It is unknown whether linguistic cues influence preschoolers' recognition of facial expression when the emotion of the face is incongruent with the linguistic cues and what type of linguistic cue is influential in the modulation of facial expression. In a priming task, we presented 5-year-old children three types of linguistic information…

The amygdala has been implicated in the recognition of facial emotions, especially fearful expressions, in adults with early-onset right temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE). The present study investigates the recognition of facial emotions in children and adolescents, 8-16 years old, with epilepsy. Twenty-nine subjects had TLE (13 right, 16 left) and…

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…

Background: This study was designed to assess whether children with a sensory disability have consistent delays in acquiring emotion recognition and emotion understanding abilities. Method: Younger (6-11 years) and older (12-18 years) hearing-impaired children (HI; n = 49), vision-impaired children (VI; n = 42), and children with no sensory…

The study investigated the recognition of standardized facial expressions of emotion (anger, fear, disgust, happiness, sadness, surprise) at a perceptual level (experiment 1) and at a semantic level (experiments 2 and 3) in children with autism (N= 20) and normally developing children (N= 20). Results revealed that children with autism were as…

Recognizing facial affect is essential for effective social functioning. This study examines emotion recognition abilities in children aged 7-13 years with High Functioning Autism (HFA = 19), Social Phobia (SP = 17), or typical development (TD = 21). Findings indicate that all children identified certain emotions more quickly (e.g., happy [less…

Recent studies demonstrated that in adults and children recognition of face identity and facial expression mutually interact (Bate, Haslam, & Hodgson, 2009; Spangler, Schwarzer, Korell, & Maier-Karius, 2010). Here, using a familiarization paradigm, we explored the relation between these processes in early infancy, investigating whether 3-month-old…

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 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…