Young Children Do Not Label Facial Expressions Spontaneously: A Brief Investigation of the Label Superiority Effect

Abstract

A label superiority effect refers to the tendency of young children to categorize facial expressions based on emotion labels (e.g., “happy”) more accurately than those based on photographs of facial expressions (e.g., “smile”). However, it is unclear whether this effect stems from inaccuracies in children’s spontaneous labeling of facial expressions or their tendency not to label facial expressions spontaneously. To further explore the label superiority effect, Japanese children aged 3–5 years (N = 48) were assigned to one of three conditions: label cue, photo cue, and compelled to label, and asked to categorize facial expressions by emotion by placing cards in a box. The children correctly put more facial expressions in the box for label cues than photo cues, but the compelled to label group performed as well as the label cues group. These results suggest that the label superiority effect occurs because children do not label facial expressions spontaneously, and this tendency may explain their difficulty in understanding facial expressions.

Keywords:

• Children
• emotion inference
• facial expression
• label superiority effect
• language

Disclosure statement

The author declares that there is no conflict of interest.

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available on request from the corresponding author, SI. The data are not publicly available due to their containing information that could compromise the privacy of research participants.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a grant from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. The Grant-in-Aid for JSPS Research Fellow Grant Number is JP17J03631.