Shades of emotion: What the addition of sunglasses or masks to faces reveals about the development of facial expression processing

• Published in: Cognition Vol. 125; no. 2; pp. 195 - 206
• Main Authors: Roberson, Debi, Kikutani, Mariko, Döge, Paula, Whitaker, Lydia, Majid, Asifa
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Amsterdam Elsevier B.V 01.11.2012; Elsevier
• Subjects: Adults; Age Factors; Attention; Biological and medical sciences; Case studies; Categories; Child; Child Development; Child, Preschool; Children; Classification; Cognitive Processes; Comparative Analysis; Data analysis; Developmental psychology; Emotion; Emotional Development; Emotions; Eye Protective Devices; Facial Expression; Facial expressions; Female; Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology; Human behaviour; Humans; Investigations; Male; Masks; Nonverbal Communication; Perceptual Masking; Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry; Psychology. Psychophysiology; Social Perception; Visual Perception; Young Adult; Child-development; Emotion; Categories; Facial expression; Human; Preschool age; Affect affectivity; Emotional expression; Cognition; Emotion emotionality; Experimental study; Social development; School age; Vision; Perception; Adult; Masking; Cognitive development; Face; Categorization; Child
• ISSN: 0010-0277; 1873-7838
• DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2012.06.018

[Display omitted] ► 3–4year-old children identify expressions better if the faceswear sunglasses. ► The effectofsunglasses is reversed by 10years of age. ► After age 10, sunglasses impair expression identification as much as face inversion. ► Adults also showed impaired classification if faces wore surgical masks. ► Young children showed no impairment for faces wearing surgical masks. Three studies investigated developmental changes in facial expression processing, between 3years-of-age and adulthood. For adults and older children, the addition of sunglasses to upright faces caused an equivalent decrement in performance to face inversion. However, younger children showed better classification of expressions of faces wearing sunglasses than children who saw the same faces un-occluded. When the mouth area was occluded with a mask, children under nine years showed no impairment in expression classification, relative to un-occluded faces. An early selective focus of attention on the eyes may be optimal for socialization, but mediate against accurate expression classification. The data support a model in which a threshold level of attentional control must be reached before children can develop adult-like configural processing skills and be flexible in their use of face- processing strategies.