How do children's early social experiences influence their perception of emotion-specific information communicated by the face? To examine this question, we tested a group of abused children who had been exposed to extremely high levels of parental anger expression and physical threat. Children were presented with arrays of stimuli that depicted…

Two experiments assessed recognition of emotion among physically abused and neglected preschoolers. Results showed that neglected children had more difficulty discriminating emotional expressions that control or abused children. Abused children displayed response bias for angry facial expressions. Control children viewed discrete emotions as…

Examined visual perception of emotion in typically developing and physically abused children, focusing on the sequential, content-based properties of feature detection in emotion recognition processes. Found that physically abused children accurately identified facial displays of anger on the basis of less sensory input than did typically…