4 To 6 Years Old Children's Dynamic Facial Expression Recognition Development Characteristics

Early childhood is a significant period of emotion development in a person’s whole life. And recognition of emotion by preschoolers improves quickly in this stage. In recent years, study on recognition of emotion by preschoolers becomes one of the hot topics in the field of psycology.Preschoolers always recognize the emotions by dynamic facial, postural, vocal cues, or combined of them in daily life, though most previous studies included on the recognition of static expressions. There were four dynamic cue conditions included in this paper: the face-only, body posture-only, vocal-only, and multi-cue (face, body, and voice). Preschoolers (4-6years, N=126) were asked to label the emotion in four cue conditions in order to investigate the development of dynamic expressions recognition, such as happiness, sadness, anger and fear. A questionnaire named "Survey on family parenting pattern" was issued to the parents of the child tested, which was used to investigate the correlation of the development of emotion recognition with parenting pattern. Results concluded that:(1) Preschoolers’ abilities to label the four dynamic expressions were well improved as they grew up gradually. For face-only and combined expressions, the happiness can be well recognized by children of4years old. Children of5years old can well recognize happiness of body-only expressions, sadness and angry of combined expressions. For children of6years old, the recognition of dynamic emotions becomes mature except the fear of face-only and voice-only expressions.(2) Effect of gender on the recognition of dynamic emotion is not marked.(3) There is a marked difference between the recognition of different dynamic emotions. The recognition of fear is marked lower than the other three emotions. For body-only expressions, preschoolers can recognize happiness and sadness better than angry condition. For the other three expressions, there are no marked differences between the recognition of happy, sad and angry.(4) There is a marked difference between the recognition of different expressions. Preschoolers can recognize the combined expressions best. The combined expression and face-only expression have no marked difference and are recognized best except for fear. For happiness and fear, recognition of body-only expressions is higher than the voice-only expressions. For sadness and angry condition, there is no marked difference between body-only and voice-only expressions. For fear condition, the face-only and voice-only expressions have the lowest recognition.(5) The correlation between the parenting pattern (warmth, punishment and indulgent) and emotion recognition development was researched. It found that the punishment was negative correlation with the recognition of happiness. There are no marked correlation of warmth and indulgent with emotion recognition.