Assessing emotion recognition in 9–15-years olds: Preliminary analysis of abilities in reading emotion from faces, voices and eyes

Abstract

Primary objective: Little is known about how emotion recognition abilities develop during childhood and adolescence, although adolescence is a time marked by significant changes in socio-emotional behaviour. The first aim of this study was to explore the range of emotion recognition skills that 9–15-year olds would normally display and whether emotion-reading skills are reliably measurable. Secondly, one wanted to determine whether adolescence is a period during which skills in recognizing emotions improve.Methods and procedures: Novel and adapted measures of emotion processing were used in tasks that required 67 9–15-year olds to read emotion from voices, eyes and faces.Main outcomes and results: Findings indicate that emotion recognition abilities are reliably measurable skills. A stage of improvement in facial expression recognition and reading emotion from eyes was found to occur at ∼11 years of age.Conclusions: The findings show that these skills can be measured and that it is possible to devise assessment tests which are sensitive to developmental improvements in emotion recognition skills in early adolescence, when screening for the effects of child brain injury.