A facial expression of pax: Assessing children鈥檚 鈥渞ecognition鈥?of emotion from faces

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• 作者：Nicole L. Nelson^a ; ^{n.nelson@uq.edu.au" class="auth_mail" title="E-mail the corresponding author} ; James A. Russell^b
• 关键词：Facial expressions ; Emotion ; Jealousy ; Fear ; Children ; Process of elimination
• 刊名：Journal of Experimental Child Psychology
• 出版年：2016
• 出版时间：January 2016
• 年：2016
• 卷：141
• 期：Complete
• 页码：49-64
• 全文大小：395 K

文摘

In a classic study, children were shown an array of facial expressions and asked to choose the person who expressed a specific emotion. Children were later asked to name the emotion in the face with any label they wanted. Subsequent research often relied on the same two tasks—choice from array and free labeling—to support the conclusion that children recognize basic emotions from facial expressions. Here five studies (N = 120, 2- to 10-year-olds) showed that these two tasks produce illusory recognition; a novel nonsense facial expression was included in the array. Children “recognized” a nonsense emotion (pax or tolen) and two familiar emotions (fear and jealousy) from the same nonsense face. Children likely used a process of elimination; they paired the unknown facial expression with a label given in the choice-from-array task and, after just two trials, freely labeled the new facial expression with the new label. These data indicate that past studies using this method may have overestimated children’s expression knowledge.