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The development of emotion‐processing in children: effects of age, emotion, and intensity
Author(s) -
Herba Catherine M.,
Landau Sabine,
Russell Tamara,
Ecker Christine,
Phillips Mary L.
Publication year - 2006
Publication title -
journal of child psychology and psychiatry
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 3.652
H-Index - 211
eISSN - 1469-7610
pISSN - 0021-9630
DOI - 10.1111/j.1469-7610.2006.01652.x
Subject(s) - psychology , disgust , anger , facial expression , cognitive psychology , emotive , affect (linguistics) , developmental psychology , emotion classification , expression (computer science) , emotional expression , emotionality , social psychology , communication , philosophy , epistemology , computer science , programming language
Background: This study examined the effects of age and two novel factors (intensity and emotion category) on healthy children's developing emotion‐processing from 4 to 15 years using two matching paradigms. Methods: An explicit emotion‐matching task was employed in which children matched the emotion of a target individual, and an implicit task whereby participants ignored the emotive facial stimulus and matched identity. Four intensities (25%, 50%, 75%, and 100%) for each of five emotion categories (sad, anger, happy, fear, and disgust) were included and provided a novel avenue of emotion‐processing exploration. Results: Increasing age significantly improved children's performance on both tasks, particularly for fear and disgust. Age was not associated with more subtle processing (i.e., lower intensity of expression). When explicitly matching emotion expressions, increasing intensity was associated with improved performance. When matching identities (implicit emotion‐matching), emotion category and intensity influenced task performance. Sex effects were minimal. Conclusions: In children, age, facial expression intensity and emotion category are important for predicting accuracy on emotion‐processing tasks. Emotion category and expression intensity differentially affect performance on explicit and implicit emotion‐processing tasks.