Wide eyes and drooping arms: Adult-like congruency effects emerge early in the development of sensitivity to emotional faces and body postures

Abstract

Adults' and 8-year-old children's perception of emotional faces is disrupted when faces are presented in the context of incongruent body postures (e.g., when a sad face is displayed on a fearful body) if the two emotions are highly similar (e.g., sad/fear) but not if they are highly dissimilar (e.g., sad/happy). The current research investigated the emergence of this adult-like pattern. Using a sorting task, we identified the youngest age at which children could accurately sort isolated facial expressions and body postures and then measured whether their accuracy was impaired in the incongruent condition. Among the child participants, 6-year-olds showed congruency effects for sad/fear, but even 4-year-olds did not do so for sad/happy. Early emergence of this adult-like pattern is consistent with the dimensional and emotional seed models of emotion perception, although future research is needed to test the relative validity of these two models. Testing children with emotional faces presented in the context of body postures and background scenes is an important step toward understanding how they perceive emotions on a daily basis.

Asymmetries of Influence: Differential Effects of Body Postures on Perceptions of Emotional Facial Expressions

“…Greater weighting of the valence dimension also makes adaptive sense; it is probably most important to know whether someone else is feeling positive or negative than it is to know whether they are highly aroused (although of course both dimensions are informative). Although this refinement to the dimensional theory would not alter our interpretation of the data presented here, heavier weighting of the valence dimension may explain evidence that happy faces are protected from congruency effects when paired with sad, fearful, and angry bodies ( [32,42,71,72]; see also catch trials in Experiments 1a and b in which happy faces were presented on congruent and incongruent bodies). Varying the relative weights of the underlying dimensions would alter the shape of the circumplex, thereby changing similarities among expressions.…”

Developmental changes in the primacy of facial cues for emotion recognition.

“…This suggests that individuals of all ages were integrating facial and contextual information when making emotion decisions but to different extents. This strategy has also been found to emerge early and vary across development (Mondloch, 2012; Mondloch et al, 2013). …”

“…Yet, some research is beginning to address these gaps, raising questions about potential developmental changes in how individuals integrate facial and contextual information. For example, similar to adults, young children show difficulties in recognizing familiar emotional faces when paired with incongruent contextual information early in development (Mondloch, Horner, & Mian, 2013). However, they rely heavily on bodily cues when identifying emotions they are uncertain about (Mondloch, 2012).…”

Affective cognition: Exploring lay theories of emotion

“…On the other hand, contextual cues often appear to drive affective cognition even when paired with facial expressions. For instance, observers often rely on written descriptions of a situation (Carroll & Russell, 1996;Goodenough & Tinker, 1931) body postures (Aviezer, Trope, & Todorov, 2012;Aviezer et al, 2008;Mondloch, 2012;Mondloch, Horner, & Mian, 2013;Van den Stock, Righart, & de Gelder, 2007), background scenery (Barrett & Kensinger, 2010;Barrett, Mesquita, & Gendron, 2011;Lindquist, Barrett, Bliss-Moreau, & Russell, 2006), and cultural norms (Masuda et al, 2008) when deciding how agents feel.…”