Herba Catherine M, Benson Philip, Landau Sabine, Russell Tamara, Goodwin Claire, Lemche Erwin, Santosh Paramala, Phillips Mary
Department of Psychological Medicine, Institute of Psychiatry, KCL, London, UK.
J Child Psychol Psychiatry. 2008 Feb;49(2):201-10. doi: 10.1111/j.1469-7610.2007.01835.x. Epub 2007 Dec 15.
The impact of personal familiarity upon children's developing emotion-processing has been largely ignored in previous research, yet may prove particularly important given the emotional salience of such stimuli and children's greater exposure to familiar others compared to strangers. We examined the impact of personal familiarity upon developing facial expression recognition (FER).
Participants included 153 children, 4-15 years old. We employed dynamic expressions of five emotions (happy, sad, anger, fear, disgust), posed by familiar (parents, teachers) and unfamiliar identities.
Accuracy improved with age for recognising sad and fear expressions, but not anger. Children tended to correctly recognise happiness and fear at lower intensities. The impact of familiarity on FER depended on emotion-category. Familiarity did not affect recognition of sad expressions, but children were less accurate at recognising anger, fear, and disgust in familiar individuals compared to strangers.
Personal familiarity may exert a distracting effect on children's performance. Findings highlight the importance of incorporating different emotion-categories and familiarity when examining the development of FER. Clinical implications are discussed.
个人熟悉度对儿童情绪加工发展的影响在以往研究中大多被忽视，但鉴于此类刺激的情感显著性以及儿童与熟悉他人相比接触陌生人的机会更多，这一点可能尤为重要。我们研究了个人熟悉度对发展性面部表情识别（FER）的影响。
参与者包括153名4至15岁的儿童。我们采用了由熟悉的人（父母、教师）和不熟悉的人做出的五种情绪（高兴、悲伤、愤怒、恐惧、厌恶）的动态表情。
识别悲伤和恐惧表情的准确率随年龄提高，但识别愤怒表情的准确率并非如此。儿童往往能在较低强度下正确识别高兴和恐惧。熟悉度对FER的影响取决于情绪类别。熟悉度不影响悲伤表情的识别，但与陌生人相比，儿童识别熟悉个体的愤怒、恐惧和厌恶表情时准确率较低。
个人熟悉度可能会对儿童的表现产生干扰作用。研究结果凸显了在研究FER发展时纳入不同情绪类别和熟悉度的重要性。文中还讨论了临床意义。
