This study of 501 children and adults found that subjects with mental retardation or borderline intelligence were less proficient at identifying facial expressions of emotion than were children of average intelligence. Among individuals with mental retardation or borderline intelligence, recognition increased with intelligence quotient. Among…

Children's ability to recognize emotional expressions from faces and bodies develops during childhood. However, the low-level features that support accurate body emotion recognition during development have not been well characterized. This is in marked contrast to facial emotion recognition, which is known to depend upon specific spatial frequency…

Although the recognition of the affective experiences of peers is an important prerequisite for social adaptation, children's ability to recognize peers' facial displays of emotion remains unexamined. To investigate the degree to which young children were able to enact expressions of emotion that were recognizable by peers and adults, and to…

Compared the recognition of emotion from facial expression by 72 Chinese and 72 Australian children using photographs of Chinese and Caucasian faces. Results provide some evidence for an ethnic bias effect in emotion recognition and demonstrate an increase in overall accuracy with age. Cultural differences are discussed. (SLD)

When face processing studies find sex differences, male infants appear better at face recognition than female infants, whereas female adults appear better at face recognition than male adults. Both female infants and adults, however, discriminate emotional expressions better than males. To investigate if sex and age differences in facial scanning…

We compared young people with high-functioning autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) with age, sex and IQ matched controls on emotion recognition of faces and pictorial context. Each participant completed two tests of emotion recognition. The first used Ekman series faces. The second used facial expressions in visual context. A control task involved…

Our facial expressions give others the opportunity to access our feelings, and constitute an important nonverbal tool for communication. Many recent studies have investigated emotional perception in adults, and our knowledge of neural processes involved in emotions is increasingly precise. Young children also use faces to express their internal…

The emotion understanding of children with language impairment (LI) was examined in two studies employing emotion-recognition tasks selected to minimize reliance on language skills. Participants consisted of 43 children with LI and 43 typically developing, age-matched peers, sampled from the age ranges of 5 to 8 and 9 to 12 years. In the first…

The purpose of this study was to trace the development of children's understanding of emotions between the ages of 4 and 12. Twenty-four children at each of five age groups (4, 6, 8, 10, and 12), equally divided by sex, served as subjects. Three groups of tasks were administered: (1) the recognition of facial expressions from photographs, (2) the…