Mothers need more information to recognise associated emotions in child facial expressions

Abstract

Infant and child faces receive more attention than adult faces, especially when they are portraying emotions. This preferential treatment is increased in mothers. It is unclear how this affects the ability to recognise child emotions and at which age children lose this preferential treatment. Using morphed videos where a neutral face continually and gradually takes on an emotion, we were able to quantify the amount of information needed to identify the emotion. We investigated amount of information needed as well as accuracy both separately and as an integrated performance score. We expected mothers to perform better than non-mothers and both groups to perform better when encountering adolescents as compared to children. We also hypothesised an interaction with the difference between mothers and non-mothers being larger for pre-schoolers than for adolescents.Both groups indeed performed better when recognising the emotions of adolescents than of preschoolers possibly due to their increasingly adult features. Contrary to our hypotheses, mothers performed worse than non-mothers in every age group due to their need for more information to identify the emotions with the same level as accuracy as non-mothers. Both groups performed similarly on a control task where they had to identify animals instead of emotions. This indicates that mothers need more information for affect recognition specifically and not for similar tasks not involving emotions. A possible explanation is that emotional child faces have a greater emotional impact on mothers than non-mothers leading to task interference. Further research is needed to examine possible causes of this effect including differences in affective social understanding as well as whether the effect extends to adult faces.

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“…We used the correction following Westfall's method 72,73 using a Matlab code (written for statistical tests with one comparison (e.g., Mann-Whitney-U, T-test or post-hoc test after an ANOVA) published on OSF (https:// osf. io/ twxsk/ 74 ).…”

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“…The differences observed between the two age groups in other domains could be attributed to parents' greater difficulty in recognizing emotions in preschool children compared to older ones. Previous studies have indicated that mothers of preschool-aged children require more information to accurately identify emotions in children's facial expressions (23). Additionally, some questionnaire items related to functions and participation might not be expected by parents of younger children to be achievable.…”