Development of Facial Emotion Recognition in Childhood: Age-related Differences in a Shortened Version of the Facial Expressions of Emotion - Stimuli and Tests

Introduction Facial emotion recognition is essential for social interaction. The development of emotion recognition abilities is not yet entirely understood (Tonks et al. 2007). Facial emotion recognition emerges gradually, with happiness recognized earliest (Herba & Phillips, 2004). The recognition of anger, fear and disgust, relying on brain regions that continue to develop during childhood and adolescence (Thomas et al., 2007), may develop latest. The aim of the present study is to investigate the normal development of facial emotion recognition and to develop a useful test for detecting emotion recognition difficulties in children with acquired brain injury. Method 100 normally developed children (49 boys, 51 girls) between 3.6-12.9 years of age participated (M=7.79, SD=2.75) in this cross-sectional study. The FEEST-36 is a Dutch shortened version of the computer based Facial Expression of Emotions – Stimuli and Tests by Young et al. (2002). It consists of 36 black and white pictures of men and women expressing the six basic emotions: Anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness and surprise. The relationship between total scores, IQ and age was investigated. Results Emotion recognition is significantly influenced by age. Especially, the recognition of fear, disgust and surprise improves with age. The results show that pre-school children younger than 5 years are significantly less accurate than children aged 5 to 10 years or children of 10 years and older in their recognition of emotions. There is no relationship with intelligence or sex. Conclusion Facial emotion recognition develops during childhood; especially the identification of fear, disgust and surprise is influenced by age. The FEEST-36 is hoped to be useful in detecting specific emotion recognition abnormalities in children and adolescents with acquired brain injury. The results are discussed in the light of the implications of the Dutch FEEST-36 in pediatric neuropsychological assessment of emotion recognition following acquired brain injury. References Herba, C., & Phillips, M. (2004). Annotation: Development of facial expression recognition from childhood to adolescence: Behavioural and neurological perspectives. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 45(7), 1185-1198. doi:10.1111/j.1469-7610.2004.00316.x Thomas, L. A., De Bellis, M. D., Graham, R., & LaBar, K. S. (2007). Development of emotional facial recognition in late childhood and adolescence. Developmental Science, 10(5), 547-558. doi:10.1111/j.1467-7687.2007.00614.x Tonks, J., Williams, W. H., Frampton, I., Yates, P., & Slater, A. (2007). Assessing emotion recognition in 9-15-years olds: Preliminary analysis of abilities in reading emotion from faces, voices and eyes. Brain Injury, 21(6), 623-629. doi:10.1080/02699050701426865 Young, A., Perrett, D., Calder, A., Sprengelmeyer, R. & Ekman, P. (2002). Facial Expression of Emotion: Stimuli and Tests (FEEST) [testing programme] Pearson.