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

Abstract

In this study, we investigated the labeling of facial expressions in French-speaking children. The participants were 137 French-speaking children, between the ages of 5 and 11 years, recruited from three elementary schools in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. The facial expressions included expressions of happiness, sadness, fear, surprise, anger, and disgust. Participants were shown one facial expression at a time, and asked to say what the stimulus person was feeling. Participants’ responses were coded by two raters who made judgments concerning the specific emotion category in which the responses belonged. 5- and 6-year-olds were quite accurate in labeling facial expressions of happiness, anger, and sadness but far less accurate for facial expressions of fear, surprise, and disgust. An improvement in accuracy as a function of age was found for fear and surprise only. Labeling facial expressions of disgust proved to be very difficult for the children, even for the 11-year-olds. In order to examine the fit between the model proposed by Widen and Russell (2003) and our data, we looked at the number of participants who had the predicted response patterns. Overall, 88.52% of the participants did. Most of the participants used between 3 and 5 labels, with correspondence percentages varying between 80.00% and 100.00%. Our results suggest that the model proposed by Widen and Russell (2003) is not limited to English-speaking children, but also accounts for the sequence of emotion labeling in French-Canadian children.

Children’s Interpretation of Facial Expressions: The Long Path from Valence-Based to Specific Discrete Categories

“…Mean age increased from 30 months at labeling level 0 to 74 months at labeling level 6. This pattern has been supported in another language and culture (French Canadian; Massarani et al, 2011).…”

“…Older children begin to interpret faces in terms of discrete negative emotions (e.g., Denham & Couchoud, 1990;Izard, 1971;Massarani, Gosselin, Montembeault, Gagnon, & Suurland, 2011;Vicari, Reilly, Pasqualetti, Vizzotto, & Caltagirone, 2000), but the change from valence to specific discrete categories is gradual. This gradual change cannot be attributed to children's vocabulary because children have and use labels for basic emotions before their third birthday (e.g., Bretherton, McNew, & Beeghly-Smith, 1981;Ridgeway, Waters, & Kuczaj, 1985).…”

“…Participants are more likely to use some emotion labels more frequently than others (Wagner, 1993). For example, when children (2-10 years) are asked to freely label facial expressions or emotion stories, the labels they use most frequently, both "correctly" and "incorrectly," are happy, sad, and angry (Massarani et al, 2011;Widen & Russell, 2003, 2008b, 2010a. Conversely, though they used scared, surprised, or disgusted "correctly" less frequently, they also rarely used these labels incorrectly.…”

Facial Expressions and Ability to Recognize Emotions From Eyes or Mouth in Children

“…Alternatively, as far as surprise is concerned, as Maassarani, Gosselin, Montembeault, and Gagnon (2014) suggest, the difficulty of its recognition could depend on the fact that some emotions may follow one another in a short period. Many situations that bring happiness may result from an unexpected source, and so happiness may be experienced immediately after a surprise.…”

Identifying Emotional Expressions: Children’s Reasoning About Pretend Emotions of Sadness and Anger

“…Moreover, prior research has studied how children understand pretend sadness, but we do not know whether children understand other negative emotions in a similar way. Therefore, as the labels for sadness and anger are the first labels for negative emotions that children acquire (Widen and Russell, 2003;Maassarani et al, 2014), we decided to study both the emotions of anger and sadness.…”