Children 2, 3 and 4 years of age were assessed on their ability to comprehend emotional labels, and recognize and identify facial expressions of emotion. In a label recognition task, children were presented with four line drawings and were asked to select the picture representing a particular emotion. Four emotions were introduced:happiness, sadness, anger, and surprise. In another task, matching discrimination, children matched photographs of different faces representing different expressions. Results showed that , scores on the label recognition task were significantly better than scores on the matching discrimination task. However the degree of superiority depends on the emotion, suggesting that the process of emotion recognition vary with the emotion. The visual and auditory process model suggested by the findings is discussed.
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