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Category: Project

Description: This project investigates emotion recognition in children and adults and its association with EQ and motor empathy. We tested 58 children (33 5-6-year-olds, 25 7- 9-year-olds) and 61 adults (24 young adults, 37 parents). Each participant received an EQ question-naire and the Dynamic Emotion Expression Recognition task, where participants were to identify four basic emotions (happy, sad, fearful, angry) from neutral to fully expressed state, and the Motor Empathy task, where participants' facial muscle activity was recorded. Results showed that “happy” was the easiest expression for all ages; 5 to 6-year-old children performed equally well as adults. The accuracies for “fearful,” “angry,” and “sad” expressions were significantly lower in children than in adults. For motor empathy, 7 to 9-year-old children exhibited the highest facial muscle activity, while the young adults showed the lowest engagement. Importantly, individual EQ scores positively correlated with the motor empathy index in adults but not in children. In sum, our study echoes the previous literature that identifying negative emotions is still difficult for children aged 5-9 and continues to improve in late childhood. Our results also suggest that stronger facial mimicry responses are positively related to a higher level of empathy in adults.