Department of Psychology, Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada L2S 3A1.
J Exp Child Psychol. 2013 Feb;114(2):203-16. doi: 10.1016/j.jecp.2012.06.003. Epub 2012 Aug 9.
Adults' and 8-year-old children's perception of emotional faces is disrupted when faces are presented in the context of incongruent body postures (e.g., when a sad face is displayed on a fearful body) if the two emotions are highly similar (e.g., sad/fear) but not if they are highly dissimilar (e.g., sad/happy). The current research investigated the emergence of this adult-like pattern. Using a sorting task, we identified the youngest age at which children could accurately sort isolated facial expressions and body postures and then measured whether their accuracy was impaired in the incongruent condition. Among the child participants, 6-year-olds showed congruency effects for sad/fear, but even 4-year-olds did not do so for sad/happy. Early emergence of this adult-like pattern is consistent with the dimensional and emotional seed models of emotion perception, although future research is needed to test the relative validity of these two models. Testing children with emotional faces presented in the context of body postures and background scenes is an important step toward understanding how they perceive emotions on a daily basis.
当呈现出不一致的身体姿势（例如，当一个悲伤的面孔显示在一个可怕的身体）时，成年人和 8 岁儿童对面部表情的感知会受到干扰，如果两种情绪高度相似（例如，悲伤/恐惧），但如果它们高度不同（例如，悲伤/快乐）则不会。目前的研究调查了这种成人模式的出现。使用分类任务，我们确定了儿童能够准确分类孤立面部表情和身体姿势的最小年龄，然后测量他们在不一致条件下的准确性是否受到影响。在儿童参与者中，6 岁儿童对悲伤/恐惧表现出一致性效应，但即使是 4 岁儿童也没有对悲伤/快乐表现出一致性效应。这种类似成人的模式的早期出现与情绪感知的维度和情绪种子模型一致，尽管需要进一步的研究来测试这两个模型的相对有效性。用身体姿势和背景场景呈现情绪面孔来测试儿童是理解他们如何在日常生活中感知情绪的重要一步。
