Children's recognition of disgust in others.

Abstract

Disgust has been theorized to be a basic emotion with a facial signal that is easily, universally, automatically, and perhaps innately recognized by observers from an early age. This article questions one key part of that theory: the hypothesis that children recognize disgust from its purported facial signal. Over the first 5 years, children experience disgust, produce facial expressions of disgust, develop a concept of disgust, understand and produce the word disgust or a synonym, know about disgust's causes and consequences, and infer disgust in others from a situation or a behavior. Yet, only gradually do these children come to "recognize" disgust specifically from the "disgust face" found in standardized sets of the facial expressions of basic emotions. Improvement is gradual, with more than half of children matching the standard disgust face to disgust only at around 9 years of age and with subsequent improvement continuing gradually until the late teens or early adulthood. Up to age 8, a majority of children studied believe that the standard disgust face indicates anger. Rather than relying on an already known signal value, children may be actively learning to interpret the expression.

Developmental changes in infants’ categorization of anger and disgust facial expressions.

“…Alternatively, for older children, emotion categorization is often tested via sorting tasks where children must produce and/or match labels (e.g., "disgust") to facial expressions (Widen & Russell, 2013). As a result, these tasks measure emotion recognition, a more sophisticated ability than the perceptual categorization skills tested in infancy (Walker-Andrews, 1997).…”

“…Importantly, these emotions have not yet been contrasted in infant research. Thus, while older children consistently misidentify anger expressions as disgust (Widen & Russell, 2013), it is unclear whether younger infants exhibit similar difficulties.…”

Congenital anosmia and emotion recognition: A case-control study

“…More specific to the present study is the fact that the recognition of facial expression of disgust occurs later in development than the recognition of fear. Although 5-year-old children are able to produce facial and verbal expressions of disgust and to infer disgust in others from a situation or a behavior, the ability to infer disgust in others from facial mimicry only gradually improves until the late teens (Widen and Russell, 2013). In contrast, 5-year old children are able to readily recognize fear in others, even from partial facial expressions (Gagnon et al, 2014).…”

French-speaking children’s freely produced labels for facial expressions

“…Recently, Widen and Russell (2003, 2008, 2013) proposed a model accounting for the age changes in the labeling of facial expressions. In a series of studies, these authors examined the number of labels used by children in free-labeling tasks.…”

“…According to Widen and Russell (2013), the age changes in the labeling of facial expressions reflect the process of concept formation. The concept of anger, for instance, corresponds to the relation between several components such as children’s knowledge of the causes of anger, of its behavioral consequences, of its facial, vocal, and behavioral correlates, of its bodily changes, and of the words used to name it.…”