Abstract
Emotion recognition plays an important role in children’s socio-emotional development. Research on children’s emotion recognition has heavily relied on stimulus sets of photos of adults posed stereotyped facial configurations. The Child Affective Facial Expression set (CAFE) is a relatively new stimulus set that provides researchers with photographs of a diverse group of children’s facial configurations in seven emotional categories—angry, sad, happy, fearful, disgusted, surprised, and neutral. However, the large size of the full CAFE set makes it less ideal for research in children. Here, we introduce two subsets of CAFE with 140 photographs of children’s facial configurations in each set, diverse in the race and ethnicity of the models, and designed to produce variability in naïve observers. The subsets have been validated with 1000 adult participants.
Highlights
Ekman and colleagues classically argued that there are a limited set of basic emotions—including happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust, and surprise—that can be recognized universally and from an early age (e.g., Ekman and Friesen, 1971)
We first sorted the faces based on the accuracy scores reported in LoBue and Thrasher (2015), and selected 20 faces with an equal interval, k, and an initial order number, k/2 (k = N/n), where N is the number of faces in the Child Affective Facial Expression set (CAFE) Subset B for the particular emotion category and n is the number of faces we aimed to select (20)
The histograms and Q-Q plots of the distributions of the 20 selected faces for each emotion in CAFE-S1 were presented in Supplementary Materials, together with the histograms of the accuracy scores for faces in the original CAFE Subset B
Summary
Ekman and colleagues classically argued that there are a limited set of basic emotions—including happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust, and surprise—that can be recognized universally and from an early age (e.g., Ekman and Friesen, 1971). Based on the assumption that stereotypical facial configurations that represent these basic emotions are universally expressed and recognized, previous research on emotion recognition has overwhelmingly depended on photographs of adults posing stereotypical configurations of these basic emotion categories While such stimulus sets provide an easy and controlled way of examining responses to human facial expressions, they come with several important limitations. First and foremost, most available stimulus sets of emotional facial configurations only capture the faces of one particular demographic—namely, Caucasian adults, with a few exceptions (e.g., Chicago Face Database, Ma et al, 2015) These sets generally contain very little racial and ethnic diversity among exemplars, and photographic sets of children are extremely rare.
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