Auditory Emotion Word Primes Influence Emotional Face Categorization in Children and Adults, but Not Vice Versa

Abstract

In order to assess how the perception of audible speech and facial expressions influence one another for the perception of emotions, and how this influence might change over the course of development, we conducted two cross-modal priming experiments with three age groups of children (6-, 9-, and 12-years old), as well as college-aged adults. In Experiment 1, 74 children and 24 adult participants were tasked with categorizing photographs of emotional faces as positive or negative as quickly as possible after being primed with emotion words presented via audio in valence-congruent and valence-incongruent trials. In Experiment 2, 67 children and 24 adult participants carried out a similar categorization task, but with faces acting as visual primes, and emotion words acting as auditory targets. The results of Experiment 1 showed that participants made more errors when categorizing positive faces primed by negative words versus positive words, and that 6-year-old children are particularly sensitive to positive word primes, giving faster correct responses regardless of target valence. Meanwhile, the results of Experiment 2 did not show any congruency effects for priming by facial expressions. Thus, audible emotion words seem to exert an influence on the emotional categorization of faces, while faces do not seem to influence the categorization of emotion words in a significant way.

Keywords: categorization; cross-modal integration; developmental changes; emotion processing; emotion words; emotional facial expressions; priming effects.

FIGURE 1

Illustration of an individual trial for Experiment 1, with emotion words priming the categorization of target faces.

FIGURE 2

Accuracy rates for categorizing face targets after priming by emotion words. Error bars represent standard error, and a star indicates a significance level of p < 0.05.

FIGURE 3

Response time for correct trials categorizing face targets after priming by emotion words. Error bars represent standard error, and a star indicates a significance level of p < 0.05.

FIGURE 4

Illustration of an individual trial for Experiment 2, with faces priming the categorization of target emotion words.

FIGURE 5

Accuracy rates for categorizing word targets after priming by faces. Error bars represent standard error. No significant effects or interactions were found involving the factor of congruency.

FIGURE 6

Response time for correct trials categorizing word targets after priming by faces. Error bars represent standard error. No significant effects or interactions were found involving the factor of congruency.