Children's Ability to Recognise Emotion from Photographs.

ABSTRACT A total of 128 middleand upper-working class children in four age groups, ranging in 2-year intervals from 4 to 10 years of age and equally divided by sex, viewed 28 photographs of adults and children expressing seven emotions in order to explore developmental changes in children's ability to differentiate emotions. Emotions modeled were happiness, sadness, fear, anger, disgust, surprise, and shame. Four tasks were posed; results of matching, labelling and comprehension tasks are reported. Whereas children in this sample showed a much greater deceleration of the curve of success than did Izard's (1971) sample, results from these London children are in some ways very similar to those obtained in his study of American and French children. The steep rise in successful recognition and labelling he obtained in those children between 2 and 5 years is also shown in the steep rise found between the 4and 6-year-olds of this sample. These subjects also displayed the marked difference between labelling and comprehension which may be indicative of their relative unfamiliarity with emotional terms and emotion as a field of discourse. Subjects frequently confused shame and sadness, fear and surprise, and anger and disgust. Happy, sad, frightened, and surprised expressions were those most easily discriminated, with happiness by far the best distinguished. (RH)