Children’s ability to recognitze clear and ambiguous facial expressions of emotion.

The ability to recognize facial expressions of emotion (FEE) was studied in Italian children (N= 311, 44% boys; age range: 6-11 yrs.) with two tasks, each involving 28 FEE pictures (e.g., Zammuner, 2008, 2012) depicting 6 emotions plus neutral expressions; 14 stimuli were prototypical, i.e., clear expressions of the target emotion; 14 stimuli were non-prototypical, i.e., somewhat more ambiguous expressions, such as one often sees in real life. In the Label task, for each expression children selected which emotion-label (7; e.g., anger, fear, neutral expression) best described it. In the Expression task children chose which expression - out of 4, varying for each story - expressed the emotion felt by the character of a briefly described story - a typical and frequently occurring event in children’s lives (e.g., My brother was given a present, but no present for me; Sometimes my peers joke at me). Two versions of 12 events each were used. Chosen Labels and Expressions for each stimulus were analysed for their frequencies and later scored for correctness (0= wrong, 1= correct). Correct recognition scores were analysed in MANOVAs to test for emotion, gender and age differences. The results obtained from Label-task ratings showed that: emotion-expression recognition (EER) is greatest for happiness, surprise and disgust, least for anger and fear; EER is greater in girls than boys, especially for prototypical ones; EER increases with age, especially for ambiguous expressions, and for some emotions (sadness, disgust); although EER is overall better for prototypical than non-prototypical expressions, differences were typically small.Similar results were obtained with the more ecological Expression task. The study results on the one hand lend further support to the literature findings on children’s emotion-expression recognition, on the other hand underline the importance of testing it using stimuli that vary for their prototypicality as children’s EER includes the ability to perceive subtle emotion cues.