Relation between processing facial identity and emotional expression in typically developing school-age children and those with Down syndrome

Abstract

The main purposes of this research were to examine the relation between the processing of face identity and emotion expressions and then discern the significance of emotional expressions using Bruce et al. tasks. Two studies were conducted. Study 1 examined 225 typically developing (TD) children age 4 to 12. Results suggested that early recognition of complete faces and interpretation of emotional expression might depend on local processing abilities, while the recognition of masked faces and emotion expression matching seemed to share configural processing. Study 2 compared 22 children with Down syndrome (DS) to two TD groups matched on mental age (MA group) and chronological age (CA group). Results showed that children with DS processed the identity of complete faces (local processing) similarly to the MA and CA groups. In contrast, their performances for masked faces (configural processing) indicated a developmental delay as they were only comparable to the MA group. Children with DS were also able to identify the emotion expressions according to labels as well as the two control groups, while they had more difficulties on the matching condition. Furthermore, specific difficulties in processing the surprise expression were observed, rather than general difficulties in encoding emotion expressions. Finally, their performances on emotion matching tasks seemed to be supported by local information processing, which might explain their lower scores compared to CA controls that mainly used configural information. These results could aid in the development of targeted interventions for DS to improve their social skills.