Perceiving arousal and valence in facial expressions: Differences between children and adults

Vesker, Michael; Bahn, Daniela; Degé, Franziska; Kauschke, Christina; Schwarzer, Gudrun

doi:10.1080/17405629.2017.1287073

Cited by 20 publications

(17 citation statements)

References 21 publications

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“…Our findings are in line with the results of Sylvester et al (2016) as well as with those of Russell and Paris (1994), who found significant correlations between adults and children (age 7 to 12, respectively, 4 and 5 years). High correlations between children's and adults’ ratings of valence and arousal have also been shown in rating studies using the same SAM scales with emotional stimuli from other modalities (e.g., McManis, Bradley, Berg, Cuthbert, & Lang, 2001, for pictures; Vesker, Bahn, Degé, Kauschke, & Schwarzer, 2017, for faces). In addition, our findings confirm the results of Sylvester et al (2016), Schmidtke et al (2014), and Russell and Paris (1994) with respect to the differential strength of the correlation of arousal and valence ratings.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 59%

Perception of valence and arousal in German emotion terms: A comparison between 9-year-old children and adults

Bahn

Kauschke

Vesker

et al. 2017

Applied Psycholinguistics

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Two major semantic features of emotion concepts have been shown to impact performance in emotion perception tasks: valence and arousal. To design psycholinguistic experiments with emotion terms as stimuli, norms are required that indicate valence and arousal values for individual words. Although such norms are usually obtained from ratings of adults, they are often also used in developmental studies. This procedure raises the question of whether children and adults perceive emotional valence and arousal of words in the same way, and consequently, whether adults’ ratings are adequate when constructing stimulus sets for children. The present study obtained valence and arousal ratings for 48 German emotion terms from three different groups: 9-year-old children and adults tested in a controlled laboratory setting, and adults tested via online survey. Results demonstrate high correlations for valence and arousal across settings. The comparison between children and adults also revealed high correlations, suggesting that children at the age of 9 already display adultlike behavior in their evaluation of emotion terms. A small difference was found for absolute rating values of arousal, with children rating words less arousing than adults. Overall, 9-year-olds and adults are sufficiently similar in their perception of emotion to warrant the use of adult valence and arousal ratings in the analysis of children data.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 59%

Perception of valence and arousal in German emotion terms: A comparison between 9-year-old children and adults

Bahn

Kauschke

Vesker

et al. 2017

Applied Psycholinguistics

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“…This selection of facial expressions for the positive and negative emotion categories was a result of striving to make sure that each category is composed of a variety of expressions, in order to truly represent a category of positive and negative emotional expressions, rather than merely contrasting happy faces against the negative expressions. We also balanced the two categories in terms of mean arousal and valence using ratings by adult subjects in a previous study [ 36 ] using a 7-point SAM valence scale [ 37 ], and a 5-point SAM arousal scale [ 37 ]. This meant that the arousal across the categories was approximately equal, and that the positive category mean should be as positive as the negative category is negative, i.e.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Developmental changes in the categorical processing of positive and negative facial expressions

et al. 2018

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Categorical biases in the processing of emotional facial expression have been the subject of much debate in the literature. Opposing views on this topic claim either that positive or negative facial expressions enjoy improved processing in the human brain. The developmental changes in the processing advantages of positive and negative facial expressions are also disputed, with studies using varying paradigms showing seemingly contradictory results. Therefore, to further investigate the development of categorical processing and extraction of emotional information from faces, we tested 6-, 9-, and 12-year-old children, as well as adults, on their ability to categorize various facial expressions as positive or negative as quickly as possible. This was a simplified paradigm designed to explicitly contrast the processing efficiency of positive and negative facial expressions on the broader level of those emotional valence categories, rather than specific single emotional expressions. Our results show an early age processing advantage for positive facial expressions, which disappears in adults who show no such differences in the case of response time measures. In the case of accuracy measures, the early advantage for positive facial expressions gradually disappears and is reversed into a negativity advantage in adults. These findings demonstrate that category-based positive and negative processing advantages are strongly modulated by age over the course of development, and can exhibit opposite effects depending on the developmental stage of the participant.

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“…The photographs were chosen in such a way that the positive and negative categories featured a variety of expressions, but still had very similar average ratings of arousal and valence as measured form a neutral point (i.e., the negative faces were as negative as the positive faces were positive) based on ratings made by adult participants in a separate study ( Vesker et al, 2017 ) using a 5-point SAM scale ( Bradley and Lang, 1994 ) for arousal, and a 7-point SAM scale for valence.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Auditory Emotion Word Primes Influence Emotional Face Categorization in Children and Adults, but Not Vice Versa

et al. 2018

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In order to assess how the perception of audible speech and facial expressions influence one another for the perception of emotions, and how this influence might change over the course of development, we conducted two cross-modal priming experiments with three age groups of children (6-, 9-, and 12-years old), as well as college-aged adults. In Experiment 1, 74 children and 24 adult participants were tasked with categorizing photographs of emotional faces as positive or negative as quickly as possible after being primed with emotion words presented via audio in valence-congruent and valence-incongruent trials. In Experiment 2, 67 children and 24 adult participants carried out a similar categorization task, but with faces acting as visual primes, and emotion words acting as auditory targets. The results of Experiment 1 showed that participants made more errors when categorizing positive faces primed by negative words versus positive words, and that 6-year-old children are particularly sensitive to positive word primes, giving faster correct responses regardless of target valence. Meanwhile, the results of Experiment 2 did not show any congruency effects for priming by facial expressions. Thus, audible emotion words seem to exert an influence on the emotional categorization of faces, while faces do not seem to influence the categorization of emotion words in a significant way.

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Perceiving arousal and valence in facial expressions: Differences between children and adults

Cited by 20 publications

References 21 publications

Perception of valence and arousal in German emotion terms: A comparison between 9-year-old children and adults

Perception of valence and arousal in German emotion terms: A comparison between 9-year-old children and adults

Developmental changes in the categorical processing of positive and negative facial expressions

Auditory Emotion Word Primes Influence Emotional Face Categorization in Children and Adults, but Not Vice Versa

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