Content uploaded by Chris Boyatzis
Author content
All content in this area was uploaded by Chris Boyatzis on Aug 17, 2015
Content may be subject to copyright.
Preschool Children's Decoding of Facial Emotions
Abstract
This study examined preschool children's ability to decode facial emotions. Subjects comprised 32 preschoolers (16 3 1/2-year-olds, 16 5-year-olds), with equal numbers of boys and girls, enrolled in a preschool. Children heard a brief story describing a boy's emotion and were shown three photographs of a boy, each displaying a different emotion (one target emotion and two distractor or nontarget emotions). Children were asked to choose the one photograph that corresponded to the boy's emotion in the story. As predicted, the ability to decode facial emotions improved with age for both boys and girls. Girls were significantly better than boys at identifying emotions; in fact, 3 1/2-year-old girls were as accurate as 5-year-old boys. Age and gender effects, as well as topics for future investigation, are discussed.
... This work suggests that Negative Affectivity may be associated with individual differences in attentional patterns, however, how specific attentional patterns (e.g., fixating on the eyes versus the mouths of affective faces) shift across age is not clear. Across early childhood, there is evidence for rapid changes in emotion processing, such that children develop the ability to reliably identify affective content across this age (Boyatzis et al., 1993;Camras and Allison, 1985;Chronaki et J o u r n a l P r e -p r o o f Durand et al., 2007;Gao and Maurer, 2010). This suggests that there may be differences in attentional patterns across this period as children develop the skills to rapidly identify, and respond appropriately, to various affective circumstances. ...
... Thus, it is possible that future work examining attention to specific facial features could provide further nuance to our understanding of attentional biases in disorders associated with Negative We also found evidence for the potential coordinated development of the biobehavioral systems that give rise to emotion processing and regulation across early childhood related to Negative Affectivity. Behavioral research has found that children undergo dramatic improvements in being able to correctly identify basic emotional faces and states across the early childhood period, with more rapid development in identifying positive versus negative content (Boyatzis et al., 1993;Camras and Allison, 1985;Chronaki et al., 2015;Durand et al., 2007;Gao and Maurer, 2010). Concurrent to this development is improvements in executive functioning and emotion regulation (Hendry et al., 2016;Rothbart et al., 2011Rothbart et al., , 2007, individual differences of which are associated with temperamental Effortful Control, a broad factor that negatively covaries with Negative Affectivity (Putnam et al., 2014;Rothbart et al., 2001). ...
... These findings lend support to the notion that affective neurodevelopmental work-particularly in children-benefit from more naturalistic and complex approaches which include the social context for affective information. Given that children in early childhood are still developing their abilities to identify emotions (Boyatzis et al., 1993;Chronaki et al., 2015;Durand et al., 2007), they likely rely more heavily on social cues to contextualize emotional content than adults. This rationale is in line with the long-studied social information processing theory (Crick and Dodge, 1994;Lemerise and Arsenio, 2000). ...
High Temperamental Negative Affectivity in early childhood has been found to predict later emotion dysregulation. While much work has been conducted to separately probe bio-behavioral systems associated with Negative Affectivity, very little work has examined the relations among multiple systems across age. In this study, we use multi-modal methods to index neurobiological systems associated with Negative Affectivity in 53 4-7-year-old children. Prefrontal activation during emotion regulation was measured using functional near-infrared spectroscopy over the lateral prefrontal cortex (PFC) while children played a game designed to elicit frustration in Social (Happy and Angry faces) and Nonsocial contexts. Gaze behaviors while free-viewing Happy and Angry faces were also measured. Finally, Negative Affectivity was indexed using a score composite based on factor analysis of parent-reported temperament. Using mixed-effects linear models, we found an age-dependent association between Negative Affectivity and both PFC activation during frustration and fixation duration on the mouth area of Happy faces, such that older children high in Negative Affectivity spent less time looking at the mouths of Happy faces and had lower PFC activation in response to frustration (ps<0.034). These results provide further insight to how Negative Affectivity may be associated with changes in affective neurobiological systems across early childhood.
