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Emotional understanding predicts facial recognition in 3-to 5-year-old children

ABSTRACT To investigate 3- to 5-year-old children’s difficulty with facial recognition across a change in facial expression, children were assessed for emotional understanding and facial recognition. The emotional understanding task tested for recognition of emotional expressions, and children’s understanding of the external causes of emotions, how emotions pertain to desires, and understanding that emotions may arise from false beliefs. Facial recognition across changes in emotional expression was tested by showing children an image of adult target face (either happy or sad) and then showing two neutral faces (one familiar and one novel) to test recognition. Children’s emotional understanding increased with age; however, emotional understanding but not age predicted facial recognition performance. Overall, these findings provide a more holistic view of the contributing factors to children’s facial recognition abilities across a change in emotional expression by suggesting that conceptual understanding of emotions impacts recognition.