Description
Many studies report that children are less accurate in facial emotion recognition than adults are. However, the faces presented in these studies are most often adult faces. The age of the stimulus could matter: adult participants are better in recognizing emotions in faces their own age than older faces, referred to as 'own-age bias'. If such a bias exists in children as well, this could suggest that their performance is hampered by the stimuli and that children can recognize emotions well. In the current study, we investigated age bias in sensitivity to facial emotions in children (N=152; 6-15 years) and adults (N=30; 19-25 years). Participants categorized emotional faces (neutral, disgust, sad, happy) with four different intensities (25, 50, 75, 100%). Results revealed an age-bias for low intensities (25%) in both children and adults, and for sad faces in children. For disgusted faces children showed an own-age bias. Suprisingly, for sad and happy faces children showed an other-age bias: they were more sensitive to emotions in adult than child faces. These results indicate that the age of the stimulus matters for emotion recognition, particularly for low intensive emotions. However, the existence of an other-age bias suggests that lower performance by children reported in previous studies cannot be fully explained by the stimulus age.| Period | 20 Dec 2019 |
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| Event title | NVP winterconference 2019 |
| Event type | Conference |