... In this context, other authors suggest that the reliable interpretation of facial expressions seems to be a skill that develops with experience (Herba et al., 2006;Gao and Maurer, 2009). On the other hand, certain authors have stated that positive valence emotions are recognized earlier and with greater precision than negative valence emotions (Camras and Allison, 1985;Boyatzis et al., 1993;Widen and Russell, 2013, among others;Golan et al., 2015). ...
... Although children can produce facial expressions very early in post-natal life (Oster and Ekman, 1978;Caron et al., 1982;Haviland and Lelwica, 1987), the ability to recognize the emotions of facial expressions increases with age (Gross and Ballif, 1991;Fox, 2001;Herba and Phillips, 2004;Widen and Russell, 2007;Widen, 2012). Some studies indicate that children can identify positive facial emotions earlier and with more precision than negative ones (Camras and Allison, 1985;Boyatzis et al., 1993;Mancini et al., 2013;Widen and Russell, 2013), and its precision increases between 3 and 7 years of age (Markham and Wang, 1996;Vicari et al., 2000;Durand et al., 2007). Other studies showed that there are few interesting changes in the recognition of facial emotions after the age of 7 (Gosselin et al., 1995a) or 10 (Tremblay et al., 1987). ...
... The basic items and the structure of the test were defined to produce the reagents. Research by Boyatzis et al. (1993), Thomas et al. (2007), Maurer (2009), Widen (2012), Golan et al. (2015) guided the development of the items, which were subjected to qualitative and quantitative analysis using different strategies, qualities, indicators and criteria. ...
The neurodevelopment of emotion recognition is critical to achieving an adequate Social Cognition. This ability is developed during the first years through primary social referents, and later peers are a source of training that facilitates insertion in social groups. Most of the emotion recognition tests used are based on reagents that use adult faces, which can be a problem when evaluating the ability to recognize basic emotions in children. The objective of the research was to study this ability in children, analyzing its incremental validity on the variables age, valence, gender and emotional category. The Recognition of Basic Emotions in Childhood Test (REBEC) was designed using 30 reagents based on faces of children expressing five basic emotions of different intensity (low, medium and high). The REBEC was administered to 214 children, between 6 and 12 years old. The maximum score was 30. The average (M) of correct answers was 19.86; with a standard deviation (SD) of ± 4.12. The study sample was divided into seven groups according to the level of schooling. The group of 12 years-old obtained the highest yield (M) 22.18 ± 4.12. The 6-years olds' group obtained the lowest yield (M) of 17.78 ± 4.41. The (M) of hits in girls was 20.61 ± 3.91; being of (M) 19.24 ± 4.21 for children. The Emotion Happiness was the most recognized (M) 93.8%, followed by Anger (M) 75.1%, Sadness (M) 58.6%, Disgust (M) 56.3%, and Fear (M) 47, 4%, We analyzed the level of success according to age, configuring the trajectory of Neurodevelopment for each emotion, taking incorrect categorization of emotions into account: disgust, tended to be confused with Anger or Sadness. After obtaining the normative data of the REBEC Test and observing its psychometric properties and the sensitivity for the detection of the differences between groups, it is postulated as a valid and reliable instrument for the measurement of the facial expression abilities of the basic emotions in childhood.
... Identification of emotions and, particularly, of facial movements is fundamental for our ability to interact with others and adjust one's social behavior accordingly (Philippot and Feldman, 1990;Vicari et al., 2000;Barrett et al., 2019). A consistent body of research mostly focused on preschool-aged children, reported that an inference of emotional expressions gleaned from facial configurations improves during development (Odom and Lemond, 1972;Philippot and Feldman, 1990;Gross and Ballif, 1991;Boyatzis et al., 1993). Changes between children and adults have been described from a neurophysiological perspective (Thomas et al., 2001) and have been related to the development of higher cognitive skills associated with increased efficiency of the pre-frontal neural structures. ...
