Preschool Children's Interpretation of Facial Expressions of Emotion

A structural model of emotions was used to reveal patterns in how children interpret the emotional facial expressions of others. Three-, four-, five-year-olds, and adults (n = 38 in each group) were asked to match 15 emotion-descriptive words (happy, excited, surprised, afraid, scared, angry, mad, disgusted, miserable, sad, sleepy, calm, relaxed, wide awake, and, as a check on response bias, insipid) with still photographs of actors showing different facial expressions. Whereas prior research had indicated that preschool-aged children are "inaccurate" in associating labels with faces, our results indicated that that research may have severely underestimated children's knowledge of emotions. In this study children used terms systematically to refer to a specifiable range of expressions, centered around a focal point. Multidimensional scaling of the word/facial expression associations yielded a two-dimensional structure able to account for the interrelationships among emotions, and this structure was the same for all age groups. The nature of this structure, the blurry boundaries between emotion words, and developmental shifts in the referents of emotion words suggested the primacy of two dimensions, pleasure-displeasure and arousal-sleep, in children's interpretation of emotion.