Children's Use of Expressive and Contextual Cues in Judgments of Emotion

Abstract

REICHENBACH, LISA, and MASTERS, JOHN C. Children's Use of Expressive and Contextual Cues in Judgments ofEmotion. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1983, 54, 993-1004. In 2 experiments, preschool and third-grade children judged the happy, sad, angry, or neutral emotional states of other children on the basis of expressive cues alone (slides of children's facial expressions), contextual cues alone (vignettes describing the stimulus children's emotion-inducing experiences), or both expressive and contextual cues. Older children were more accurate than younger only when given multiple cues. For children of both ages, contextual cues led to greater accuracy in the recognition of emotional states than did expressive cues. When multiple cues were inconsistent with one another, younger children relied more on expressive cues, while older children preferred contextual ones. Children from disrupted families were less accurate in judging emotion in peers, and their misjudgments involved fewer judgments of happiness and more judgments of anger. Results are discussed in terms of cognitive-developmental and social learning processes influencing children's judgment of emotion in others.