To date, COVID-19 has spread across the world, changing our way of life and forcing us to wear face masks. This report demonstrates that face masks influence the human ability to infer emotions by observing facial configurations. Specifically, a mask obstructing a face limits the ability of people of all ages to infer emotions expressed by facial features, but the difficulties associated with the mask’s use are significantly pronounced in children aged between 3 and 5 years old. These findings are of essential importance, as they suggest that we live in a time that may potentially affect the development of social and emotion reasoning, and young children’s future social abilities should be monitored to assess the true impact of the use of masks.
... Most methods of assessing young children's emotional understanding focus on the decoding of facial and gestural emotions. In the picture and story technique (Boyatzis, Chazan, & Ting, 1993), for example, children are presented with a hypothetical story and asked to indicate their own emotions or those of the target by pointing to relevant pictures or drawings. The choice-from-array task simply asks children to choose the person or puppet in a picture who expresses a particular emotion or to name a captioned emotion (Denham, Bassett, Brown, Way, & Steed, 2015). ...
Understanding others accurately is crucial in relationships and learning. Research shows that adults face challenges in empathic accuracy, that is, the ability to read the content of others' moment-to-moment mental states during interactions. Although young children possess some empathic understanding, the extent of their empathic accuracy is uncharted. Using a new SSP, 106 Chinese children aged 60 to 80 months (M = 70 months) were assessed on their ability to infer the mental states of adults in ongoing parent-child interactions. Replicating and extending extant findings on adults and adolescents, the children's inferences were found to be, at least computationally on a scale of .00 to 1.00, more often inaccurate than accurate regardless of the gender of the targets or participants (overall accuracy rate = .28). However, both the children and their primary caregivers overestimated the children's performance. In addition, although the primary caregivers expected girls to outperform boys, no gender difference in empathic accuracy was found when controlling for verbal fluency. Drawing on the findings of this first-ever application of the empathic accuracy paradigm in young children, the implications of empathic accuracy performance and misperceptions about such accuracy are discussed.
... Most methods of assessing young children's emotional understanding focus on the decoding of facial and gestural emotions. In the picture and story technique (Boyatzis, Chazan, & Ting, 1993), for example, children are presented with a hypothetical story and asked to indicate their own emotions or those of the target by pointing to relevant pictures or drawings. The choice-from-array task simply asks children to choose the person or puppet in a picture who expresses a particular emotion or to name a captioned emotion (Denham, Bassett, Brown, Way, & Steed, 2015). ...
Understanding others accurately is crucial in relationships and learning. Research shows that adults face challenges in empathic accuracy, that is, the ability to read the content of others’ moment-to-moment mental states during interactions. Although young children possess some empathic understanding, the extent of their empathic accuracy is uncharted. Using a new SSP, 106 Chinese children aged 60 to 80 months (M = 70 months) were assessed on their ability to infer the mental states of adults in ongoing parent–child interactions. Replicating and extending extant findings on adults and adolescents, the children’s inferences were found to be, at least computationally on a scale of .00 to 1.00, more often inaccurate than accurate regardless of the gender of the targets or participants (overall accuracy rate = .28). However, both the children and their primary caregivers overestimated the children’s performance. In addition, although the primary caregivers expected girls to outperform boys, no gender difference in empathic accuracy was found when controlling for verbal fluency. Drawing on the findings of this first-ever application of the empathic accuracy paradigm in young children, the implications of empathic accuracy performance and misperceptions about such accuracy are discussed.
... In addition, in the literature supporting teachers' expressions that the development of children's ability to understand others' emotions and expressing their own emotions progresses with age (Camras & Allison, 1985;Denham et al., 2011;Denham, Bassett, & Wyatt, 2007;Freitag & Schwarzer, 2011;Izard, 1991;Kandır, 2003;Macklem, 2008;Odom & Lemond, 1972;Székely et al., 2011), it has been shown that empathy (MoNE, 2013;Tanyel, 2009) and the ability to express others' emotions develop with age. In addition, studies conducted with 48-72-month-old children showed that children started to use emotion facial expressions and started to recognize and name emotional facial expressions depending on their age (Şen & Arı, 2011;Boyatzis, Chazan, & Ting, 1993;Lewis, Sullivan, & Vasen, 1987). Although it is frequently mentioned in the literature that preschool period is critical in the acquisition of emotion regulation skills, it has been noticed that several teachers expressed this in the study (Akman, Baydemir, Akyol, Arslan, & Kent-Kütüncü, 2011;Berk, 2015;Denham & Kochanoff, 2002;Hyson, 2004;Saarni, 2011). ...
