Dults’ faces. Children’s parents’ faces convey important affective information and

Dults’ faces. Children’s parents’ faces convey important affective information and childrenPLOS ONE | DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0125256 May 15,9 /No Own-Age Advantage in Children’s Recognition of Emotionhave a great deal of experience looking at their parents’ faces from a young age. It is therefore possible that an own-age advantage may exist for some age-groups which lack motivation for LIMKI 3 site processing another age group’s faces (e.g., younger adults processing older adults’ faces) but not for children processing adults’ faces. Considering the development of emotion recognition, our findings did replicate previous studies which have shown that emotion recognition is still developing in late childhood [1, 2]. Interestingly, we found improvements in accuracy of emotion recognition with age for all emotions except anger, suggesting a lack of development of anger recognition after early childhood. This has been shown in some other studies [14, 15] and may suggest that anger is a particularly easy emotion to learn. The intensity of the expression prototypes was increased during stimuli development to ensure that the expressions were strong enough to be accurately recognised. Both original images and increased intensity images were presented in the study to look at whether this small manipulation was journal.pone.0174109 successful in increasing recognition accuracy. Our Linaprazan chemical information results show that higher intensity images were indeed recognised more accurately, although this difference was greater for some emotions than for others. This is unsurprising as the intensity of the expressions at each level were not standardised across stimuli. An unpredicted finding was that the younger child age group benefited less from increased intensity than the older child and adult age groups. This may be explained by increases in perceptual sensitivity to emotional expressions with age between 5 and 9 years of age [2]. Perhaps younger children were not sensitive to the subtle difference in intensity between the higher and lower intensity levels. The current study is somewhat limited in what it can tell us about sensitivity to expressions as only two levels of intensity were included. Further studies using more levels of intensity would be needed to fully understand how the intensity of expression affects recognition in different age groups. A further potential limitation of the current study is that the stimulus set was not independently validated (e.g., by collecting ratings of strength and intensity of expression) before being used. However the results show that the adult participant group labelled the emotions on all three prototypes ages with an accuracy of between 71 -78 . This level of accuracy is equivalent to the overall mean accuracy found in validations of emotional expression stimulus sets in adult populations [26, 27], suggesting that our stimulus set was comparable to other stimulus sets. There was considerable variation in how well different jir.2010.0097 emotions were recognised. However this is common in emotion stimulus sets and the pattern of differences evident in the current study, with”happy” being most accurate and “afraid” least accurate, is not unusual [27, 28]. These findings therefore suggest that our face prototype stimuli are valid depictions of emotional facial expressions. There was also some variation in how well certain expressions were recognised on faces of different ages. Sadness, anger and happiness, were better recognised on younger face prototypes, whereas disgust was.Dults’ faces. Children’s parents’ faces convey important affective information and childrenPLOS ONE | DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0125256 May 15,9 /No Own-Age Advantage in Children’s Recognition of Emotionhave a great deal of experience looking at their parents’ faces from a young age. It is therefore possible that an own-age advantage may exist for some age-groups which lack motivation for processing another age group’s faces (e.g., younger adults processing older adults’ faces) but not for children processing adults’ faces. Considering the development of emotion recognition, our findings did replicate previous studies which have shown that emotion recognition is still developing in late childhood [1, 2]. Interestingly, we found improvements in accuracy of emotion recognition with age for all emotions except anger, suggesting a lack of development of anger recognition after early childhood. This has been shown in some other studies [14, 15] and may suggest that anger is a particularly easy emotion to learn. The intensity of the expression prototypes was increased during stimuli development to ensure that the expressions were strong enough to be accurately recognised. Both original images and increased intensity images were presented in the study to look at whether this small manipulation was journal.pone.0174109 successful in increasing recognition accuracy. Our results show that higher intensity images were indeed recognised more accurately, although this difference was greater for some emotions than for others. This is unsurprising as the intensity of the expressions at each level were not standardised across stimuli. An unpredicted finding was that the younger child age group benefited less from increased intensity than the older child and adult age groups. This may be explained by increases in perceptual sensitivity to emotional expressions with age between 5 and 9 years of age [2]. Perhaps younger children were not sensitive to the subtle difference in intensity between the higher and lower intensity levels. The current study is somewhat limited in what it can tell us about sensitivity to expressions as only two levels of intensity were included. Further studies using more levels of intensity would be needed to fully understand how the intensity of expression affects recognition in different age groups. A further potential limitation of the current study is that the stimulus set was not independently validated (e.g., by collecting ratings of strength and intensity of expression) before being used. However the results show that the adult participant group labelled the emotions on all three prototypes ages with an accuracy of between 71 -78 . This level of accuracy is equivalent to the overall mean accuracy found in validations of emotional expression stimulus sets in adult populations [26, 27], suggesting that our stimulus set was comparable to other stimulus sets. There was considerable variation in how well different jir.2010.0097 emotions were recognised. However this is common in emotion stimulus sets and the pattern of differences evident in the current study, with”happy” being most accurate and “afraid” least accurate, is not unusual [27, 28]. These findings therefore suggest that our face prototype stimuli are valid depictions of emotional facial expressions. There was also some variation in how well certain expressions were recognised on faces of different ages. Sadness, anger and happiness, were better recognised on younger face prototypes, whereas disgust was.