The ability to recognize emotions quickly and accurately is an important social skill. We know that children’s recognition of the basic emotions (happy, sad, angry, fear, surprise, disgust) develops quite early (around 5-years-old) and is as good as adults by around 10- to 12-years-old. Researchers have also found conflicting findings regarding about gender differences in emotion recognition, with some indicating that girls are better at recognising emotions than boys and others finding no gender differences exist for recognising emotions.
The present study seeks to extend this research and to explore links with boys and girls emotion recognition, from three age groups (6-, 8-, and 10-years-old). We aim to explore if other factors besides gender of the child can predict how well the child recognises emotion. In addition to assessing children’s ability to recognise emotions, we will also explore the following.
Children
‘s processing of emotions in the brain. We will show children images of faces that have an emotion portrayed only on one side. Two faces will be shown, one above the other. The bottom face will be the mirror image of the top face (see the sample image to the side). Children’s decisions about which faces are more emotional indicates if they are more likely to process emotions in the right hemisphere or the left hemisphere.
Children’s feelings in different social situations. Children will asked to respond to a brief set of questions about their feelings during social interactions to assess if these may relate to their recognition of emotion.
Children’s exposure to hormones in the womb. We will measure children’s second and forth digits to give us an indicator of hormonal exposure in the womb, which may explain some of the gender effects that researchers have found.
Researchers: Sophie Farthing, Emmy Fisher, Rebecca Kyrk, and Lucy Nunn