Contrary to traditional assumptions, young children are more likely to correctly label someone’s ... more Contrary to traditional assumptions, young children are more likely to correctly label someone’s emotion from a story that describes the causes and consequences of the emotion than from the person’s facial expression. This Story Superiority Effect was examined in a sample of older children and adolescents (N = 90, 8-20 years) for the emotions of fear, disgust, shame, embarrassment, and pride. Participants freely labeled the emotion they inferred from a story describing a cause and consequence of each emotion and, separately, from the corresponding facial expression. In each of five age groups, the expected emotion label was used for the emotion story significantly more than for the corresponding facial expression (except for pride). The Story Superiority Effect is strong from childhood to early adulthood and opens the door to new accounts of how emotion concepts develop.
The common within-subjects design of studies on the recognition of emotion from facial expression... more The common within-subjects design of studies on the recognition of emotion from facial expressions allows the judgement of one face to be influenced by previous faces, thus introducing the potential for artefacts. The present study (N=344) showed that the canonical “disgust face” was judged as disgusted, provided that the preceding set of faces included “anger expressions”, but was judged as angry when the preceding set of faces excluded anger but instead included persons who looked sad or about to be sick. Chinese observers showed lower recognition of the “disgust face” than did American observers. Chinese observers also showed lower recognition of the “fear face” when responding in Chinese than in English.
Contrary to traditional assumptions, young children are more likely to correctly label someone’s ... more Contrary to traditional assumptions, young children are more likely to correctly label someone’s emotion from a story that describes the causes and consequences of the emotion than from the person’s facial expression. This Story Superiority Effect was examined in a sample of older children and adolescents (N = 90, 8-20 years) for the emotions of fear, disgust, shame, embarrassment, and pride. Participants freely labeled the emotion they inferred from a story describing a cause and consequence of each emotion and, separately, from the corresponding facial expression. In each of five age groups, the expected emotion label was used for the emotion story significantly more than for the corresponding facial expression (except for pride). The Story Superiority Effect is strong from childhood to early adulthood and opens the door to new accounts of how emotion concepts develop.
The common within-subjects design of studies on the recognition of emotion from facial expression... more The common within-subjects design of studies on the recognition of emotion from facial expressions allows the judgement of one face to be influenced by previous faces, thus introducing the potential for artefacts. The present study (N=344) showed that the canonical “disgust face” was judged as disgusted, provided that the preceding set of faces included “anger expressions”, but was judged as angry when the preceding set of faces excluded anger but instead included persons who looked sad or about to be sick. Chinese observers showed lower recognition of the “disgust face” than did American observers. Chinese observers also showed lower recognition of the “fear face” when responding in Chinese than in English.
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Papers by Sherri Widen