In this study, it was aimed to reveal the opinions of preschool teachers about the practices supporting the emotion regulation skills of children. The data in the research conducted using a qualitative approach have been acquired through semi-structured interviews. The research was carried out with teachers working in state and private preschool education institutions in Eskişehir city center in the spring semester of the 2015-2016 academic year. 28 volunteer teachers determined with maximum diversity among purposive sampling methods constitute the participants of the study. Data were analyzed through inductive method. Codes and themes acquired from the data were presented for expert review to increase credibility. Coding key was calculated according to Miles and Huberman’s (2015) reliability formula and reliability co-efficient was found to be 92%. Based on this formula, the study was accepted as reliable. As a result of analysis, it was found that teachers had a limited perception of emotion regulation concept. They expressed that anger and happiness were the most observed emotions in the class; and that students, and therefore teachers themselves, had difficulty dealing with anger. They also pointed out that they needed support inside and outside the classroom.
... La habilidad para discriminar las expresiones emocionales faciales se desarrolla a lo largo de los años preescolares (Boyatzis, Chazan, & Ting, 1993;Camras & Allison, 1985;Markham & Adams, 1992). A los 4 años se es capaz de realizar tareas de falsa creencia, reconociendo cuando alguien tiene un pensamiento erróneo de la realidad (Wimmer & Perner, 1983). ...
Based on the distinction between "hot" and "cool" executive functions
(Zelazo & Müller, 2002), a research line that aims to study the relationship
between executive functions related to emotions (―hot") and socio-emotional
deficits observed in ASD, began. The main objective of this study is to analyze
the psychopathological correlates of emotional deficits in ASD.
This work arises in this theoretical framework and aims to study socioemotional
deficits in adults with autism, in relation to both "hot" and ―cool‖
executive dysfunctions, social maturity, autistic traits and comorbid
psychopathology, specifying which variables influence or explain the perception
of emotions in Autism Spectrum Disorders. Four experiments were designed,
linked to the 4 general objectives of the research:
1. Confirm the presence of emotional perception deficits in adults with ASD, compared to the control group (no TEA).
2. Confirm the presence of deficits in executive functions attributed to the ASD group, compared to the control group (no TEA).
3. Specify which variables influence, or explain, the perception of emotions in adults with autism, in order to find out the nature of emotional deficits in people with autism.
4. Establish if certain emotional permeability exists in the experimental group (TEA), through a task of emotion induction.
Previous studies have shown inconsistent findings regarding the contribution of the different prefrontal regions in emotion recognition. Moreover, the hemispheric lateralization hypothesis posits that the right hemisphere is dominant for processing all emotions regardless of affective valence, whereas the valence specificity hypothesis posits that the left hemisphere is specialized for processing positive emotions while the right hemisphere is specialized for negative emotions. However, recent findings suggest that the evidence for such lateralization has been less consistent. In this study, we investigated emotion recognition of fear, surprise, happiness, sadness, disgust, and anger in 30 patients with focal prefrontal cortex lesions and 30 control subjects. We also examined the impact of lesion laterality on recognition of the six basic emotions. The results showed that compared to control subjects, the frontal subgroups were impaired in recognition of three negative basic emotions of fear, sadness, and anger – regardless of the lesion laterality. Therefore, our findings did not establish that each hemisphere is specialized for processing specific emotions. Moreover, the voxel‐based lesion symptom mapping analysis showed that recognition of fear, sadness, and anger draws on a partially common bilaterally distributed prefrontal network.
