关键词: 儿童, 面部表情, 情绪识别, 发展特点, 影响因素

Abstract: Facial emotions are mood status and emotional signals that expressed by the facial muscle movement around eyes and mouth. Children’s facial emotion recognition ability not only plays a crucial role in children’s social skills and communications development, but also represents an important signal to evaluate children’s cognitive development. This paper reviews most of the recent empirical studies on children’s recognition of facial emotions, discussing children’s recognition development trend of each basic facial emotion. The following conclusions are drawn: children’s recognition of the positive valence of facial expression develops earlier than the negative valence of facial expressions; the recognition of happiness develops at first, and reaches the accuracy peak at children’s early school period; different categories of the negative valence of facial expressions have specific critical period; children’s recognition of sadness and anger develops earlier than fear, surprise and disgust; preschool children can accurately recognize the intense sadness and anger; children at primary school can develop dramatically their facial recognition abilities to fear, surprise and disgust. Moreover, we use the Discrete Emotions Theory to interpret characteristics of children’s facial emotions recognition, and discuss the factors that may influence children’s emotions recognition. In the end, we prospect the future possible studies in this domain.

Key words: children, facial expression, emotion recognition, developmental characteristics, influencing factor