This study aims to further understand children’s capacity to identify and reason about pretend emotions by analyzing which sources of information they take into account when interpreting emotions simulated in pretend play contexts. A total of 79 children aged 3 to 8 participated in the final sample of the study. They were divided into the young group and the older group. The children were administered a facial emotion recognition task, a pretend emotions task, and a non-verbal cognitive ability test. In (...) the pretend emotions task, the children were asked whether the protagonist of silent videos, who was displaying pretend emotions, was displaying a real or a pretend emotion, and to justify their answer. The results show significant differences in the children’s capacity to identify and justify pretend emotions according to age and type of emotion. The data suggest that young children recognize pretend sadness, but have more difficulty detecting pretend anger. In addition, children seem to find facial information more useful for the detection of pretend sadness than pretend anger, and they more often interpret the emotional expression of the characters in terms of pretend play. The present research presents new data about the recognition of negative emotional expressions of sadness and anger and the type of information children take into account to justify their interpretation of pretend emotions, which consists not only in emotional expression but also contextual information. (shrink)

ABSTRACTFacial expressions play a central role in diverse areas of psychology. However, facial stimuli are often only validated by adults, and there are no face databases validated by school-aged c...

The errors young children make when recognising others’ emotions may be systematic over-identification biases and may partially explain the challenges some have socially. These biases and associations may be differential by emotion. In a sample of 871 ethnically and racially diverse preschool-aged children (i.e. 33–68 months; 49% Hispanic/Latine, 52% Children of Colour), emotion recognition was assessed, and scores for accuracy and bias were calculated by emotion (i.e. anger, sad, happy, calm, and fear). Child and family characteristics and teacher-reported social behaviour (...) were also collected. Multilevel structural equation modelling revealed emotion-specific recognition accuracies varied between 36 and 65% whereas biases varied between 4 and 13%. Anger was the strongest bias followed by sad, happy, fear, and calm, in contrast to the pattern for accuracy – happy, sad, angry, fear, and calm. More variance was explained in emotion-specific recognition accuracies by child and family characteristics – 7–38% – than biases – 3–7%. Negatively-valanced emotion recognition biases associated with positively-valanced accuracies, and positively-valued emotion recognition biases associated with negatively-valued accuracies. Biases did not have meaningful associations with social behaviour. This study highlights that children’s emotion recognition errors may partially be systematic, but future studies are needed to understand the underlying cognitive mechanisms. (shrink)