| dc.description.abstract | Recognizing others’ emotional states from their nonverbal expressions has been widely studied in typically developing (TD) and clinical populations, such as Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), and is thought to underlie several components of adaptive social-emotional functioning. Findings show TD humans develop and refine this ability throughout childhood and suggest a female recognition advantage in many cases. Moreover, different emotions are associated with the unique posturing of specific features and regions. Guided by this, eye-tracking has allowed researchers to examine how observers visually process this information during emotion recognition tasks. A lack of attention to these features is associated with poorer recognition. Importantly, however, the majority of research in these areas has focused on faces.
Increasing amounts of research have shown that TD individuals can accurately recognize emotions from bodily expressions, and similarly view core areas and postural information associated with specific emotions. Yet, the extant literature is quite limited relative to faces. Motivated by this, the current study sought to examine emotion expression processing from the face and body and how this relates to social-emotional functioning. During a recognition task, 41 TD children (7-11-years old) viewed expressions of basic emotions from the face and body while their eye movements were recorded. Recognition performance and gaze behavior were compared within and across faces and bodies. In addition, the relationships between recognition performance and gaze and between recognition performance and ratings of participants’ social-emotional functioning were explored. | en |
