Abstract
The present study examined emotional facial perception (happy and angry) in 7, 9 and 11-year-old children from Caucasian and multicultural environments with an offset task for two ethnic groups of faces (Asian and Caucasian). In this task, participants were required to respond to a dynamic facial expression video when they believed that the first emotion presented had disappeared. Moreover, using an eye-tracker, we evaluated the ocular behavior pattern used to process these different faces. The analyses of reaction times do not show an emotional other-race effect (i.e., a facility in discriminating own-race faces over to other-race ones) in Caucasian children for Caucasian vs. Asian faces through offset times, but an effect of emotional face appeared in the oldest children. Furthermore, an eye-tracked ocular emotion and race-effect relative to processing strategies is observed and evolves between age 7 and 11. This study strengthens the interest in advancing an eye-tracking study in developmental and emotional processing studies, showing that even a “silent” effect should be detected and shrewdly analyzed through an objective means.
Highlights
Emotional facial perception is a complex process that develops in childhood from the earliest days of life
We included 7, 9 and 11 year-old children in a multicultural public school who had to perform an offset task, in order to detect their sensitivity to facial emotional cues through reaction times and/or ocular behavior
There was not a significant difference in reaction time performance between Caucasian and Asian emotional expression processing. This result is consistent with a previous study using this task that showed an emotional other-race effect in Vietnamese children but not in their Swiss counterparts [64]. This observation is made in the integrated Swiss population, in a city composed of 48% foreign residents [71, 72]
Summary
Emotional facial perception is a complex process that develops in childhood from the earliest days of life. The ability to recognize facial expressions emerges early, at around the age of 7 months [1,2,3] Despite this early emotional skills enhancement, the improvement of facial expression perception persists during childhood until about age 14 [4] parallel to frontal cortical maturation. Wilson and Taylor [4] showed that happy faces were perceived well by 6-year-old children as by adults whereas other emotional faces were perceived poorly until adolescence, showing the importance of considering the development of emotional facial expressions individually.
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