Abstract
The performance of children at ages 4, 6, and 8 years was compared on the four types of task most often used in facial expression studies with children. We examined whether the order of mastery of emotions at different ages was constant across tasks, or alternatively, if it was task-specific. The relative difficulty of the tasks was also investigated, with the aim of arranging them into a hierarchy of increasing difficulty. The four tasks used were situation discrimination, matching discrimination, forced choice labeling, and free labeling. Accuracy was found to increase with age, but the interaction between age, type of task, and emotion was not significant. These results suggest that conclusions about the ordering of specific emotions from least to most difficult at different ages is not task dependent. Nevertheless, a significant interaction found between task and emotion suggests that such conclusions should specify which type of task generated the pattern. A hierarchy of difficulty for the tasks was only partially supported. Performance on the first three tasks was very similar but performance on free labeling was significantly poorer.
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Markham, R., Adams, K. The effect of type of task on children's identification of facial expressions. J Nonverbal Behav 16, 21–39 (1992). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00986877
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00986877