No Own-Age Advantage in Children's Recognition of Emotion on Prototypical Faces of Different Ages.
Ontology highlight
ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Griffiths S
PROVIDER: S-EPMC4433217 | biostudies-literature | 2015
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
Publications
No Own-Age Advantage in Children's Recognition of Emotion on Prototypical Faces of Different Ages.
Griffiths Sarah S Penton-Voak Ian S IS Jarrold Chris C Munafò Marcus R MR
PloS one 20150515 5
We test whether there is an own-age advantage in emotion recognition using prototypical younger child, older child and adult faces displaying emotional expressions. Prototypes were created by averaging photographs of individuals from 6 different age and sex categories (male 5-8 years, male 9-12 years, female 5-8 years, female 9-12 years, adult male and adult female), each posing 6 basic emotional expressions. In the study 5-8 year old children (n = 33), 9-13 year old children (n = 70) and adults ...[more]
Similar Datasets
Project description:Emotions play an important role in human communication, and the daily-life interactions of young children often include situations that require the verbalization of emotional states with verbal means, e.g., with emotion terms. Through them, one can express own emotional states and those of others. Thus, the acquisition of emotion terms allows children to participate more intensively in social contexts - a basic requirement for learning new words and for elaborating socio-emotional skills. However, little is known about how children acquire and process this specific word category, which is positioned between concrete and abstract words. In particular, the influence of valence on emotion word processing during childhood has not been sufficiently investigated. Previous research points to an advantage of positive words over negative and neutral words in word processing. While previous studies found valence effects to be influenced by factors such as arousal, frequency, concreteness, and task, it is still unclear if and how valence effects are also modified by age. The present study compares the performance of children aged from 5 to 12 years and adults in two experimental tasks: lexical decision (word or pseudoword) and emotional categorization (positive or negative). Stimuli consisted of 48 German emotion terms (24 positive and 24 negative) matched for arousal, concreteness, age of acquisition, word class, word length, morphological complexity, frequency, and neighborhood density. Results from both tasks reveal two developmental trends: First, with increasing age children responded faster and more correctly, suggesting that emotion vocabulary gradually becomes more stable and differentiated during middle childhood. Second, the influence of valence varied with age: younger children (5- and 6-year-olds) showed significantly higher performance levels for positive emotion terms compared to negative emotion terms, whereas older children and adults did not. This age-related valence effect in emotion word processing will be discussed with respect to linguistic and methodological aspects.
| S-EPMC5526962 | biostudies-other
Project description:Age constitutes a salient feature of a face and signals group membership. There is evidence of greater attention to and better memory for own-age than other-age faces. However, little is known about the neural and behavioral mechanisms underlying processing differences for own-age vs. other-age faces. Even less is known about the impact of emotion expressed in faces on such own-age effects. Using fMRI, the present study examined brain activity while young and older adult participants identified expressions of neutral, happy, and angry young and older faces. Across facial expressions, medial prefrontal cortex, insula, and (for older participants) amygdala showed greater activity to own-age than other-age faces. These own-age effects in ventral medial prefrontal cortex and insula held for neutral and happy faces, but not for angry faces. This novel and intriguing finding suggests that processing of negative facial emotions under some conditions overrides age-of-face effects.
| S-EPMC3684564 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Background:Existing literature suggests that age affects recognition of affective facial expressions. Eye-tracking studies highlighted that age-related differences in recognition of emotions could be explained by different face exploration patterns due to attentional impairment. Gender also seems to play a role in recognition of emotions. Unfortunately, little is known about the differences in emotion perception abilities across lifespans for men and women, even if females show more ability from infancy. Objective:The present study aimed to examine the role of age and gender on facial emotion recognition in relation to neuropsychological functions and face exploration strategies. We also aimed to explore the associations between emotion recognition and quality of life. Methods:60 healthy people were consecutively enrolled in the study and divided into two groups: Younger Adults and Older Adults. Participants were assessed for: emotion recognition, attention abilities, frontal functioning, memory functioning and quality of life satisfaction. During the execution of the emotion recognition test using the Pictures of Facial Affects (PoFA) and a modified version of PoFA (M-PoFA), subject's eye movements were recorded with an Eye Tracker. Results:Significant differences between younger and older adults were detected for fear recognition when adjusted for cognitive functioning and eye-gaze fixations characteristics. Adjusted means of fear recognition were significantly higher in the younger group than in the older group. With regard to gender's effects, old females recognized identical pairs of emotions better than old males. Considering the Satisfaction Profile (SAT-P) we detected negative correlations between some dimensions (Physical functioning, Sleep/feeding/free time) and emotion recognition (i.e., sadness, and disgust). Conclusion:The current study provided novel insights into the specific mechanisms that may explain differences in emotion recognition, examining how age and gender differences can be outlined by cognitive functioning and face exploration strategies.
