A facial expression of pax: Assessing children's "recognition" of emotion from faces

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology
Nicole L Nelson, James A Russell

Abstract

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.

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Jan 10, 2003·Developmental Psychology·Sherri C Widen, James A Russell
Sep 29, 2005·Emotion·Jessica L TracyKristin H Lagattuta
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Apr 20, 2011·Emotion·Eszter SzékelyCatherine M Herba
Apr 29, 2011·Journal of Experimental Child Psychology·Nicole L Nelson, James A Russell
May 17, 2011·Emotion Review : Journal of the International Society for Research on Emotion·Paul C QuinnJames W Tanaka
Jun 26, 2013·Emotion·Mary H Kayyal, James A Russell
Aug 2, 2013·The British Journal of Developmental Psychology·Nicole L NelsonJames A Russell
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Jan 23, 2015·Psychological Science·Maria GendronLisa Feldman Barrett
Sep 9, 2015·Developmental Psychology·Nicole L Nelson, James A Russell

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Citations

May 26, 2016·Journal of Experimental Child Psychology·Nicole L Nelson, James A Russell
Aug 10, 2017·Cognition & Emotion·Lydia Whitaker, Sherri C Widen
Dec 20, 2018·Cognition & Emotion·Abbie L CoyCatherine J Mondloch
Sep 28, 2017·Current Opinion in Psychology·Kristen A Lindquist
Nov 13, 2021·The Journal of Genetic Psychology·Fernando Nicolás StellaEliana Ruetti

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