Abstract
Children 3, 6, 9, and 12 years of age were assessed on their ability to recognize and identify facial expressions of emotion. In an emotion recognition (ER) task, children were presented with three facial photographs and were asked to select the photo representing a particular emotion (e.g., happiness, disgust, sadness). Another task, emotion labeling (EL), required that the child name the emotional state expressed in a facial photograph. An age trend was found for both tasks: Accuracy in judging emotional states increased with age. Results showed that scores on the ER task were significantly better than scores on the EL task, suggesting that recognition of an emotional state was less difficult than verbally identifying an emotional state. The order in which the two tasks were given significantly affected results on the EL task: When the ER task preceded the EL task, scores on EL were higher than when EL was given first. Accuracy in judging the individual emotion categories also varied with the order of tasks.
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Harrigan, J.A. The effects of task order on children's identification of facial expressions. Motiv Emot 8, 157–169 (1984). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00993071
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00993071