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The use of analytic and holistic modes of processing in the recognition of emotional expressions was explored. Five- and 7-year-old children as well as adults were presented with slides of emotional expressions with different parts of the faces exposed. In Condition 1 (discrete categories), individuals were asked to press a button for each of the target emotions: happiness, surprise, fear, and anger. In Condition 2 (global categories), the target terms were feels goodand feels bad. Individual features were better for identifying global categories than discrete categories, and younger children relied more on single than on combinations of features. The classification of emotional expressions may not fit a classic hierarchical model of categorization, and recognition of each emotion appears to follow different courses of development
Roberta Kestenbaum (Sun,) studied this question.