Critical Review of Brechet Et Al. (2009). How Does Sam Feel?: Children’s Labelling and Drawing of Basic Emotions
Critical Review of Brechet et al. (2009). How does Sam feel?: Children’s labelling and drawing of basic emotions
Word Count: 1537
Introduction
Children's understanding of emotions contributes to their cognitive development and interpersonal relationship. The development of ability to identify basic emotions by children has been tested by different tasks. According to type of task the recognition of emotion was tested using facial expressions, scenarios describing the situations or drawing a person or face expressing basic emotions (Camras & Allison, 1985; Widen & Rusell, 2003; Picard et al., 2007).
The children comprehension of emotions was tested on children as young as 2 years old (Widen & Rusell, 2003) and in addition to basic emotions the pride emotion was recognized by the age of 4 years (Tracy et al., 2005) and like other basic emotions it improves by age.
Harrigan (1984) found that when emotion recognition task preceded emotion labelling task the scores were higher in the labelling task. This was the reason why Picard et al. (2007) used between subject design in his study where he examined children’s and adult’s drawings which indicated that children tend to use more facial expression than posture or context cues to depict emotion. Reichenbach and Masters (1983) revealed that using two emotion stimuli at the same time does not increase the number of correct answers but this could be because prior to the experiment the meaning of possible emotions (e.g. happy, sad, mad or OK) that the children’s faces on pictures could present was explained. Camras and Allison (1985) study contradicted Reichenbach and Masters (1983) findings where the possible answers of three emotion labels or facial expressions were given to children immediately after emotional scenarios and leaded to high performance; however the labels had better recognition than facial expressions.
In Camras and Allison (1985) study participants also underwent the switching task
Word Count: 1537
Introduction
Children's understanding of emotions contributes to their cognitive development and interpersonal relationship. The development of ability to identify basic emotions by children has been tested by different tasks. According to type of task the recognition of emotion was tested using facial expressions, scenarios describing the situations or drawing a person or face expressing basic emotions (Camras & Allison, 1985; Widen & Rusell, 2003; Picard et al., 2007).
The children comprehension of emotions was tested on children as young as 2 years old (Widen & Rusell, 2003) and in addition to basic emotions the pride emotion was recognized by the age of 4 years (Tracy et al., 2005) and like other basic emotions it improves by age.
Harrigan (1984) found that when emotion recognition task preceded emotion labelling task the scores were higher in the labelling task. This was the reason why Picard et al. (2007) used between subject design in his study where he examined children’s and adult’s drawings which indicated that children tend to use more facial expression than posture or context cues to depict emotion. Reichenbach and Masters (1983) revealed that using two emotion stimuli at the same time does not increase the number of correct answers but this could be because prior to the experiment the meaning of possible emotions (e.g. happy, sad, mad or OK) that the children’s faces on pictures could present was explained. Camras and Allison (1985) study contradicted Reichenbach and Masters (1983) findings where the possible answers of three emotion labels or facial expressions were given to children immediately after emotional scenarios and leaded to high performance; however the labels had better recognition than facial expressions.
In Camras and Allison (1985) study participants also underwent the switching task
References: Camras, L. A., & Allison, K. (1985). Children’s understanding of emotional facial expressions and verbal labels. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 9(2), 84–94. Dibbets, P., & Jolles, J. (2006). The Switch Task for Children: Measuring mental flexibility in young children. Cognitive Development, 21, 60–71. Harrigan, J.A. (1984). The effects of task order on children 's identification of facial expressions. Motivation and Emotion, 8(2), 157-169. Picard, D., Brechet, C., & Baldy, R. (2007). Expressive Strategies in Drawing are Related to Age and Topic. Journal of Nonverbal Behaviour, 31, 243-257. Reichenbach, L., & Masters, J. C. (1983). Children’s Use of Expressive and Contextual Cues in Judgement of Emotion. Child Development, 54, 993–1004. Tracy, J. L., Robins, R.W., & Lagattuta, K.H. (2005). Can Children Recognize Pride? Emotion, 5(3), 251–257. Widen, S. C., & Russell, J. A. (2003). A Closer Look at Preschoolers’ Freely Produced Labels for Facial Expressions. Developmental Psychology, 39(1), 114–128.