Do Dynamic Facial Expressions Convey Emotions to Children Better Than Do Static Ones?

Abstract

Past research has shown that children recognize emotions from facial expressions poorly and improve only gradually with age, but the stimuli in such studies have been static faces. Because dynamic faces include more information, it may well be that children more readily recognize emotions from dynamic facial expressions. The current study of children (N = 64, aged 5–10 years old) who freely labeled the emotion conveyed by static and dynamic facial expressions found no advantage of dynamic over static expressions; in fact, reliable differences favored static expressions. An alternative explanation of gradual improvement with age is that children's emotional categories change during development from a small number of broad emotion categories to a larger number of narrower categories—a pattern found here with both static and dynamic expressions.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

We thank Nicole Nelson, Dorothy Kelleher, Cara D'Arcy, and Kelly Fischietto for their help with this study.

Notes

¹Based on our own viewing of the videos and watching children respond to the videos in a pilot study, we were convinced that the dynamic expressions gave children ample time to view the expression at its apex. For both the dynamic and static expressions, children typically responded quickly.

²Although unconventional, ANOVA can be used on binary data when the number of degrees of freedom of the error term is greater than 40 (Brechet, Baldy, & Picard, 2009; Greer & Dunlap, 1997; Lunney, 1970). This condition was satisfied here.

³In a preliminary analysis, effect of condition (dynamic male/static female vs. dynamic female/static male) was tested. The significant Condition × Mode × Emotion interaction indicated that the difference reflected a model difference rather than a condition difference: Children were less likely to “correctly” label the male model than the female model for the dynamic sad face and static sad, angry, and pride faces. Children were more likely to “correctly” label the male model rather than the female model only for the dynamic pride face.