title: Facial Expressions and Ability to Recognize Emotions From Eyes or Mouth in Children.
abstract: This research aims to contribute to the literature on the ability to recognize anger, happiness, fear, surprise, sadness, disgust and neutral emotions from facial information. By investigating children's performance in detecting these emotions from a specific face region, we were interested to know whether children would show differences in recognizing these expressions from the upper or lower face, and if any difference between specific facial regions depended on the emotion in question. For this purpose, a group of 6-7 year-old children was selected. Participants were asked to recognize emotions by using a labeling task with three stimulus types (region of the eyes, of the mouth, and full face). The findings seem to indicate that children correctly recognize basic facial expressions when pictures represent the whole face, except for a neutral expression, which was recognized from the mouth, and sadness, which was recognized from the eyes. Children are also able to identify anger from the eyes as well as from the whole face. With respect to gender differences, there is no female advantage in emotional recognition. The results indicate a significant interaction 'gender x face region' only for anger and neutral emotions.
authors.affiliation: Faculty of Human and Social Sciences, University of Enna "KORE", Enna, Italy.
authors.forename: Maria
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Guarnera
authors.affiliation: Department of Educational Sciences, University of Catania, Catania, Italy.
authors.forename: Zira
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Hichy
authors.affiliation: Faculty of Human and Social Sciences, University of Enna "KORE", Enna, Italy.
authors.forename: Maura I
authors.initials: MI
authors.lastname: Cascio
authors.affiliation: School of Psychology, Social Work and Human Sciences, University of West London, London, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: Stefano
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Carrubba
keywords: children; emotions; facial expressions; labeling task; recognizing from eyes; recognizing from mouth