Children’s recognition of emotion expressed by own-race versus other-race faces

Abstract

Adults are less accurate at recognizing emotions expressed by individuals from a different cultural background. However, the research with children is less clear; whereas some studies suggest better emotion recognition for own-race and own-culture faces, others have found no such relationship. The current study examined the influence of race on emotion recognition in children and adults who share a cultural background (i.e., Canadian). Based on previous studies, we hypothesized that participants would demonstrate better emotion recognition for own-race faces. We also hypothesized that emotion recognition would improve across the lifespan (from childhood to adulthood) and as a function of emotion, such that recognition would be better for happy faces than for the other emotions. Children (n = 69; ages 6–10 years; 41 female) and adults (n = 82; mean age = 19.94 years; 72 female) of Western European or South Asian descent were asked to complete a five-alternative forced-choice emotion recognition task (anger, fear, happiness, sadness, and neutral) in which expressions were displayed by White and South Asian faces. As predicted, adults performed better than older children, who performed better than younger children, and participants performed best on happy faces. South Asian participants, but not White participants, performed better when judging own-race faces compared with other-race faces. This finding only partially supports an own-race bias in emotion recognition and may reflect the tendency in the literature to conflate culture and race. More studies are needed to understand cross-race emotion recognition when individuals share the same culture.