Abstract

This research aimed to assess two components of emotion knowledge (EK): receptive EK with face emotion identification and matching tasks, and emotion situation knowledge with the emotion attribution task (EAT). Study 1 assessed the development of EK in 265 neurotypical (NT) children (4–11 years), divided into four age groups. Overall, results showed a significant improvement of EK with age in the NT population for the three tasks, especially between the ages of 4/5 and 6/7. Children were less successful at the EAT in comparison to the other two tasks, indicating that receptive EK develops earlier than emotion situation knowledge. The presence of visual context (EAT) does not help to improve our children’s overall facial emotion recognition, especially for anger and sadness, while these emotions are well recognized in isolated facial expressions (emotion identification). Study 2 compared EK between 32 children with Down syndrome (CA: M = 13 years, SD = 2.13) and 32 NT children (CA: M = 5.3 years, SD = 1.36): matched on a vocabulary task. Children with DS had more difficulties in EK than NT children. They had lower performances on the identification and the EAT tasks, while exhibited similar performances to their NT controls on the emotion matching task. Moreover, good abilities to identify emotion expressions seem to be a prerequisite for successful face-context recognition in NT children, but not in children with DS. Difficulties encountered by children with DS could result from executive dysfunction when dealing with complex visual information in addition to emotion processing difficulties.

摘要

本研究旨在评估情绪知识 (EK) 的两个组成部分：具有面部情绪识别和匹配任务的接受性 EK，以及具有情绪归因任务 (EAT) 的情绪情境知识。研究 1 评估了 265 名神经型 (NT) 儿童（4-11 岁）的 EK 发展，分为四个年龄组。总体而言，结果显示，在这三项任务中，NT 人群的 EK 随着年龄的增长而显着改善，尤其是在 4/5 和 6/7 岁之间。与其他两项任务相比，儿童在 EAT 中的成功率较低，这表明接受性 EK 比情绪情境知识发展得更早。视觉上下文 (EAT) 的存在无助于提高我们孩子的整体面部情绪识别能力，尤其是对于愤怒和悲伤，而这些情绪在孤立的面部表情中可以很好地识别（情绪识别）。研究 2 比较了 32 名唐氏综合症儿童（CA：M  = 13 岁，SD = 2.13）和 32 个 NT 儿童（CA：M  = 5.3 岁，SD = 1.36）：在词汇任务上匹配。DS 患儿 EK 比 NT 患儿更困难。他们在识别和 EAT 任务上的表现较低，而在情绪匹配任务上表现出与他们的 NT 控制相似的表现。此外，良好的情绪表达识别能力似乎是 NT 儿童成功进行面部上下文识别的先决条件，但对于 DS 患儿则不然。除了情绪处理困难外，DS儿童遇到的困难可能是由于处理复杂视觉信息时的执行功能障碍。