Maurice Sendak’s picture book Where the Wild Things Are was investigated as a means of emotion recognition in preschool children. Sixty-six children and 60 adults participated in two tasks. The first was a book task, requiring identification of emotions in three target pictures, in three conditions. The visual condition presented the book with the text covered; the audio condition required listening to an audio recording of the book; in the combined condition participants were presented the book and audio recording simultaneously. The second was a traditional emotion recognition task. Children’s performance in the audio condition was poorer than the in other conditions. Children had difficulty identifying anger and happiness and the positive and negative valence of emotions in the audio condition compared to the other conditions. Our findings suggest that showing the pictures or reading and showing the pictures simultaneously can help children recognise intense emotions.
Background
Effective emotion regulation (ER) may be supported by: (a) accurate emotion identification, encoding, and maintenance of emotional states and related brain activity of regions involved in emotional response (i.e., amygdala, ventral/posterior insula); and (b) cognitive processes that implement reframing, supported by activation in cognitive control brain regions (e.g., frontal, insular and parietal cortices). The purpose of this project was to examine how emotion labelling ability in early childhood is related to ER concurrently and prospectively.
Methods
Data from a prospective longitudinal study of youth at risk for depression, including measures of emotional labelling (i.e., Facial Affect Comprehension Evaluation) and ER ability (i.e., Emotion Regulation Checklist) and strategy use (i.e., Cognitive Emotion Regulation Questionnaire, Children’s Response Style Questionnaire), and fMRI data during a sadness ER task (n=139), were examined.
Results
Findings from multilevel modeling and linear regression suggested that greater emotion labelling ability of more difficult emotions in early childhood was associated with enhanced parent-reported ER in adolescence, but not with a tendency to engage in adaptive or maladaptive emotion regulation strategies. Recognition of fear and surprise predicted greater activation in cortical regions involved in cognitive control during an ER of sadness task including in the insula, anterior cingulate cortex, dorsal medial prefrontal cortex, and inferior frontal gyrus.
Discussion
These findings suggest that early ability to identify and label difficult facial emotions in early childhood is associated with better ER in adolescence and enhanced activity of cognitive control regions of the brain.
A nursery school teacher brought a little girl to a psychologist’s attention when the girl was being made the focus of contemptuous looks by her peers and playmates. “Why do they look at her that way?” asked the teacher. “She’s attractive and bright and she wants to play with the other children.” The psychologist looked over at the child. “What little girl?” she asked. “That’s a boy.” The psychologist was wrong and that was the problem. This 4-year-old girl had the lower brow ridge of a boy, the smaller mouth and the gestures of a boy. She did not often smile; she stood obliquely and she gestured expansively. She engaged in rough-and-tumble play. She also nurtured dolls and was learning to read early. The children in playschool did not know what to make of her. The adults said, “There’s something strange about the nice child over there, but I can’t quite put my finger on it.” That last sentence sums up what our research in nonverbal behavior is all about. We are putting our fingers on the important things that people have few words for—the barely conscious gestures that separate and identify the sexes.
Although researchers have learned much about children’s social knowledge in the last decade, little is known about children’s understanding of emotions and emotional expressions. Investigations of children’s knowledge of emotions and the socialization of emotional behavior have been restricted in part by a powerful theory of emotion, which was suggested by Darwin (1872) and later elaborated by Tomkins (1962, 1963) and Izard (1977). This biological view of emotion was characterized by Hochschild (1979) in the following description of emotional behavior:
The image that comes to mind is that of a sudden, automatic reflex syndrome—Darwin’s instant snarl expression; Freud’s tension discharge at a given breaking point of tension overload; James’ and Lange’s notion of an instantaneous, unmediated visceral reaction to a perceived stimulus, the perception of which is also unmediated by social influence, (pp. 553–554)
Emotions are viewed as analogous to knee jerks or sneezes, unlearned, biologically controlled, and subject to relatively little socialization influence.
