Facial affect recognition and social anxiety in preschool children

Abstract

Research relating anxiety and facial affect recognition has focused mostly on school‐aged children and adults and has yielded mixed results. The current study sought to demonstrate an association among behavioural inhibition and parent‐reported social anxiety, shyness, social withdrawal and facial affect recognition performance in 30 children, ages four to five years. Children performed significantly more accurately when labelling child faces than adult faces, t(29) = −2.70, p < .05 and were most accurate in labelling happy faces, t(29) = −2.05, p < .05. Behavioural inhibition, social anxiety, shyness and social withdrawal accounted for a significant portion of variance in children’s labelling of child facial affect, r 2 = .31, F(4,24) = 2.74, p = .05. Findings suggest that children with social anxiety may be highly adept at facial affect interpretation in peers. Future research is needed to more clearly elucidate the role of hypervigilance to social cues in development of anxiety.