A new paper released in the journal Emotion showcased a newly developed tool by researchers at North Carolina State University.
The new tool is said to assess how accurately people are able to recognize emotion in young children.
Known as Perceptions of Children’s Emotions in Videos, Evolving and Dynamic (PerCEIVED) Task, the tool’s assessment entails adults watching video clips of various emotions being portrayed by different child actors.
The study of emotion recognition skills dates back more than 100 years. With these most recent findings, researchers are able to identify any emotion-related biases using the tool.
Researchers went through four studies containing at least 470 adult participants.
“To support research in both emotion recognition skill and bias, we first describe all extant measures of emotion recognition with child actors that we have found, evaluating strengths and constraints of these measures,” according to the study’s authors.
“We then introduce a new measure of emotion understanding that includes assessment of six emotions portrayed dynamically over rounds by 72 child actors, balancing child race and gender within each emotion, and certified by Facial Action Coding System coders,” the authors also explained in their journal article.
The authors concluded: “We conclude with potential uses of the measure in terms of assessing the accuracy and inaccuracies of participants, including opportunities for the study of developmental processes, individual differences, and confusions between various emotions.”
