The influence of emotional body posture on adults' and 8-year-olds' perception facial expressions
Abstract
The present set of experiments was designed to investigate the development of children's
sensitivity of facial expressions observed within emotional contexts. Past research
investigating both adults' and children's perception of facial expressions has been limited
primarily to the presentation of isolated faces. During daily social interactions, however,
facial expressions are encountered within contexts conveying emotions (e.g., background
scenes, body postures, gestures). Recently, research has shown that adults' perception of
facial expressions is influenced by these contexts. When emotional faces are shown in
incongruent contexts (e.g., when an angry face is presented in a context depicting fear)
adults' accuracy decreases and their reaction times increase (e.g., Meeren et a1. 2005). To
examine the influence of emotional body postures on children's perception of facial
expressions, in each of the experiments in the current study adults and 8-year-old children
made two-alternative forced choice decisions about facial expressions presented in
congruent (e.g., a face displayed sadness on a body displaying sadness) and incongruent
(e.g., a face displaying fear on a body displaying sadness) contexts. Consistent with
previous studies, a congruency effect (better performance on congruent than incongruent
trials) was found for both adults and 8-year-olds when the emotions displayed by the face
and body were similar to each other (e.g., fear and sad, Experiment l a ) ; the influence of
context was greater for 8-year-olds than adults for these similar expressions. To further
investigate why the congruency effect was larger for children than adults in Experiment
1 a, Experiment 1 b was conducted to examine if increased task difficulty would increase
the magnitude of adults' congruency effects. Adults were presented with subtle facial
and despite successfully increasing task difficulty the magnitude of the. congruency effect did not increase suggesting that the difference between children's and adults' congruency
effects in Experiment l a cannot be explained by 8-year-olds finding the task difficult. In
contrast, congruency effects were not found when the expressions displayed by the face
and body were dissimilar (e.g., sad and happy, see Experiment 2). The results of the
current set of studies are examined with respect to the Dimensional theory and the
Emotional Seed model and the developmental timeline of children's sensitivity to facial
expressions.
A secondary aim of the series of studies was to examine one possible mechanism
underlying congruency effe cts-holistic processing. To examine the influence of holistic
processing, participants completed both aligned trials and misaligned trials in which the
faces were detached from the body (designed to disrupt holistic processing). Based on the
principles of holistic face processing we predicted that participants would benefit from
misalignment of the face and body stimuli on incongruent trials but not on congruent
trials. Collectively, our results provide some evidence that both adults and children may
process emotional faces and bodies holistically. Consistent with the pattern of results for
congruency effects, the magnitude of the effect of misalignment varied with the similarity
between emotions. Future research is required to further investigate whether or not facial
expressions and emotions conveyed by the body are perceived holistically.