Emotional faces of children and adults: What changes in their perception

Abstract

This work investigates disparities between children and middle aged adults in their ability to decode the six primary facial expressions of emotions when portrayed by contemporary children and adult faces. The analyses were conducted on a sample of 40 (20 females) very closely aged children (mean age=7.4; SD=±0.2), and 40 middle aged (mean age=54.3; SD=±2.9) adults (20 females). Four different experimental conditions were assessed: a) 20 children and 20 middle aged adults assessing child faces; b) 20 children and 20 middle aged adults assessing adult faces; c) 20 children assessing adult faces and 20 children assessing child faces; d) 20 middle aged adults assessing adult faces and 20 middle aged adults assessing child faces. The analyses do not show significant differences between children and adults for conditions a), and b). Children performances on condition c) did not support the peers-prejudice theory, since no significant differences were found among children on their ability to decode either facial expressions of adults or children. Middle aged adults were significantly more accurate in decoding adult rather than children faces. No significant gender differences were found in the four conditions, even though significant interactions were found between emotional categories and gender of stimuli. In particular, the gender of stimuli had a significant effect in condition a) where emotional faces portrayed by male children are more accurately decoded than those portrayed by female children. Several significant interactions were observed between emotional categories, participants' age, and gender of stimuli. Details are discussed in the text.