Le développement de la discrimination des expressions faciales émotionnelles chez les nourrissons dans la première année

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.

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.