Preschoolers' real-time coordination of vocal and facial emotional information.
An eye-tracking methodology was used to examine the time course of 3- and 5-year-olds' ability to link speech bearing different acoustic cues to emotion (i.e., happy-sounding, neutral, and sad-sounding intonation) to photographs of faces reflecting different emotional expressions. Analyses of saccadic eye movement patterns indicated that, for both 3- and 5-year-olds, sad-sounding speech triggered gaze shifts to a matching (sad-looking) face from the earliest moments of speech processing. However, it was not until approximately 800ms into a happy-sounding utterance that preschoolers began to use the emotional cues from speech to identify a matching (happy-looking) face. Complementary analyses based on conscious/controlled behaviors (children's explicit points toward the faces) indicated that 5-year-olds, but not 3-year-olds, could successfully match happy-sounding and sad-sounding vocal affect to a corresponding emotional face. Together, the findings clarify developmental patterns in preschoolers' implicit versus explicit ability to coordinate emotional cues across modalities and highlight preschoolers' greater sensitivity to sad-sounding speech as the auditory signal unfolds in time.
Department of Psychology, University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta T2N 1N4, Canada.
Jared M J
JM
Berman
Department of Psychology, University of Toronto, Mississauga, Ontario L5L 1C6, Canada.
Craig G
CG
Chambers
Department of Psychology, University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta T2N 1N4, Canada. Electronic address: susan.graham@ucalgary.ca.
Susan A
SA
Graham
D002675:Child, Preschool; D003463:Cues; D004644:Emotions / Q000502:physiology*; D005149:Facial Expression; D005260:Female; D006240:Happiness; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D012938:Social Perception
Coordination; Emotion; Eye-tracking; Facial emotion; Implicit processing; Vocal affect