This study compared 17 abused and 17 matched, nonabused children on their ability to identify six facial expressions of emotions and on teacher ratings of social competency. Abused children were less skilled in decoding facial expressions of emotions and were rated less socially competent than nonabused children. The findings suggest a strategy for studying the development of emotion recognition skills by abused and nonabused children.
Investigated the degree to which 4–5 yr olds (
n = 48) can enact expressions of emotion recognizable by peers and adults; the study also examined whether accuracy of recognition was a function of age and whether the expression was posed or spontaneous. Adults (
n = 103) were much more accurate than children in recognizing neutral states, slightly more accurate in recognizing happiness and anger, and equally accurate in recognizing sadness. Children's spontaneous displays of happiness were more recognizable than posed displays, but for other emotions there was no difference between the recognizability of posed and spontaneous expressions. Children were highly accurate in identifying the facial expressions of happiness, sadness, and anger displayed by their peers. Sex and ethnicity of the child whose emotion was displayed interacted to influence only adults' recognizability of anger. Results are discussed in terms of the social learning and cognitive developmental factors influencing (a) adults' and children's decoding (recognition) of emotional expressions in young children and (b) encoding (posing) of emotional expressions by young children. (20 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Administered a series of social interaction situations representing the 4 emotions of happy, afraid, sad, and angry to 288 American children and 288 Chinese children. 24 girls and 24 boys, 1/2 from middle-class families and 1/2 from disadvantaged families, were tested at 6-mo intervals between 3 and 6 yrs of age. Children from both cultural groups exhibited similar overall trends in their ability to recognize other people's emotional responses. By 3 yrs of age, the majority of American and Chinese children could differentiate between happy and unhappy reactions in other people. Perception of afraid, sad, and angry feelings developed somewhat later and appeared to be influenced by social learning. Results of a previous investigation that very young children are capable of empathic responses are confirmed. The awareness of other people's feelings by young children from very different cultural backgrounds suggests that empathy may be a basic human characteristic related to social adaptation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Summarizes results of 75 studies that reported accuracy for males and females at decoding nonverbal communication. The following attributes of the studies were coded: year, sample size, age of judges, sex of stimulus person, age of stimulus person, and the medium and channel of communication (e.g., photos of facial expressions, filtered speech). These attributes were examined in relation to 3 outcome indices: direction of effect, effect size (in standard deviation units), and significance level. Results show that more studies found a female advantage than would occur by chance, the average effect was of moderate magnitude and was significantly larger than zero, and more studies reached a conventional level of significance than would be expected by chance. The gender effect for visual-plus-auditory studies was significantly larger than for visual-only and auditory-only studies. The magnitude of the effect did not vary reliably with sample size, age of judges, sex of stimulus person, or age of stimulus person. (60 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
20 maltreated and 20 nonmaltreated children (ages = 3–7 years) and their mothers were observed during a laboratory play session and 7 home observation visits. Ss' facial behavior was video recorded in the lab and coded live by observers in the home. Children also participated in an emotional-expression recognition task. Data analysis showed that both maltreatment status and mothers' facial behavior were predictors of children's recognition scores. Positive relationships were also found between mothers' and children's expressive behavior. Although maltreated and nonmaltreated children differed significantly in their recognition of emotional facial expressions, group differences were not found for either mothers' or children's expressive behavior. Overall, this study's findings indicate that children's recognition and production of facial expressions depends in part on the expressive environment provided by their mothers. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
20 mothers of 5-yr-old children were videotaped while viewing slides designed to elicit pleasant, neutral, or disgusted expressions. 80 undergraduates then viewed the tapes and attempted to judge which slide the mothers were viewing. On the basis of these ratings, mothers were classified as either good or poor encoders. Each of the 20 children then viewed the tapes of his/her own mother and 2 other mothers who were either good or poor encoders, and judged which type of slide the mothers had viewed. The mothers then viewed tapes of a good and a poor encoder and made the same judgments. Results show that the decoding accuracy of a child was related to his/her mother's encoding ability; this effect was found, however, only when the children were attempting to decode the facial expressions of relatively good encoders. No relationship was found between a mother's encoding ability and her own decoding score. (14 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)