| S-EPMC6819430 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Many cognitive bias modification (CBM) tasks use facial expressions of emotion as stimuli. Some tasks use unique facial stimuli, while others use composite stimuli, given evidence that emotion is encoded prototypically. However, CBM using composite stimuli may be identity- or emotion-specific, and may not generalise to other stimuli. We investigated the generalisability of effects using composite faces in two experiments. Healthy adults in each study were randomised to one of four training conditions: two stimulus-congruent conditions, where same faces were used during all phases of the task, and two stimulus-incongruent conditions, where faces of the opposite sex (Experiment 1) or faces depicting another emotion (Experiment 2) were used after the modification phase. Our results suggested that training effects generalised across identities. However, our results indicated only partial generalisation across emotions. These findings suggest effects obtained using composite stimuli may extend beyond the stimuli used in the task but remain emotion-specific.
| S-EPMC5448393 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Cartoon faces are widely used in social media, animation production, and social robots because of their attractive ability to convey different emotional information. Despite their popular applications, the mechanisms of recognizing emotional expressions in cartoon faces are still unclear. Therefore, three experiments were conducted in this study to systematically explore a recognition process for emotional cartoon expressions (happy, sad, and neutral) and to examine the influence of key facial features (mouth, eyes, and eyebrows) on emotion recognition. Across the experiments, three presentation conditions were employed: (1) a full face; (2) individual feature only (with two other features concealed); and (3) one feature concealed with two other features presented. The cartoon face images used in this study were converted from a set of real faces acted by Chinese posers, and the observers were Chinese. The results show that happy cartoon expressions were recognized more accurately than neutral and sad expressions, which was consistent with the happiness recognition advantage revealed in real face studies. Compared with real facial expressions, sad cartoon expressions were perceived as sadder, and happy cartoon expressions were perceived as less happy, regardless of whether full-face or single facial features were viewed. For cartoon faces, the mouth was demonstrated to be a feature that is sufficient and necessary for the recognition of happiness, and the eyebrows were sufficient and necessary for the recognition of sadness. This study helps to clarify the perception mechanism underlying emotion recognition in cartoon faces and sheds some light on directions for future research on intelligent human-computer interactions.
| S-EPMC8382696 | biostudies-literature
Project description:People have a memory advantage for faces that belong to the same group, for example, that attend the same university or have the same personality type. Faces from such in-group members are assumed to receive more attention during memory encoding and are therefore recognized more accurately. Here we use event-related potentials related to memory encoding and retrieval to investigate the neural correlates of the in-group memory advantage. Using the minimal group procedure, subjects were classified based on a bogus personality test as belonging to one of two personality types. While the electroencephalogram was recorded, subjects studied and recognized faces supposedly belonging to the subject's own and the other personality type. Subjects recognized in-group faces more accurately than out-group faces but the effect size was small. Using the individual behavioral in-group memory advantage in multivariate analyses of covariance, we determined neural correlates of the in-group advantage. During memory encoding (300 to 1000 ms after stimulus onset), subjects with a high in-group memory advantage elicited more positive amplitudes for subsequently remembered in-group than out-group faces, showing that in-group faces received more attention and elicited more neural activity during initial encoding. Early during memory retrieval (300 to 500 ms), frontal brain areas were more activated for remembered in-group faces indicating an early detection of group membership. Surprisingly, the parietal old/new effect (600 to 900 ms) thought to indicate recollection processes differed between in-group and out-group faces independent from the behavioral in-group memory advantage. This finding suggests that group membership affects memory retrieval independent of memory performance. Comparisons with a previous study on the other-race effect, another memory phenomenon influenced by social classification of faces, suggested that the in-group memory advantage is dominated by top-down processing whereas the other-race effect is also influenced by extensive perceptual experience.
