Tsenkova Nikol, Bahn Daniela, Kauschke Christina, Schwarzer Gudrun
Psychology and Sports Science, Department of Developmental Psychology, Justus Liebig University, Giessen, Germany.
Institute of German Linguistics, Clinical Linguistics, Philipps University, Marburg, Germany.
PLoS One. 2025 Aug 8;20(8):e0329554. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0329554. eCollection 2025.
The development of emotion perception has predominantly been studied using static, unimodal stimuli featuring the faces of young adults. Most findings indicate a processing advantage for positive emotions in children (positivity bias) and a negativity bias in adults, although these results are usually task-dependent. We created a new stimulus database comprising digital avatars from four age groups, dynamically expressing happiness, happy-surprise, anger, and sadness in visual (face only) and visual-verbal (face and voice) conditions. To determine whether previously found biases would re-emerge with this new database, we tested the arousal and valence perception of positive and negative emotions in 6- and 7-year-old children and young adults. Our results revealed high correlations between children's and adults' responses but also significant differences: children rated negative expressions as more arousing compared to adults and positive emotions as more positive than adults. Additionally, visual-verbal presentations were perceived as more arousing than visual across both age groups. In terms of valence, all participants found positive emotions as more positive in the visual condition, whereas negative emotions were perceived as more negative in the visual-verbal condition. As one of the first studies to employ dynamically multimodal emotional expressions, our findings underscore the relevance of studying developmental differences in emotion perception using naturalistic stimuli.
情绪感知的发展主要是通过使用以年轻人面部为特征的静态单峰刺激来进行研究的。大多数研究结果表明，儿童在处理积极情绪方面具有优势（积极偏差），而成年人则存在消极偏差，尽管这些结果通常取决于任务。我们创建了一个新的刺激数据库，其中包含来自四个年龄组的数字虚拟人，它们在视觉（仅面部）和视觉-语言（面部和声音）条件下动态表达快乐、惊喜、愤怒和悲伤。为了确定使用这个新数据库是否会再次出现先前发现的偏差，我们测试了6岁和7岁儿童以及年轻人对积极和消极情绪的唤醒和效价感知。我们的结果显示，儿童和成年人的反应之间存在高度相关性，但也存在显著差异：与成年人相比，儿童认为消极表情更具唤醒性，而积极情绪比成年人更积极。此外，在两个年龄组中，视觉-语言呈现都比视觉呈现更具唤醒性。在效价方面，所有参与者在视觉条件下都认为积极情绪更积极，而在视觉-语言条件下消极情绪被认为更消极。作为首批采用动态多模态情绪表达的研究之一，我们的研究结果强调了使用自然主义刺激来研究情绪感知发展差异的重要性。
