Alana, Patrick and Dawn will be attending the BPS Developmental conference in Amsterdam. Dawn will be presenting one of her undergraduate projects by Ramona DaCruz, Bethany Elms, Iesha Ginn, and Zehra Saifuddin this year. The presentation is titled: Children’s recognition of emotion through body language: Is recognition enhanced with cartoon drawings? This presentation will highlight that children’s emotion recognition has traditionally been explored using facial expressions of emotion; however, much information about emotion is conveyed through body language. From local and central London schools, we had 272 children between 6 and 12 years complete an emotion matching task of the six basic emotions (happy, sad, angry, fear, surprise, and disgust), where they matched emotive body posture with facial expressions of emotion. The stimuli were either cartoon drawings or human images (both reflecting the same body posture).
We found that children had better matching ability for the cartoon drawings than human figure, but this was particularly true when matching cartoon body to the cartoon face. We will be discussing the findings with regard to the emergence of emotion recognition skills and the nature of drawings versus human figures.