Finding an emotional face in the kindergarten – Happiness superiority effect for children faces in pre-schoolers

Abstract

Previous studies investigating the advantage of emotional expressions in visual processing in preschool children only used adult faces. However, children perceive facial expression of emotions differently when displayed on adults’ compared to children’s faces. In the present study, pre-schoolers (N=43, Mean age=5.65) and adults (N=37, Mean age=21.8) had to find a target face displaying an emotional expression among eight neutral faces. Gender of the faces (boy and girl) were also manipulated. Happy faces were found the fastest across both samples. Children detected the angry face faster than the fearful one, while adults vice versa. However, an interaction in the adult sample suggests that this is only true for girls’ faces, while the difference was nonsignificant for boys’ faces. In both samples, the detection was faster with boys’ faces compare to girls’ for all emotions. It is suggested that the happy face could have an advantage in visual processing due to its importance in social situations.

The Role of Emotional Valence for the Processing of Facial and Verbal Stimuli—Positivity or Negativity Bias?

“…Searching for studies with children we only found a few which met our criteria: 4 detection studies (see Supplementary Table 2A, Walden and Field, 1982; De Sonneville et al, 2002; LoBue, 2009; Zsido et al, 2018) and 2 identification studies (see Supplementary Table 2B, De Sonneville et al, 2002; Tottenham et al, 2013). In all but one of these studies, children's responses (from around 3 to 10 years of age) were compared to adults' responses, and indicated similar results across age.…”