Emotiedetectie van gezichtsuitdrukkingen na emotiepriming: Het effect van het aannemen van een emotionele gezichtsexpressie die overeenkomt met een targetemotie

Abstract

The ability to accurately detect and understand emotions of others is an important feature in regard to the social development of children. It is assumed that our own bodily states play an important role in regard to the processing of facial expressions of emotion; facial emotional expressions of others are more easily recognized when this bodily state matches. The present study examined the influence of congruence between a facial expression of emotion and a target emotion by means of emotion priming (‘match’) on the accuracy of emotion detection of facial expressions. Children (Mage = 7.96, SDage = .72, N = 67) participated in an experiment, which consisted of matching one of the six basic emotions to stimuli that evoked emotions and consequently choosing whether several facial expressions were congruent with a target emotion. Although the proportion of accuracy of the emotion detection of faces was a little higher in the case of a match compared to no match, matches were not a statistically significant predictor of the accuracy of emotion detection of facial expressions. Implications for future research consist of improving the methodology and focusing on children with deficiencies in emotion detection abilities, for example children with autism spectrum disorder.