Children’s recognition of happy, sad, and angry facial expressions across emotive intensities

Abstract

Sharing emotional experiences is a key task that requires accurate recognition of peers’ emotions during middle childhood. Existing research suggests that children are proficient at discerning emotion from facial expressions during middle childhood, but this research has focused on recognition of adults’ intense emotional expressions. In this study, facial emotion recognition for children’s happy, sad, and angry expressions across low, medium, and high intensities was measured in a sample of 7- to 10-year-old children (N = 80; 53% female) to quantify overall accurate recognition as well as inaccuracies, including identifying an emotion as present when it is not (false alarms) and failing to identify an emotion when present (miss rate). Children’s recognition accuracy for low-threshold happiness, sadness, and anger was quite poor but improved in a cubic fashion as expression intensity increased, with dramatic improvements across medium-intensity expressions, and little further improvement across high-intensity expressions. A positivity bias was evident; children were more accurate at recognizing happiness than at recognizing sadness and anger, rarely failed to identify happiness when present, and tended to mislabel expressions as happy rather than as angry or sad. Children were generally better at recognizing anger compared with sadness but were more accurate at recognizing subtle sadness compared with anger, which appeared to be due to children missing subtle anger when present. The findings are discussed with regard to the functionality of others’ happiness for signaling positive socializing opportunities, anger for signaling threatening interactions, and sadness for prompting prosocial action and with regard to how children’s facial emotion recognition may affect general socioemotional development.