Abstract
ABSTRACTThere is substantial evidence to suggest that deafness is associated with delays in emotion understanding, which has been attributed to delays in language acquisition and opportunities to converse. However, studies addressing the ability to recognise facial expressions of emotion have produced equivocal findings. The two experiments presented here attempt to clarify emotion recognition in deaf children by considering two aspects: the role of motion and the role of intensity in deaf children’s emotion recognition. In Study 1, 26 deaf children were compared to 26 age-matched hearing controls on a computerised facial emotion recognition task involving static and dynamic expressions of 6 emotions. Eighteen of the deaf and 18 age-matched hearing controls additionally took part in Study 2, involving the presentation of the same 6 emotions at varying intensities. Study 1 showed that deaf children’s emotion recognition was better in the dynamic rather than static condition, whereas the hearing children showed no difference in performance between the two conditions. In Study 2, the deaf children performed no differently from the hearing controls, showing improved recognition rates with increasing rates of intensity. With the exception of disgust, no differences in individual emotions were found. These findings highlight the importance of using ecologically valid stimuli to assess emotion recognition.
Highlights
Developing children learn about emotions in a linguistic and social context, usually through interactions with siblings and friends (Taumeopeau & Ruffman, 2008), and by discussing or overhearing discussions about emotional experiences with their parents (Symons, 2004)
The studies presented in this paper were the first to investigate the effect of motion on deaf children’s emotion identification, and to clarify whether deaf children have difficulty in emotion recognition relative to their hearing peers in middle childhood (i.e. 6–12year-olds)
The main finding was that deaf children were poorer at recognising static images relative to hearing controls, even when controlling for age, but there were no differences between groups in recognising dynamic images
Summary
Developing children learn about emotions in a linguistic and social context, usually through interactions with siblings and friends (Taumeopeau & Ruffman, 2008), and by discussing or overhearing discussions about emotional experiences with their parents (Symons, 2004). 3–4-year-old deaf children with CIs were poorer than their hearing peers at labelling emotional facial expressions in cartoons (Wiefferink, Rieffe, Ketelaar, De Raeve, & Frijns, 2013). Sidera, Amadó, and Martínez (2016) recently found 3–8year-old deaf children to be relatively poorer than hearing controls in their ability to match emotion words to facial expressions of emotion portrayed in cartoons, but only in the emotions, fear, disgust and surprise. These results revealed that linguistic skills were related to emotion recognition, even when controlling for age. While CIs might improve access to conversations about emotions, it is important to note that CIs remain highly variable in their effectiveness in improving access to spoken language (Niparko et al, 2010), and many deaf children still use HAs as their hearing amplification device
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