i.e. accuracy) and the intensity of the emotion produced. The results of both measurement scales showed that all children (deaf and hearing) were able to produce socially recognisable prototypical configuration of facial expressions. However, the deaf children were rated by adults as expressing their emotions with greater intensity compared to the hearing children. The results suggest deaf children may show more exaggerated facial expressions of emotion, possibly to avoid any ambiguity in communication.

Earlier than previously thought: Yawn contagion in preschool children

Yawning is a primitive and stereotyped motor action involving orofacial, laryngeal, pharyngeal, thoracic and abdominal muscles. Contagious yawning, an involuntarily action induced by viewing or listening to others' yawns, has been demonstrated in human and several non-human species. Previous studies with humans showed that infants and preschool children, socially separated during video experiments, were not infected by others' yawns. Here, we tested the occurrence of yawn contagion in 129 preschool children (ranging from 2.5 to 5.5 years) belonging to five different classes by video recording them in their classrooms during the ordinary school activities. As it occurs in adult humans, children of all ages were infected by others' yawns within the 2 min after the perception of the stimulus. The yawn contagion occurred earlier than previously thought. For children, it appears that the natural social setting is more conducive to yawn contagion than the inherently artificial experimental approach. Moreover, children's gender did not affect the level of contagious yawning. The neural, emotional and behavioural traits of preschool children are probably not sufficiently mature to express variability between boys and girls; nevertheless, children appeared to be already well equipped with the 'neural toolkit' necessary for expressing yawn contagion.

The Qingdao Preschooler Facial Expression Set: Acquisition and Validation of Chinese Children's Facial Emotion Stimuli

Traditional research on emotion-face processing has primarily focused on the expression of basic emotions using adult emotional face stimuli. Stimulus sets featuring child faces or emotions other than basic emotions are rare. The current study describes the acquisition and evaluation of the Qingdao Preschooler Facial Expression (QPFE) set, a facial stimulus set with images featuring 54 Chinese preschoolers' emotion expressions. The set includes 712 standardized color photographs of six basic emotions (joy, fear, anger, sadness, surprise, and disgust), five discrete positive emotions (interest, contentment, relief, pride, and amusement), and a neutral expression. The validity of the pictures was examined based on 43 adult raters' online evaluation, including agreement between designated emotions and raters' labels, as well as intensity and representativeness scores. Overall, these data should contribute to the developmental and cross-cultural research on children's emotion expressions and provide insights for future research on positive emotions.

A preliminary evaluation of still face images by deep learning: A potential screening test for childhood developmental disabilities

Most developmental disorders are defined by their clinical symptoms and many disorders share common features. The main objective of this research is to evaluate still facial images as a potential screening test for childhood developmental disabilities, which is free of any biases of subjective judgments of human observers. Via supervised machine learning, a classifier of convolution neural network (CNN) was built by using 908 facial images, half of those were photos of children labeled with "autism", which may include some developmental disorders with autism-like features. Then face images were generated for two categories of photos. Above all, the most important discovery of this research is that face images labeled "autism" and normal controls populate two quite distinctive manifolds. Different pattern was found to be distributed in the eyes and mouth in the generated photos for two categories of faces by deep learning. It is showed that supervised machine learning can obtain facial features, which could possibly be applicable to improve early screening for childhood developmental disabilities by facial expression. A simple computer-based screening test of still face images may prove to be a useful adjunct in many clinical settings.

Equivocal expression of emotions in children with Prader-Willi syndrome: what are the consequences for emotional abilities and social adjustment?

Background

People with Prader-Willi Syndrome (PWS) experience great difficulties in social adaptation that could be explained by disturbances in emotional competencies. However, current knowledge about the emotional functioning of people with PWS is incomplete. In particular, despite being the foundation of social adaptation, their emotional expression abilities have never been investigated. In addition, motor and cognitive difficulties - characteristic of PWS - could further impair these abilities.

Method

To explore the expression abilities of children with PWS, twenty-five children with PWS aged 5 to 10 years were assessed for 1) their emotional facial reactions to a funny video-clip and 2) their ability to produce on demand the facial and bodily expressions of joy, anger, fear and sadness. Their productions were compared to those of two groups of children with typical development, matched to PWS children by chronological age and by developmental age. The analyses focused on the proportion of expressive patterns relating to the target emotion and to untargeted emotions in the children’s productions.

Results

The results showed that the facial and bodily emotional expressions of children with PWS were particularly difficult to interpret, involving a pronounced mixture of different emotional patterns. In addition, it was observed that the emotions produced on demand by PWS children were particularly poor and equivocal.

Conclusions

As far as we know, this study is the first to highlight the existence of particularities in the expression of emotions in PWS children. These results shed new light on emotional dysfunction in PWS and consequently on the adaptive abilities of those affected in daily life.

Children with autism spectrum disorder produce more ambiguous and less socially meaningful facial expressions: an experimental study using random forest classifiers

Background

Computer vision combined with human annotation could offer a novel method for exploring facial expression (FE) dynamics in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD).

Methods

We recruited 157 children with typical development (TD) and 36 children with ASD in Paris and Nice to perform two experimental tasks to produce FEs with emotional valence. FEs were explored by judging ratings and by random forest (RF) classifiers. To do so, we located a set of 49 facial landmarks in the task videos, we generated a set of geometric and appearance features and we used RF classifiers to explore how children with ASD differed from TD children when producing FEs.

Results

Using multivariate models including other factors known to predict FEs (age, gender, intellectual quotient, emotion subtype, cultural background), ratings from expert raters showed that children with ASD had more difficulty producing FEs than TD children. In addition, when we explored how RF classifiers performed, we found that classification tasks, except for those for sadness, were highly accurate and that RF classifiers needed more facial landmarks to achieve the best classification for children with ASD. Confusion matrices showed that when RF classifiers were tested in children with ASD, anger was often confounded with happiness.

Limitations

The sample size of the group of children with ASD was lower than that of the group of TD children. By using several control calculations, we tried to compensate for this limitation.

Conclusion

Children with ASD have more difficulty producing socially meaningful FEs. The computer vision methods we used to explore FE dynamics also highlight that the production of FEs in children with ASD carries more ambiguity.

Social cognition

Social cognition refers to a complex set of mental abilities underlying social stimulus perception, processing, interpretation, and response. Together, these abilities support the development of adequate social competence and adaptation. Social cognition has a protracted development through infancy to adulthood. Given the preponderance of social dysfunctions across neurologic conditions, social cognition is now recognized as a core domain of functioning that warrants clinical attention. This chapter provides an overview of the construct of social cognition, defines some of the most clinically significant sociocognitive abilities (face processing, facial expression processing, joint attention, theory of mind, empathy, and moral processing), and introduces the neural networks and frameworks associated with these abilities. Broad principles for understanding the development of social cognition are presented, and a summary of normative developmental milestones of clinically relevant sociocognitive abilities is proposed. General guidelines for sound social cognition assessment in children and adolescents are summarized.