Development of Facial Emotion Recognition in Childhood: Age-related Differences in a Shortened Version of the Facial Expression of Emotions - Stimuli and Tests. Data from an ongoing study

OBJECTIVE: Facial emotion recognition is a crucial aspect of social cognition and deficits have been shown to be related to psychiatric disorders in adults and children. However, the development of facial emotion recognition is less clear (Herba & Philips, 2004) and an appropriate instrument to measure specific facial emotion recognition in the pediatric population is lacking. For adults, The Facial Expression of Emotions – Stimuli and Tests (FEEST; Young et al., 2002) has become a widely used instrument to assess emotion recognition, enabling clinicians to assess deficits in the recognition of specific emotions. We propose a Dutch shortened version of the FEEST (FEEST-36 by Veenstra, Huitema, & Aarnoudse, 2010) to investigate typical development of facial emotion recognition and for detecting emotion recognition difficulties in children with acquired brain injury. PARTICIPANTS AND METHOD: 111 normally developed children (50 boys, 61 girls) between 3.6-12.5 years of age participated (MAge=7.66, SDAge=2.5; MIQ=109.95, SDIQ=12.96) in this our study. The FEEST-36 consists of 36 black and white pictures of men and women expressing the six basic emotions: Anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness and surprise. The relationship between total scores, IQ, gender and age was investigated. RESULTS: A multiple linear regression analysis revealed that is a good predictor of the facial emotion recognition measured with the FEEST-36. Intelligence adds very little information to the model and gender does not predict facial emotion recognition in our sample. Looking at specific emotions, we see that recognition of disgust, fear, sadness and surprise is influenced by age. Younger children are significantly less accurate in recognizing those emotions. DISCUSSION: Our results show that there are significant age-related differences in facial emotion recognition. Happiness is recognized by children of all ages in our sample. Recognition of sadness and anger does not seem to change much between the ages 3.6 and 12.5. However, the recognition of surprise, disgust and fear increases evidently with age. A possible explanation might be that the recognition of these emotions relies on brain structures that continue to develop throughout childhood and adolescence (Thomas et al., 2007). Future studies in our group will focus on developing normative data for the FEEST-36 in order to make it available for use in clinical practice with pediatric patients.