Emotion Recognition in Preschool Children: The Role of Age, Gender and Emotional Categories

This study aims to contribute to the research on emotion recognition through facial cues during preschool age, which is a critical period for human cognitive development. The work investigates differences between 3-year and 5-year-old children in the ability to decode facial expressions of five emotions (happiness, anger, surprise, sadness and fear), by using three different types of stimuli: children faces, stylized faces and picto. To this aim, 133 children aged between 3 and 5.6 years (mean age = 4.2; SD = 0.9; 65 females) were recruited and assigned to six different groups according to their age (3-year-olds versus 5-year-olds) and the type of stimuli presented (children faces, stylized faces, picto) during the experimental session. Children were presented with one of the three sets of stimuli, and they were required to perform an emotional recognition task. Three repeated measures ANOVAs were separately conducted on the recognition accuracy scores associated with the three different types of stimuli. Results show that children’s age and emotional category play a crucial role in the emotion recognition process, even though to a different extent for each type of stimuli. Instead, gender differences were observed only in response to children's facial expressions. These results will be discussed in the proposed paper, considering the implications they may have for human–computer interaction research.