The Development of Emotion Recognition Skills from Childhood to Adolescence

This study investigates how the ability to recognize static facial emotional expressions changes over time, specifically through three developmental stages: childhood, preadolescence, and adolescence. A total of 301 Italian participants were involved and divided into three age groups: children (7–10 years), pre-adolescents (11–13 years), and adolescents (14–19 years). Participants completed an online emotional decoding task using images from the Child Affective Facial Expression (CAFE) database, depicting anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, surprise, and neutrality, conveyed by children of different ethnicities (African American, Caucasian/European American, Latino, and Asian). Results indicated that female participants generally exhibited a higher emotion recognition accuracy than male participants. Among the emotions, happiness, surprise, and anger were the most accurately recognized, while fear was the least recognized. Adolescents demonstrated a better recognition of disgust compared to children, while pre-adolescents more poorly recognized neutrality compared to children and adolescents. Additionally, this study found that female facial expressions of disgust, sadness, and fear were more accurately recognized than male expressions, whereas male expressions of surprise and neutrality were better recognized than female expressions. Regarding the ethnicity of facial expressions, results revealed that ethnicity can be better or more poorly recognized depending on the emotion investigated, therefore presenting very heterogeneous models.