Effective emotion recognition is imperative to successfully navigating social situations. Research suggests differing developmental trajectories for the recognition of bodily and vocal emotion, but emotions are usually studied in isolation and rarely considered as multimodal stimuli in the literature. When adults are presented with basic multimodal sensory stimuli, the Colavita effect suggests that they have a visual dominance, whereas more recent research finds that an auditory sensory dominance may be present in children under 8 years of age. However, it is not currently known whether this phenomenon holds for more complex multimodal social stimuli. Here we presented children and adults with multimodal social stimuli consisting of emotional bodies and voices, asking them to recognize the emotion in one modality while ignoring the other. We found that adults can perform this task with no detrimental effects on performance regardless of whether the ignored emotion was congruent or not. However, children find it extremely challenging to recognize bodily emotion while trying to ignore incongruent vocal emotional information. In several instances, they performed below chance level, indicating that the auditory modality actively informs their choice of bodily emotion. Therefore, this is the first evidence, to our knowledge, of an auditory dominance in children when presented with emotionally meaningful stimuli.

有效的情绪识别对于成功驾驭社交场合至关重要。研究表明，识别身体和声音情绪的发展轨迹不同，但情绪通常是孤立研究的，文献中很少将其视为多模态刺激。当成年人接受基本的多模式感官刺激时，Colavita 效应表明他们具有视觉优势，而最近的研究发现 8 岁以下儿童可能存在听觉优势。然而，目前尚不清楚这种现象是否适用于更复杂的多模式社会刺激。在这里，我们向儿童和成人展示了由情绪体和声音组成的多模态社交刺激，要求他们识别一种模态中的情绪，而忽略另一种。我们发现，无论被忽视的情绪是否一致，成年人都可以执行这项任务，而不会对表现产生不利影响。然而，儿童发现在试图忽略不一致的声音情感信息的同时识别身体情感极具挑战性。在一些情况下，他们的表现低于机会水平，表明听觉模式主动通知他们对身体情感的选择。因此，据我们所知，这是第一个证据表明，当呈现具有情感意义的刺激时，儿童的听觉优势。在一些情况下，他们的表现低于机会水平，表明听觉模式主动通知他们对身体情感的选择。因此，据我们所知，这是第一个证据表明，当呈现具有情感意义的刺激时，儿童的听觉优势。在一些情况下，他们的表现低于机会水平，表明听觉模式主动通知他们对身体情感的选择。因此，据我们所知，这是第一个证据表明，当呈现具有情感意义的刺激时，儿童的听觉优势。