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Impact of familiarity upon children's developing facial expression recognition
Author(s) -
Herba Catherine M.,
Benson Philip,
Landau Sabine,
Russell Tamara,
Goodwin Claire,
Lemche Erwin,
Santosh Paramala,
Phillips Mary
Publication year - 2008
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.1469-7610.2007.01835.x
Subject(s) - disgust , psychology , anger , happiness , facial expression , salience (neuroscience) , developmental psychology , typically developing , affect (linguistics) , expression (computer science) , emotional expression , emotion classification , cognitive psychology , social psychology , communication , autism , computer science , programming language
Background: The impact of personal familiarity upon children's developing emotion‐processing has been largely ignored in previous research, yet may prove particularly important given the emotional salience of such stimuli and children's greater exposure to familiar others compared to strangers. We examined the impact of personal familiarity upon developing facial expression recognition (FER). Methods: Participants included 153 children, 4–15 years old. We employed dynamic expressions of five emotions (happy, sad, anger, fear, disgust), posed by familiar (parents, teachers) and unfamiliar identities. Results: Accuracy improved with age for recognising sad and fear expressions, but not anger. Children tended to correctly recognise happiness and fear at lower intensities. The impact of familiarity on FER depended on emotion‐category. Familiarity did not affect recognition of sad expressions, but children were less accurate at recognising anger, fear, and disgust in familiar individuals compared to strangers. Conclusion: Personal familiarity may exert a distracting effect on children's performance. Findings highlight the importance of incorporating different emotion‐categories and familiarity when examining the development of FER. Clinical implications are discussed.