Developmental Variations in Facial Emotion Recognition Across Age Groups

Facial Emotion Recognition (FER) is crucial for communication and socialisation, and deficits are linked to several Socio-psychological, cognitive, and neurological factors. Research in this domain has produced both corroborative and contradictory findings. This study examines the various dimensions of FER ability in relation to age and across different emotions. The study includes 369 participants, ranging from children to young adults. Accuracy, perceived intensity, and reaction time were evaluated. The study found that recognition accuracy progressed as age increased. Findings revealed that Happy(92.3%) was the most accurately recognised emotion, followed by Neutral(64%), Surprise(51%), Disgust(50%), Anger(47.3%), Sad(47%), and Fear(23.6%). Surprise was perceived with the highest intensity, while fear was the lowest. The result found an inverse relation between accuracy and reaction time. Positive emotions were better than negative ones, and females outperformed males in recognition accuracy. Study also uncovered patterns of misattribution in emotion recognition, suggesting nuanced challenges in emotion decoding.