Emotion Recognition in Kindergarten Children.

Background/aims: Recognition and understanding of emotions are essential skills in nonverbal communication and in everyday social functioning. These are already evident in infancy. We aimed to compare how young children recognize facial emotional expressions from static faces versus vocal emotional expressions from speech prosody.

Methods: Participants were 313 kindergarten children (162 girls, mean age = 51.01, SD 9.65 months; range 36-72). The design consisted of a visual and an auditory block (with 45 randomized trials each). Children were seated in front of a 14-inch laptop monitor and received visual stimuli (photos of faces) or auditory stimuli (spoken sentences) via loudspeakers.

Results: Recognizing emotions from looking at static faces was found to be easier compared to interpreting emotions transmitted by speech prosody alone. The ability to interpret emotions from both faces and speech prosody increased with age. It was easier to identify a "happy" emotion from a facial expression than an "angry" or "sad" one, whereas a "sad" emotion could be more easily recognized from speech prosody alone than facial imagery alone. Girls were significantly better than boys in identifying "sad" facial expressions.

Conclusion: The results of the study are discussed in terms of educational implications for nonverbal communication.