Recognition of Dynamic Emotional Expressions in Children and Adults and Its Associations with Empathy

Abstract

This present study investigates emotion recognition in children and adults and its association with EQ and motor empathy. Overall, 58 children (33 5–6-year-olds, 25 7–9-year-olds) and 61 adults (24 young adults, 37 parents) participated in this study. Each participant received an EQ questionnaire and completed the dynamic emotion expression recognition task, where participants were asked to identify four basic emotions (happy, sad, fearful, and angry) from neutral to fully expressed states, and the motor empathy task, where participants’ facial muscle activity was recorded. The results showed that “happy” was the easiest expression for all ages; 5- to 6-year-old children performed equally well as adults. The accuracies for “fearful,” “angry,” and “sad” expressions were significantly lower in children than in adults. For motor empathy, 7- to 9-year-old children exhibited the highest level of facial muscle activity, while the young adults showed the lowest engagement. Importantly, individual EQ scores positively correlated with the motor empathy index in adults but not in children. In sum, our study echoes the previous literature, showing that the identification of negative emotions is still difficult for children aged 5–9 but that this improves in late childhood. Our results also suggest that stronger facial mimicry responses are positively related to a higher level of empathy in adults.