Children track probabilistic distributions of facial cues across individuals
Open accessAbstract
Children face a difficult task in learning how to reason about other people's emotions. How intensely facial configurations are displayed can vary not only according to what and how much emotion people are experiencing, but also across individuals based on differences in personality, gender, and culture. To navigate these sources of variability, children may use statistical information about other's facial cues to make interpretations about perceived emotions in others. We examined this possibility by testing children's ability to adjust to differences in the intensity of facial cues across different individuals. In the present study, children (6- to 10-year-olds) categorized the information communicated by facial configurations of emotion varying continuously from "calm" to "upset," with differences in the intensity of each actor's facial movements. We found that children's threshold for categorizing a facial configuration as "upset" shifted depending on the statistical information encountered about each of the different individuals. These results suggest that children are able to track individual differences in facial behavior and use these differences to flexibly update their interpretations of facial cues associated with emotion. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).
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- Authors
- Woodard, K., Plate, R. C., & Pollak, S. D.
- Venue
- Journal of Experimental Psychology: General
- Published
- 2022-02
- Volume
- 151
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 506-511
- ISSN
- 0096-3445 (ISSN-L)
- 1939-2222
- PMC
- PMC8923917
- OpenAlex
- W3201711748
- Cited by
- 9
- References
- 26
- Citations by year
- 2026: 1 · 2025: 2 · 2024: 1 · 2023: 1 · 2022: 3 · 2021: 1
- FWCI
- 0.79
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- hybrid
- doi.org
- Locations
- Journal of Experimental Psychology General (publishedVersion, other-oa)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- PubMed Central (acceptedVersion)
- OSF Preprints (OSF Preprints) (submittedVersion)
- Funders
- National Institute of Mental Health (MH61285)
- National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (U54 HD090256)
- University of Wisconsin
- National Science Foundation (DGE-1256259)
- Sponsor name not included
- Topics
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Face Recognition and Perception
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Developmental and Educational Psychology › Child and Animal Learning Development
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Clinical Psychology › Child and Adolescent Psychosocial and Emotional Development
- Keywords
- emotion perception, facial expressions, children, probabilistic reasoning, statistical learning, individual differences, emotion classification, social cognition development
- MeSH terms
- Child, Cues, Emotions, Face, Facial Expression, Humans, Learning
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