Poster #96 - Recognition of Emotional Body Language From Dyadic and Monadic PLDs in Preschoolers and Adults

• In Event: Poster Session 15

Abstract

Understanding the emotional expression of others is important for successful interactions and social communication. This is particular relevant for children, as their communication skills and emotional competencies are still developing (Rangel-Rodriguez et al., 2021; Trentacosta & Izard, 2007). Next to faces and language, humans communicate emotions through body movements. While recent adult studies showed increased accuracy rates and higher confidence in the recognition of emotional body movements with two interaction partners (dyads) compared to monadic representations (e.g. Keck et al., 2022), much less is known about the role of social interactions in emotion perception from body movements in childhood. Therefore, this study aimed to find out how preschoolers and adults perceive happy and angry actions from human kinematics.
Using a within-subjects design, we asked 5-year-old children and adults to categorize happy and angry dynamic point-light displays (PLD), presented as pairs (dyads) and as single actors (monads) in a button-press task (cf. Figure 1). The PLDs were selected from a dataset already validated in adults (Lorey et al., 2012). We calculated recognition accuracies and compared these ratings for the factor emotion (happy, angry) and for the factor social context (monadic, dyadic).
Our results showed overall high emotion recognition accuracy in 5-year-old children (81.3 %) and in adults (97.7 %). As expected, emotion recognition was higher when presented as interactive dyads compared to monads in children (dyads: 85.9 %; monads: 76.7 %) and in adults (dyads: 99.4 %; monads: 95.9 %). Moreover, 5-year-old children were significantly more accurate in recognizing happy (84.15 %) compared to angry PLD monads (69.2 %; p < 0.01; cf. Figure 2). Adults, by contrast, were significantly more accurate in recognizing angry (98.0 %) compared to happy PLD monads (93.8 %; p < 0.01; cf. Figure 2). However, we found no significant difference between happy and angry PLDs, when presented as interactive dyads, in either age group.
Our study is the first to show that young children benefit from interpersonal movement information in emotion recognition, as was previously shown for adults (Clarke et al., 2015; Keck et al., 2022). This emphasizes the importance of interactive social cues in emotion recognition and shows young children’s ability to consider interpersonal movement information when judging an emotional scene. In addition, our results suggest a bias favouring the recognition of positive emotional body language in young children, whereas adults showed an advantage in recognizing negative emotions. Therefore, emotion processing seems to undergo a developmental shift from a positivity bias in young children towards a negativity bias in adults. As such an age-specific bias in emotion processing also occurred for emotional faces (Feyereisen et al., 1986; Vesker et al., 2018) and for emotional terms (Bahn et al., 2017; Kauschke et al., 2019), our study suggests this bias to be consistent across emotion modalities. One reason for this tendency could be changes in the social relevance of the particular emotional expression, as social-emotional needs and social conditions differ between children and adults.

Authors

• Lucie Preißler, Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen
  Presenting Author

• Johannes Keck, Justus-Liebig-Universität Giessen

• Britta Krüger, Justus-Liebig-Universität Giessen

• Jörn Munzert, University of Giessen

• Gudrun Schwarzer, University of Giessen