A comparative study of visual and auditory perception of emotions in children of primary school age

We investigated the characteristics of perception of nonverbal emotional information in the two modalities of presentation, visual and auditory, in 32 schoolchildren of 8-9 years old. We studied the recognition of four basic emotions: «happiness», «sadness», «anger», «fear» in facial expressions and in tone of voice. We found that in visual perception, the identification of emotion is more accurate. The lack of correlation between the results of emotions recognition in different modalities indicates the independence of processes of emotion recognition in the visual and auditory modalities. The detected hierarchically coincident unevenness in forming different emotion perception mechanism in both modalities, apparently, is largely determined by external factors.