Suchergebnisse

AbstractFace masks are an effective and important tool to prevent the spread of COVID‐19, including among children. However, occluding parts of the face can impact emotion recognition, which is fundamental to effective social interactions. Social distancing, stress, and changes to routines because of the pandemic have also altered the social landscape of children, with implications for social development. To better understand how social input and context impact emotion recognition, the current study investigated emotion recognition in children (7–12 years old, N = 131) using images of both masked and unmasked emotional faces. We also assessed a subsample of participants ("pre‐pandemic subsample," n = 35) who had completed the same emotion recognition task with unmasked faces before and during the pandemic. Masking of faces was related to worse emotion recognition, with more pronounced effects for happy, sad, and fearful faces than angry and neutral faces. Masking was more strongly related to emotion recognition among children whose families reported greater social disruption in response to the pandemic. Finally, in the pre‐pandemic subsample, emotion recognition of sad faces was lower during versus before the pandemic relative to other emotions. Together, findings show that occluding face parts and the broader social context (i.e., global pandemic) both impact emotion‐relevant judgments in school‐aged children.

AbstractAttention to emotional signals conveyed by others is critical for gleaning information about potential social partners and the larger social context. Children appear to detect social threats (e.g., angry faces) faster than non‐threatening social signals (e.g., neutral faces). However, methods that rely on behavioral responses alone are limited in identifying different attentional processes involved in threat detection or responding. To address this question, we used a visual search paradigm to assess behavioral (i.e., reaction time to select a target image) and attentional (i.e., eye‐tracking fixations, saccadic shifts, and dwell time) responses in children (ages 7–10 years old, N = 42) and adults (ages 18–23 years old, N = 46). In doing so, we compared behavioral responding and attentional detection and engagement with threatening (i.e., angry and fearful faces) and non‐threatening (i.e., happy faces) social signals. Overall, children and adults were faster to detect social threats (i.e., angry faces), but spent a smaller proportion of time dwelling on them and had slower behavioral responses. Findings underscore the importance of combining different measures to parse differences between processing versus responding to social signals across development.Research Highlights
Children and adults are slower to select angry faces when measured by time to mouse‐click but faster to detect angry faces when measured by time to first eye fixation.
The use of eye‐tracking addresses some limitations of prior visual search tasks with children that rely on behavioral responses alone.
Results suggest shorter time to first fixation, but subsequently, shorter duration of dwell on social threat in children and adults.