Children’s and Adolescent’s Use of Context in Judgments of Emotion Intensity

The ability to infer others’ emotions is important for social communication. This study examines three key aspects of emotion perception for which relatively little is currently known: (1) the evaluation of the intensity of portrayed emotion, (2) the role of contextual information in the perception of facial configurations, and (3) developmental differences in how children perceive co-occurring facial and contextual information. Two experiments examined developmental effects on the influence of congruent, incongruent, and neutral situational contexts on participants’ reasoning about others’ emotions, both with and without emotion labels. Experiment 1 revealed that participants interpreted others’ emotions to be of higher intensity when facial movements were congruent with contextual information. This effect was greater for children compared to adolescents and adults. Experiment 2 showed that without verbal emotion category labels, adults relied less on context to scale their intensity judgments, but children showed an opposite pattern; in the absence of labels, children relied more on contextual information than facial information. Making accurate inferences about others’ internal states is a complex learning task given high variability within and across individuals and contexts. These data suggest changes in attention to perceptual information as such learning occurs.