Do Dynamic Facial Expressions Convey Emotions to Children Better Than Do Static Ones?

Past research has shown that children recognize emotions from facial expressions poorly and improve only gradually with age, but the stimuli in such studies have been static faces. Because dynamic faces include more information, it may well be that children more readily recognize emotions from dynamic facial expressions. The current study of children (N = 64, aged 5–10 years old) who freely labeled the emotion conveyed by static and dynamic facial expressions found no advantage of dynamic over static expressions; in fact, reliable differences favored static expressions. An alternative explanation of gradual improvement with age is that children's emotional categories change during development from a small number of broad emotion categories to a larger number of narrower categories—a pattern found here with both static and dynamic expressions.