Abstract
Access to validated stimuli depicting children’s facial expressions is useful for different research domains (e.g., developmental, cognitive or social psychology). Yet, such databases are scarce in comparison to others portraying adult models, and validation procedures are typically restricted to emotional recognition accuracy. This work presents subjective ratings for a sub-set of 283 photographs selected from the Child Affective Facial Expression set (CAFE [1]). Extending beyond the original emotion recognition accuracy norms [2], our main goal was to validate this database across eight subjective dimensions related to the model (e.g., attractiveness, familiarity) or the specific facial expression (e.g., intensity, genuineness), using a sample from a different nationality (N = 450 Portuguese participants). We also assessed emotion recognition (forced-choice task with seven options: anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, surprise and neutral). Overall results show that most photographs were rated as highly clear, genuine and intense facial expressions. The models were rated as both moderately familiar and likely to belong to the in-group, obtaining high attractiveness and arousal ratings. Results also showed that, similarly to the original study, the facial expressions were accurately recognized. Normative and raw data are available as supplementary material at https://osf.io/mjqfx/.
Highlights
Children communicate positive and negative emotions through multiple channels, namely: vocalizations, gestures, body postures, body movements and facial expressions
The goal of the current work was to extend the available norms for the Child Affective Facial Expression (CAFE; [2]), a database that exclusively includes photographs depicting facial expressions of children
The preliminary analysis of the data showed no indication of systematic responses and a small percentage of outliers (1.02%—outliers were identified considering the criterion of 2.5 standard deviations above or below the mean evaluation of each stimulus in a given dimension)
Summary
Children communicate positive and negative emotions through multiple channels, namely: vocalizations, gestures, body postures, body movements and facial expressions (for a review, see [3]). Do facial expressions signal the children’s emotional state, but they can evoke behavioral motives (e.g., motivation to nurture) in the observers (for a review, see [4]). Parent-child interaction and parental mental health may be predicted by how accurately the children’s emotional expression is perceived (for a review, see [5]). The availability of validated children’s facial expressions databases is important for several research domains. In contrast to databases depicting adult models, such databases
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