Development Of Emotion Perception Research Articles

Emotion perception in children with cochlear implants and with hearing aids

Emotion recognition is an important part of human communication and this ability contributes to children’s social development. Children with hearing loss may have difficulties perceiving relevant acoustic cues conveying emotions, but the combined effects of neuroplasticity, physiological effects from hearing loss, and the compensatory features of hearing aids and cochlear implants are not fully understood. As a result, it is also unclear if difficulties in vocal emotion perception are mostly due to a reduced access to relevant acoustic cues, an acute effect. Additionally, the ability to recognize and label emotions may develop differently in children with hearing loss, an accumulated effect over a longer period of time that may be less directly related to hearing difficulties. We will present findings from recent studies on vocal emotion recognition from semantically meaningless sentences in children (6–18 years) with cochlear implants or with hearing aids, and preliminary results from ongoing work on both vocal and facial emotion recognition in hearing aided children (6–18 years). These data show a large variability in performance, indicating some children with hearing loss mayhave great difficulties. We will discuss potentially relevant contributing factors in the development of emotion perception in children with hearing loss.

The Development of Emotion Perception: Evidence from an Unconstrained Sorting Task

The Development of Emotion Perception: Evidence from an Unconstrained Sorting Task

Cross-cultural differences in the development of emotion perception from face and voice between Japanese and Dutch speakers

Recent studies have demonstrated cultural differences in multisensory emotion perception from faces and voices. Tanaka et al. (2010, Psychol. Sci.) showed that Japanese people are more tuned than Dutch people to vocal processing in adults. The current study investigated how such a cultural difference develops in children and adults. In the experiment, Japanese and Dutch participants observed affective expressions of both Japanese and Dutch actors. A face and a voice, expressing either congruent or incongruent emotions, were presented simultaneously on each trial. Participants judged whether the person is happy or angry. Results in incongruent trials showed that the rate of vocal responses was higher in Japanese than Dutch participants in adults, especially when in-group speakers expressed a happy face with an angry voice. The rate of vocal responses was very low and not significantly different between Japanese and Dutch 5-6-year-olds. However, it increased over age in Japanese participants, while it remained the same in Dutch participants. These results reveal the developmental onset of cultural differences in multisensory emotion perception.

The development of emotion perception in face and voice during infancy

Interacting with others by reading their emotional expressions is an essential social skill in humans. How this ability develops during infancy and what brain processes underpin infants' perception of emotion in different modalities are the questions dealt with in this paper. Literature review. The first part provides a systematic review of behavioral findings on infants' developing emotion-reading abilities. The second part presents a set of new electrophysiological studies that provide insights into the brain processes underlying infants' developing abilities. Throughout, evidence from unimodal (face or voice) and multimodal (face and voice) processing of emotion is considered. The implications of the reviewed findings for our understanding of developmental models of emotion processing are discussed. The reviewed infant data suggest that (a) early in development, emotion enhances the sensory processing of faces and voices, (b) infants' ability to allocate increased attentional resources to negative emotional information develops earlier in the vocal domain than in the facial domain, and (c) at least by the age of 7 months, infants reliably match and recognize emotional information across face and voice.

Experiential Influences on Multimodal Perception of Emotion

The impact of 2 types of learning experiences on children's perception of multimodal emotion cues was examined. Children (aged 7-12 years) were presented with conflicting facial and vocal emotions. The effects of familiarity were tested by varying whether emotions were presented by familiar or unfamiliar adults. The salience of particular emotional expressions was tested by contrasting the performance of physically abused and nonabused children. Children exhibited a preference for auditory expressions produced by their mothers but not by strangers. Additionally, abused children were biased to rely on auditory cues when their own abusive mother was expressing anger. These results are discussed in terms of the impact of both typical and atypical early experiences on the development of emotion perception.