| S-EPMC3866141 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Emotional databases are important tools to study emotion recognition and their effects on various cognitive processes. Since, well-standardized large-scale emotional expression database is not available in India, we evaluated Radboud faces database (RaFD)-a freely available database of emotional facial expressions of adult Caucasian models, for Indian sample. Using the pictures from RaFD, we investigated the similarity and differences in self-reported ratings on emotion recognition accuracy as well as parameters of valence, clarity, genuineness, intensity and arousal of emotional expression, by following the same rating procedure as used for the validation of RaFD. We also systematically evaluated the universality hypothesis of emotion perception by analyzing differences in accuracy and ratings for different emotional parameters across Indian and Dutch participants. As the original Radboud database lacked arousal rating, we added this as a emotional parameter along with all other parameters. The results show that the overall accuracy of emotional expression recognition by Indian participants was high and very similar to the ratings from Dutch participants. However, there were significant cross-cultural differences in classification of emotion categories and their corresponding parameters. Indians rated certain expressions comparatively more genuine, higher in valence, and less intense in comparison to original Radboud ratings. The misclassifications/ confusion for specific emotional categories differed across the two cultures indicating subtle but significant differences between the cultures. In addition to understanding the nature of facial emotion recognition, this study also evaluates and enables the use of RaFD within Indian population.
| S-EPMC6166925 | biostudies-literature
Project description:With the emergence of new technologies, there has been an explosion of basic and clinical research on the affective and cognitive neuroscience of face processing and emotion perception. Adult emotional face stimuli are commonly used in these studies. For developmental research, there is a need for a validated set of child emotional faces. This paper describes the development of the National Institute of Mental Health Child Emotional Faces Picture Set (NIMH-ChEFS), a relatively large stimulus set with high quality, color images of the emotional faces of children. The set includes 482 photographs of fearful, angry, happy, sad and neutral child faces with two gaze conditions: direct and averted gaze. In this paper we describe the development of the NIMH-ChEFS and data on the set's validity based on ratings by 20 healthy adult raters. Agreement between the a priori emotion designation and the raters' labels was high and comparable with values reported for commonly used adult picture sets. Intensity, representativeness, and composite "goodness" ratings are also presented to guide researchers in their choice of specific stimuli for their studies. These data should give researchers confidence in the NIMH-ChEFS's validity for use in affective and social neuroscience research.
| S-EPMC3342041 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Human-machine communication can be substantially enhanced by the inclusion of high-quality real-time recognition of spontaneous human emotional expressions. However, successful recognition of such expressions can be negatively impacted by factors such as sudden variations of lighting, or intentional obfuscation. Reliable recognition can be more substantively impeded due to the observation that the presentation and meaning of emotional expressions can vary significantly based on the culture of the expressor and the environment within which the emotions are expressed. As an example, an emotion recognition model trained on a regionally-specific database collected from North America might fail to recognize standard emotional expressions from another region, such as East Asia. To address the problem of regional and cultural bias in emotion recognition from facial expressions, we propose a meta-model that fuses multiple emotional cues and features. The proposed approach integrates image features, action level units, micro-expressions and macro-expressions into a multi-cues emotion model (MCAM). Each of the facial attributes incorporated into the model represents a specific category: fine-grained content-independent features, facial muscle movements, short-term facial expressions and high-level facial expressions. The results of the proposed meta-classifier (MCAM) approach show that a) the successful classification of regional facial expressions is based on non-sympathetic features b) learning the emotional facial expressions of some regional groups can confound the successful recognition of emotional expressions of other regional groups unless it is done from scratch and c) the identification of certain facial cues and features of the data-sets that serve to preclude the design of the perfect unbiased classifier. As a result of these observations we posit that to learn certain regional emotional expressions, other regional expressions first have to be "forgotten".
| S-EPMC10209154 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Children born preterm (<37 weeks' gestation) show a specific vulnerability for socio-emotional difficulties, which may lead to an increased likelihood of developing behavioral and psychiatric problems in adolescence and adulthood. The accurate decoding of emotional signals from faces represents a fundamental prerequisite for early social interactions, allowing children to derive information about others' feelings and intentions. The present study aims to explore possible differences between preterm and full-term children in the ability to detect emotional expressions, as well as possible relationships between this ability and socio-emotional skills and problem behaviors during everyday activities. We assessed 55 school-age children (n = 34 preterm and n = 21 full-term) with a cognitive battery that ensured comparable cognitive abilities between the two groups. Moreover, children were asked to identify emotional expressions from pictures of peers' faces (Emotion Recognition Task). Finally, children's emotional, social and behavioral outcomes were assessed with parent-reported questionnaires. The results revealed that preterm children were less accurate than full-term children in detecting positive emotional expressions and they showed poorer social and behavioral outcomes. Notably, correlational analyses showed a relationship between the ability to recognize emotional expressions and socio-emotional functioning. The present study highlights that early difficulties in decoding emotional signals from faces may be critically linked to emotional and behavioral regulation problems, with important implications for the development of social skills and effective interpersonal interactions.
| S-EPMC9180201 | biostudies-literature