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Title

Facial emotion and identity processing development in 5- to 15-year-old children

Author(s)

Johnston, Patrick J.;  Kaufman, Jordy;  Bajic, Julie;  Alicia Sercombe;  Patricia T. Michie;  Frini Karayanidis

Abstract

Most developmental studies of emotional face processing to date have focused on infants and very young children. Additionally, studies that examine emotional face processing in older children do not distinguish development in emotion and identity face processing from more generic age-related cognitive improvement. In this study, we developed a paradigm that measures processing of facial expression in comparison to facial identity and complex visual stimuli. The three matching tasks were developed (i.e., facial emotion matching, facial identity matching, and butterfly wing matching) to include stimuli of similar level of discriminability and to be equated for task difficulty in earlier samples of young adults. Ninety-two children aged 5-15 years and a new group of 24 young adults completed these three matching tasks. Young children were highly adept at the butterfly wing task relative to their performance on both face-related tasks. More importantly, in older children, development of facial emotion discrimination ability lagged behind that of facial identity discrimination.

Publication type

Journal article

Research centre

Swinburne University of Technology. Faculty of Life and Social Sciences. Brain and Psychological Sciences Research Centre

Source

Frontiers in Psychology, Vol. 2, no. 6 (Feb 2011)

Publication year

2011

Keyword(s)

Development;  Face processing;  Facial emotion;  Facial identity

Publisher

Frontiers Research Foundation

ISSN

1664-1078

Publisher URL

http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2011.00026

Copyright

Copyright © 2011 Johnston, Kaufman, Bajic, Sercombe, Michie and Karayanidis. This is an open-access article subject to an exclusive license agreement between the authors and Frontiers Media SA, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original authors and source are credited.

Full text

Peer reviewed