Recognition of Emotion by Chinese and Australian Children

The performance of Chinese children in Beijing and Australian children in Sydney was compared on two types of facial expression task. Children of 4, 6, and 8 years of age were presented situation discrimination and situation inference/labeling tasks with both Chinese and Caucasian faces. Some evidence was obtained for an ethnic bias effect in emotion recognition from facial expressions. There was no indication that children from a collectivist culture are poorer at recognizing certain emotions than children from an individualistic society. Overall accuracy increased with age for children from both cultures, but the Chinese children were significantly more accurate than the Australians at all ages. These results are discussed in terms of the possible effects of different socialization practices, demographic factors, and suitability of the testing procedures for the two cultures.