Poster #215 - The Influence of Situational Context on Ratings of Emotional Intensity Across Development.

• In Event: 1-115 - Poster Session 03
  In Poster Session: PS 03 Section - Social, Emotional, Personality

Integrative Statement

The ability to read emotional expressions is essential for adaptive social interactions. While researchers have historically focused on isolated facial expressions, contemporary research is revealing that situational context is essential for accurately reading emotional reactions (Aviezer et al., 2008; de Gelder et al., 2006). Additionally, there is evidence to suggest that this differs across development (Leitzke & Pollak, 2016; Noh & Issacowitz, 2013). However, research in this area has primarily focused on how people categorize emotions, for example, whether someone is angry or disgusted. It is not yet clear how individuals discern other affective traits, such as the intensity of one’s emotional display. Given the variability in emotion perception across development, we explored the impact of situational context on perceived intensity of facial emotion across development.
We examined these questions across three developmental periods: childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood. Fifty children (Mage = 7.9, SD = 0.6; 51% Female), 52 adolescents (Mage = 13.06, SD = 0.56; 45% Female) and 53 young adults (Mage = 19.57, SD = 0.82; 40% Female) completed a situational context and intensity task. Participants viewed images of individuals expressing the emotions anger, sadness, fear, happiness, or disgust at high (80%) and low (20%) intensities in response to situational information that either matched or did not match the facial expression. For each image, participants were asked to rate the perceived emotional intensity of the presented facial expression. We also assessed for IQ and socioeconomic status and controlled for these factors in our analyses.
These data suggest that children, adolescents, and adults rate facial emotion as more intense when facial and contextual emotion match, relative to when they do not match, F(1, 151) = 80.19, p < .001. Further, adolescents and adults are better able to differentiate between facial emotion of low and high intensity, F(2, 151) = 5.85, p = .004, while younger children appear to rate all facial expressions as appearing more intense than the adolescents (p = .005) and adults (p = .007), F(2, 151) = 5.22, p = .006.
These results suggest that situational context influences the perception of emotional intensity. Moreover, the ability to discriminate between subtle changes in facial emotion appears to be a skill that develops with age. Thus, more experience and learning appears to help refine the underlying mechanisms of emotion processing. Continuing to work towards a more solid understanding of this process can serve as a basis for the development of age appropriate emotion processing interventions for children who experience deficits in the acquisition of social skills. Such deficits are particularly prominent in children with a history of abuse. With an estimated 700,000 children abused annually in the United States alone, the development of effective and lasting interventions is of pressing concern (U.S. Department of Human Services, 2017).

Authors

• Gwyneth DeLap, University of Wisconsin Madison
  Presenting Author

• Brian Leitzke, University of Wisconsin - Madison
  Non-Presenting Author

• Seth D Pollak, University of Wisconsin-Madison
  Non-Presenting Author