Abstract
Few attempts have been made since the pioneer work of Ekman et al. (1980) to examine the development of the deliberate control of facial action units in children. We are reporting here two studies concerned with this issue. In Study 1, we investigated children’s ability to activate facial action units involved in sadness and happiness expressions as well as combinations of these action units. In Study 2, we examined children’s ability to pose happiness and sadness with their face, without telling them which action unit to activate. The children who took part in this study were simply asked to portray happiness and sadness as convincingly as possible. The results of Study 1 indicate a strong developmental progression in children’s ability to produce elementary facial components of both emotions as well as in their ability to produce a combination of the elements in the case of happiness. In agreement with prior research in motor development, several non-target action units were also activated when children performed the task. Their occurrence persisted throughout childhood, indicating limitations in the finer motor control achieved by children across age. The results obtained in Study 2 paralleled those obtained in Study 1 in many respects, providing evidence that the children used the technique of deliberate action to pose the two target emotions.
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Notes
The coactivation of the cheek raiser was not an artifact due to the coding of the material, as we used the 1992 FACS version. This version contains norms for coding the presence of the cheek raiser when the lip corner puller is activated at high intensity (levels D and E).
Although the task performed by the participants in Gosselin et al.’s (2010) study was very similar to that used in Study 1, performance was not assessed exactly in the same way. In order to meet the specificity criterion, the target action unit had to be activated without any non-target action units during the complete duration of a given trial. In the present study, we considered the specificity criterion was met if the target action unit was activated without any non-target action units at some point during a given trial, as Ekman et al. (1980) did. This difference in assessing performance explains why, for some action units, the children in this study did somewhat better than the adults who participated in Gosselin et al.’s study.
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Gosselin, P., Maassarani, R., Younger, A. et al. Children’s Deliberate Control of Facial Action Units Involved in Sad and Happy Expressions. J Nonverbal Behav 35, 225–242 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10919-011-0110-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10919-011-0110-9