Validating the Radboud faces database from a child’s perspective

Abstract

Facial expressions play a central role in diverse areas of psychology. However, facial stimuli are often only validated by adults, and there are no face databases validated by school-aged children. Validation by children is important because children still develop emotion recognition skills and may have different perceptions than adults. Therefore, in this study, we validated the adult Caucasian faces of the Radboud Faces Database (RaFD) in 8-to 12-year-old children (N = 652). Additionally, children rated valence, clarity, and model attractiveness. Emotion recognition rates were relatively high (72%; compared to 82% in the original validation by adults). Recognition accuracy was highest for happiness, below average for fear and disgust, and lowest for contempt. Children showed roughly the same emotion recognition pattern as adults, but were less accurate in distinguishing similar emotions. As expected, in general, 10-to 12-year-old children had a higher emotion recognition accuracy than 8-and 9-year-olds. Overall, girls slightly outperformed boys. More nuanced differences in these gender and age effects on recognition rates were visible per emotion. The current study provides researchers with recommendation on how to use the RaFD adult pictures in child studies. Researchers can select appropriate stimuli for their research using the online available validation data.

Content-Specific Interpretation Bias in Children with Varying Levels of Anxiety: The Role of Gender and Age

“…As the current study was part of a larger project focused at assessing emotion processing, social processes and childhood anxiety, the children also completed other measures (a full list of all the measures can be obtained from the authors). Two other published papers about different topics were based on the same participant group [40, 41]. The current study was conducted in 11 of the 15 schools among 605 children.…”

Social anxiety and perceptions of likeability by peers in children

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Recognizing Emotions through Facial Expressions: A Largescale Experimental Study

“…In the first case, despite the significant cross-cultural differences in the classification of emotions that should be taken in account, the authors found high recognition agreement rates [ 52 ], which were similar to the ones reported in the original study by Langner et al (2010) [ 32 ]. In the second case, children’s emotion recognition pattern was identical to the adults’ pattern, although children were less able to distinguish between similar emotions [ 54 ]. In another study, Dawel et al (2017) pointed out that an advantage of the RaFD database was the availability of genuineness ratings [ 55 ].…”