Preschoolers Can Match the Facial and Bodily Emotional Expressions: A Behavior and Eye-Tracking Study

Abstract

The preschool age is an important period in the development of children’s emotional abilities. The face and body are both vital carriers of emotional information and adults readily match the emotional cues coming from these two modalities. However, it is unknown whether preschoolers have this ability or not. In the current study, 36 preschoolers (22 boys, aged 44–73 months old) participated in an emotional facial and bodily matching test including angry, happy, and neutral expressions (Experiment 1) and an eye-tracking experiment (Experiment 2). The results show that: (1) preschoolers can accurately match three categories of facial and bodily expressions of emotion (all matching rates were above 93% in Experiment 1); (2) robust emotional matching was observed across conditions in Experiment 2. That is, the eye-tracking indexes including the total fixation duration, the first fixation duration, and the fixation count, all indicated that the preschoolers more thoroughly processed bodily expressions of emotion which were congruent to the facial expressions compared to incongruent bodily expressions of emotion. This study shows that the ability to match facial and bodily expressions of emotion develops at an early age. Preschool children have already reached a high level of this ability.