Child Emotions Picture Set (CEPS): Development of a database of children’s emotional expressions.

The recognition of facial emotions plays an important role in establishing social interactions through nonverbal communication.This is particularly true during childhood because language skills are not yet fully developed.Nevertheless, few studies have focused on facial emotion processing in children.Moreover, studies that have addressed this issue commonly have the major limitation of using only adult facial stimuli, and stimulus sets with children's faces are rare.The present study sought to fill this gap by developing the Child Emotions Picture Set (CEPS).The CEPS is a database of the facial emotions of 17 children who posed or naturally expressed 6 basic emotions.A panel of expert judges rated each picture.The set is split into 3 age groups (6 -7 years old, 8 -9 years old, and 10 -11 years old) and includes 225 photos of boys and girls who display facial expressions of happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust, and surprise at 3 different intensities (low, medium, and high) plus neutrality.This work contributes to the scientific field by constructing a set of child facial stimuli that is intended for use in further research on emotional processing in children.Additionally, the database may allow future studies on the mechanisms that are involved in processing facial emotions across childhood and investigating effects associated with psychiatric disorders.