School of Medicine, China Medical University, Taichung 404, Taiwan.
Graduate Institute of Biomedical Sciences, China Medical University, Taichung 404, Taiwan.
Sensors (Basel). 2024 Jul 18;24(14):4674. doi: 10.3390/s24144674.
This present study investigates emotion recognition in children and adults and its association with EQ and motor empathy. Overall, 58 children (33 5-6-year-olds, 25 7-9-year-olds) and 61 adults (24 young adults, 37 parents) participated in this study. Each participant received an EQ questionnaire and completed the dynamic emotion expression recognition task, where participants were asked to identify four basic emotions (happy, sad, fearful, and angry) from neutral to fully expressed states, and the motor empathy task, where participants' facial muscle activity was recorded. The results showed that "happy" was the easiest expression for all ages; 5- to 6-year-old children performed equally well as adults. The accuracies for "fearful," "angry," and "sad" expressions were significantly lower in children than in adults. For motor empathy, 7- to 9-year-old children exhibited the highest level of facial muscle activity, while the young adults showed the lowest engagement. Importantly, individual EQ scores positively correlated with the motor empathy index in adults but not in children. In sum, our study echoes the previous literature, showing that the identification of negative emotions is still difficult for children aged 5-9 but that this improves in late childhood. Our results also suggest that stronger facial mimicry responses are positively related to a higher level of empathy in adults.
本研究旨在调查儿童和成人的情绪识别能力及其与情商和运动共情的关系。共有 58 名儿童（33 名 5-6 岁儿童，25 名 7-9 岁儿童）和 61 名成年人（24 名年轻成年人，37 名父母）参与了本研究。每位参与者都接受了情商问卷，并完成了动态情绪表达识别任务，要求参与者从中性到完全表达的状态识别出四种基本情绪（快乐、悲伤、恐惧和愤怒），以及运动共情任务，记录参与者的面部肌肉活动。结果表明，“快乐”是所有年龄段最容易识别的表情；5-6 岁的儿童与成年人的表现一样好。对于“恐惧”、“愤怒”和“悲伤”的表情，儿童的识别准确率明显低于成年人。对于运动共情，7-9 岁的儿童表现出最高水平的面部肌肉活动，而年轻成年人的参与度最低。重要的是，个体情商得分与成年人的运动共情指数呈正相关，但在儿童中则没有。总之，我们的研究与之前的文献相呼应，表明 5-9 岁儿童仍然难以识别负面情绪，但在儿童后期这种情况会有所改善。我们的研究结果还表明，更强的面部模仿反应与成年人更高水平的共情能力呈正相关。
