The Age Difference of Preschool Children Identifing Micro-Expressions

Infancy is the critical period in children’s rapid development of emotion comprehension, in which children paves the way for future achievement of many important social contact abilities through identifying and understand... [ view full abstract ]

Infancy is the critical period in children’s rapid development of emotion comprehension, in which children paves the way for future achievement of many important social contact abilities through identifying and understand others’ emotion. In social life, distinguishing other person’s emotion quickly and accurately and responding actively is beneficial to an individual’s existence and development. Using pictures of expression to study children’s identification and comprehension is the main approach to the research of their cognition of emotion. It has been confirmed that infants’ ability to predict others’ psychological state derives from spotting their facial expressions; however, it is often the case that adults employ micro-expressions to conceal their true feelings.

Using pictures of micro-expression as experiment material, adopting Japaneses and Caucasian Brief Affect Recognition Test as measuring tool, this study investigates the identification of micro-expressions ability in children between 4-6 years old. The final findings are the following:

(1) Preschool children have the ability to identifying the mirco-expressions. (2) With the growth of their age, children between 4-6 years old improve the ability to distinguish the micro-expressions, the ability to identify micro-expressions of 6-year-old children is significant overtop 4 and 5-year-old child, the ability to identify micro-expressions of 5-year-old children is significant overtop 4-year-old child.