Recognition of facial expressions of emotions in school-age children: the intersection of perceptual and semantic categories

Recognition of the facial expressions of emotions is a critical communicati ve system early in development and continues to play an important role thro ughout adulthood, In the past, the results of developmental studies of emot ional facial recognition have often conflicted. The present study was desig ned to examine the development of emotional facial recognition in a large s ample of school-aged children (n=120, ages 5-10 y). In particular, we inves tigate whether emotion categories, i.e., those based on the visual spatial parameters of facial expression, develop in a similar fashion to those that also recruit lexical knowledge of emotion terms. We have found two distinc t patterns of development and we suggest that these different profiles are a consequence of the very different cognitive abilities that they recruit. Conclusion: Emotion cognition is a variegated domain which is differentiall y related to such areas of cognition as visuo-spatial and lexical semantic abilities.