The ability to decode and accurately identify information from facial emotions may advantage young children socially. This capacity to decode emotional information may likewise be influenced by individual differences in children's temperament. This study investigated whether sensory reactivity and perceptual awareness, two dimensions of temperament, as well as children's ability to accurately label emotions relates to the neural processing of emotional content in faces. Event related potentials (ERPs) of 4 to 6 year-old children (N = 119) were elicited from static displays of anger, happy, fearful, sad, and neutral emotion faces. Children, as a group, exhibited differential early (N290) and mid-latency (P400) event-related potentials (ERPs) in response to facial expressions of emotion. Individual differences in children's sensory reactivity were associated with enhanced P400 amplitudes to neutral, sad, and fearful faces. In a separate task, children were asked to provide an emotional label for the same images. Interestingly, children less accurately labeled the same neutral, sad, and fearful faces, suggesting that, contrary to previous work showing enhanced attentional processing to threatening cues (i.e., fear), children higher in sensory reactivity may deploy more attentional resources when decoding ambiguous emotional cues.

中文翻译：

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幼儿情绪面部表情和感觉反应的大脑和行为处理之间的关联

解码和准确识别面部情绪信息的能力可能在社交方面对幼儿有利。这种解码情绪信息的能力可能同样受到儿童气质个体差异的影响。这项研究调查了感官反应和知觉意识、气质的两个维度以及儿童准确标记情绪的能力是否与面部情绪内容的神经处理有关。4~6岁儿童事件相关电位（ERPs）（N= 119) 是从愤怒、快乐、恐惧、悲伤和中性情绪面孔的静态表现中得出的。作为一个群体，儿童表现出不同的早期 (N290) 和中期潜伏期 (P400) 事件相关电位 (ERP) 以响应面部表情。儿童感觉反应的个体差异与中性、悲伤和恐惧面孔的 P400 振幅增强有关。在另一项任务中，要求孩子们为相同的图像提供情感标签。有趣的是，儿童对相同的中性、悲伤和恐惧面孔的标注不太准确，这表明，与之前的研究显示对威胁线索（即恐惧）的注意力处理能力增强相反，感官反应性较高的儿童在解码模棱两可的情绪时可能会部署更多的注意力资源线索。