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Age and Gender Differences in Decoding Basic and Non-basic Facial Expressions in Late Childhood and Early Adolescence

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Abstract

This study examined age and gender differences in decoding nonverbal cues in a school population of 606 (pre)adolescents (9–15 years). The focus was on differences in the perceived intensity of several emotions in both basic and non-basic facial expressions. Age differences were found in decoding low intensity and ambiguous faces, but not in basic expressions. Older adolescents indicated more negative meaning in these more subtle and complex facial cues. Girls attributed more anger to both basic and non-basic facial expressions and showed a general negative bias in decoding non-basic facial expressions compared to boys. Findings are interpreted in the light of the development of emotion regulation and the importance for developing relationships.

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Notes

  1. Although not highlighted in their text (but visible in their tables), Bouhuys et al. (1995a), while using schematic drawings, also found mixes of emotions in high intensity basic expressions similar to the ones described by Hall and Matsumoto (2003), with higher intensities for the target emotions.

  2. ANOVA analyses showed that the perceived intensities of all the target emotions in the basic facial expressions were significantly higher than the non-target emotions and higher than the perceived intensities of the same emotion in the non-basic expressions (statistical data available from the first author). Thus, basic expressions clearly showed a dominant emotion contrary to the non-basic faces in which a more balanced mix of emotions and lower intensities were indicated.

  3. The somewhat lower correlation for joy is due to the lack of ambiguous smiles in the DANVA pictures.

  4. Unlike Hall and Matsumoto (2003) we could not analyze target and non-target emotions in the same analyses due to a very high number of multivariate outliers.

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Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank W. Kaal, D. Braspenning, G.van Renselaar, and H. van Dasler, for their help in developing the instruments and gathering the data.

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This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.

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  1. Developmental Psychology, Utrecht University, Heidelberglaan 1, 3584 CS, Utrecht, The Netherlands

    Yolanda van Beek & Judith Semon Dubas

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  1. Yolanda van Beek
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Correspondence to Yolanda van Beek.

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van Beek, Y., Dubas, J.S. Age and Gender Differences in Decoding Basic and Non-basic Facial Expressions in Late Childhood and Early Adolescence. J Nonverbal Behav 32, 37–52 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10919-007-0040-8

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