title: Preschoolers' use of dynamic facial, bodily, and vocal cues to emotion.
abstract: In daily experience, children have access to a variety of cues to others' emotions, including face, voice, and body posture. Determining which cues they use at which ages will help to reveal how the ability to recognize emotions develops. For happiness, sadness, anger, and fear, preschoolers (3-5 years, N = 144) were asked to label the emotion conveyed by dynamic cues in four cue conditions. The Face-only, Body Posture-only, and Multi-cue (face, body, and voice) conditions all were well recognized (M > 70%). In the Voice-only condition, recognition of sadness was high (72%), but recognition of the three other emotions was significantly lower (34%).
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA 02467, USA. nelsonnf@bc.edu
authors.forename: Nicole L
authors.initials: NL
authors.lastname: Nelson
authors.forename: James A
authors.initials: JA
authors.lastname: Russell
mesh_terms: D002675:Child, Preschool; D003463:Cues; D004192:Discrimination, Psychological; D004644:Emotions; D005149:Facial Expression; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D011187:Posture; D013061:Speech Acoustics; D013067:Speech Perception; D056345:Theory of Mind