Abstract
Facial expressions of fear and disgust have repeatedly been found to be less well recognized than those of other basic emotions by children. We undertook two studies in which we investigated the recognition and visual discrimination of these expressions in school-age children. In Study 1, children (5, 6, 9, and 10 years of age) were shown pairs of facial expressions, and asked to tell which one depicted a target emotion. The results indicated that accuracy in 9- and 10-year-olds was higher than in 5- and 6-year-olds for three contrasts: disgust–anger, fear–surprise, and fear–sadness. Younger children had more difficulty recognizing disgust when it was presented along with anger, and in recognizing fear when it was presented along with surprise. In Study 2, children (5, 6, 9, and 10 years of age) were shown a target expression along with two other expressions, and were asked to point to the expression that was the most similar to the target. Contrary to our expectations, even 5- and 6-year-olds were very accurate in discriminating fear and disgust from the other emotions, suggesting that visual perception was not the main limiting factor for the recognition of these emotions in school-age children.
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Notes
The data were also submitted to arcsine transformations prior to ANOVAs in the rest of this article.
It was not possible to perform an Age x Contrast ANOVA because the variance was null for the contrast fear-anger in the older age group.
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Gagnon, M., Gosselin, P., Hudon-ven der Buhs, I. et al. Children’s Recognition and Discrimination of Fear and Disgust Facial Expressions. J Nonverbal Behav 34, 27–42 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10919-009-0076-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10919-009-0076-z