Preschoolers’ use of dynamic facial, bodily, and vocal cues to emotion

In daily experience, children have access to a variety of cues to others’ emotions, including face, voice, and body posture. Determining which cues they use at which ages will help to reveal how the ability to recognize emotions develops. For happiness, sadness, anger, and fear, preschoolers (3–5 years, N = 144) were asked to label the emotion conveyed by dynamic cues in four cue conditions. The Face-only, Body Posture-only, and Multi-cue (face, body, and voice) conditions all were well recognized (M > 70%). In the Voice-only condition, recognition of sadness was high (72%), but recognition of the three other emotions was significantly lower (34%).

► We presented 3-5 year-olds with emotions conveyed by facial, postural, vocal, and multi-cue (combined face/posture/voice) expressions. ► Children recognized the facial, postural and multi-cue expressions, but recognition of vocal expressions was lower. ► We conclude that preschoolers first recognize visual aspects of emotional expressions and only later recognize vocal expressions.