Perception of emotion in young children: A developmental investigation of their abilities to use nonverbal cues

The present study examined the developmental course for the perception of emotion through nonverbal information, such as facial expressions and situational cues, in normal children between the ages of 3 and 5 years. To accomplish this, we used a forced-choice task, an affect-matching task, and a situation-discrimination task wherein both the stimuli we presented and the responses of the subjects were nonverbal. Performance on all three tasks improved relative to the age of the subjects. We also found that the situations-discrimination task was most difficult for this age range, followed by the affect-matching task, and then by the forced-choice task. These results differ from previous studies using similar measures that include verbal stimuli and responses. The removal of verbal components from these tasks may have given us a more accurate picture of these children's abilities to perceive emotion through nonverbal information.