Key points are not available for this paper at this time.
This study is concerned with the recognition of the human facial expressions of emotions proposed by Ekman and Friesen (1978a). The first objective is to examine the developmental pattern of the recognition of some of these expressions, and the second one is to verify whether the recognition is affected by the accentuation of the expression. Ninety children, between the ages of 5 and 10 years, and 30 young adults participated in the study. There were asked to choose between several words (happiness, anger, surprise and disgust) the one which best described the emotion portrayed by the facial expression. The results indicate that the recognition accuracy increases with age for the expressions of surprise and disgust. Two kinds of errors were more common than others for the children : the interpretation of disgust expressions as anger expressions, and the interpretation of surprise expressions as disgust expressions. Finally, the results generally do not support the prediction concerning the accentuation of facial expression.
Gosselin et al. (Sun,) studied this question.