Abstract
In order to assess how the perception of audible speech and facial expressions influence one another for the perception of emotions, and how this influence might change over the course of development, we conducted two cross-modal priming experiments with three age groups of children (6-, 9-, and 12-years old), as well as college-aged adults. In Experiment 1, 74 children and 24 adult participants were tasked with categorizing photographs of emotional faces as positive or negative as quickly as possible after being primed with emotion words presented via audio in valence-congruent and valence-incongruent trials. In Experiment 2, 67 children and 24 adult participants carried out a similar categorization task, but with faces acting as visual primes, and emotion words acting as auditory targets. The results of Experiment 1 showed that participants made more errors when categorizing positive faces primed by negative words versus positive words, and that 6-year-old children are particularly sensitive to positive word primes, giving faster correct responses regardless of target valence. Meanwhile, the results of Experiment 2 did not show any congruency effects for priming by facial expressions. Thus, audible emotion words seem to exert an influence on the emotional categorization of faces, while faces do not seem to influence the categorization of emotion words in a significant way.
Highlights
The perception of basic emotion has been studied extensively in several modalities, with faces and language being among the most extensively studied modalities
EXPERIMENT 1 In Experiment 1 we investigated how children of 6, 9, and 12 years of age compared to adults in performing valence-based categorization of positive and negative emotional expression when they were primed with congruent or incongruent positive or negative emotion words
The effect of congruency was qualified by a significant interaction between congruency and face-valence [F(1,8781) = 4.674, p < 0.05], with post hoc pairwise comparisons showing that congruent trials only differed significantly from incongruent trials for positive faces (p < 0.001), but not for negative faces (p = 0.596), see Figure 2
Summary
The perception of basic emotion has been studied extensively in several modalities, with faces and language being among the most extensively studied modalities (for a recent review see Schirmer and Adolphs, 2017). Cross-Modal Priming of Emotional Categorization under naturalistic conditions, since both audible language and face processing are often used together during social interaction. Another important aspect of the interaction between audible emotional speech and face processing is its course of development during childhood, which is an area that has not been extensively studied far beyond infancy. In the years beyond infancy as children increasingly learn the meaning of emotional words, such interactions can have a crucial impact on how they perceive emotions It was the central aim of the present study to explore the development of the interaction between the modalities of audible speech and faces in the perception of basic emotion during childhood
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
