Development and Validation of the Children's Emotions Database (CED): Preschoolers' Basic and Complex Facial Expressions

Abstract

Background. Emotions are a crucial part of our human nature. The recognition of emotions is an essential component of our social and emotional skills. Facial expressions serve as a key element in discerning others' emotions. Different databases of images of facial emotion expressions exist worldwide; however, most of them are limited to only adult faces and include only the six basic emotions, as well as neutral faces, ignoring more complex emotional expressions. Here, we present the Children's Emotions Database (CED), a novel repository featuring both basic and complex facial expressions captured from preschool-aged children. The CED is one of the first databases to include complex emotional expressions in preschoolers. Our aim was to develop such a database that can be used further for research and applied purposes. Methods. Three 6-year-old children (one female) were photographed while showing different facial emotional expressions. The photos were taken under standardized conditions. The children were instructed to express each of the following basic emotions: happiness, pleasant surprise, sadness, fear, anger, disgust; a neutral face; and four complex emotions: pride, guilt, compassion, and shame; this resulted in a total of eleven expressions for each child. Two photos per child were reviewed and selected for validation. The photo validation was performed with a sample of 104 adult raters (94 females; aged 19-70 years; M = 29.9; SD = 11.40) and a limited sample of 32 children at preschool age (17 girls; aged 4-7 years; M = 6.5; SD = 0.81). The validation consisted of two tasks-free emotion labeling and emotion recognition (with predefined labels). Recognition accuracy for each expression was calculated. Results and Conclusions. While basic emotions and neutral expressions were recognized with high accuracy, complex emotions were less accurately identified, consistent with the existing literature on the developmental challenges in recognizing such emotions. The current work is a promising new database of preschoolers' facial expressions consisting of both basic and complex emotions. This database offers a valuable resource for advancing research in emotional development, educational interventions, and clinical applications tailored to early childhood.

Keywords: Children’s Emotions Database (CED); complex emotions; emotion recognition; emotions; facial expressions; preschoolers.

Figure 1

Examples of the facial emotional expressions of one of the children in CED. (A) Six basic facial emotional expressions together with a neutral facial expression. (B) Four complex facial emotional expressions.

Figure 2

Averaged percent correct responses for each of the eleven facial emotional expressions in the free naming (white bars) and the recognition (gray bars) validation tasks with adult participants. Note the relatively lower correct responses for the complex emotions. Vertical bars denote SEM. Emotion codes: HA—Happiness; SU—Surprise; PR—Pride; NE—Neutral; CO—Compassion; AN—Anger; FE—Fear; SA—Sadness; DI—Disgust; SH—Shame; GU—Guilt.

Figure 3

Averaged percent correct responses for each of the eleven facial emotional expressions in the free naming (white bars) and the recognition (gray bars) validation tasks with child participants. Note the relatively lower correct responses for the complex emotions. Vertical bars denote SEM. Emotion codes: same as in Figure 2.

Figure 4

Confusion matrices based on the responses in the emotion recognition task of adult (A) and child participants (B). Each column represents 1 of the 11 presented emotional categories. Each row represents the responses out of the 11 possible labels. Note that complex emotions were confused much more than the basic ones.